The Planning for Informality web tool has recently been updated, drawing on a review of publicly available 2024/2025 municipal documentation for South Africa's eight metropolitan municipalities (metros). The tool, initiated in August 2017, serves to monitor the responses of South African metropolitan municipalities to informal settlements and backyard housing, based on reporting and policy commitments found in core annual municipal documents. A better understanding of informality in South African metros allows for better decision-making and analysis, and comprehensive informal upgrading strategies and plans are important elements in achieving upgrading targets. Furthermore, the tool also promotes transparency and accountability by opening up data regarding municipal upgrading plans and strategies to a wider audience. Specifically, it indicates the commitments made by the eight largest South African cities in upgrading informal settlements and improving backyard dwelling conditions.

One trend has been clear across all metros over the past 6 updates of the tool: the declining delivery of serviced sites, and a connected lowering of serviced site delivery targets. This is amid the change in human settlements policy focus away from large-scale subsidised top structure housing provision, with reduced provisioning targeted at those considered most vulnerable – the elderly, people with disabilities and military veterans – to the scaling up of land release and serviced site provision. So, despite the increased importance of serviced sites, actual delivery has declined. Why is this so?

Firstly, it is common knowledge that the in-situ upgrading of informal settlements is time-consuming. Administrative processes begin with settlement recognition, enumeration and categorisation, proceed to prioritising a settlement for upgrading through the drawing up of a business plan, inclusion in a municipality’s human settlements pipeline and IDP, and budget allocation. Basic services are required to be provided to the settlement and the provision of these can take a while to be implemented. If the land on which the settlement is located is not municipally-owned or owned by another sphere of government or public entity, then complex and slow land purchase / transfer processes have to be followed. Multiple technical studies and authorisation processes have to be completed (often taking several years) before any site work begins. Community engagement and social facilitation processes need to start early and run in parallel to these other strands of work. Settlement re-blocking, negotiations and possible decanting of residents to other temporary relocation areas during the upgrade process, and installation of permanent infrastructure and services, also take a long time. And this is all just to deliver serviced sites. It is commonly accepted that it will take a minimum of 8 years to upgrade an informal settlement in-situ. So, these time-consuming processes partly explain the slow pace of delivery.

Secondly, municipalities are currently not institutionally set up for effective upgrading of informal settlements. Informal settlement upgrading requires specific skills that are in short supply in municipalities, such as social facilitation and partnership management, among others. While some municipalities may partially outsource some of these responsibilities to NGOs or construction companies, with varied results, it is vital to have these skills as municipal competencies to embed participative ways of working in municipal practice. This also reduces service provider costs or reliance on intermediaries, where these may not be available or sufficiently resourced / experienced in each municipality.

Thirdly, and linked to the above, informal settlement upgrading is not given sufficient prominence in municipal planning and resourcing, with insufficient budgets and staff compliments. This further hampers delivery. Given the decreasing national budget human settlements allocations over the past 5 years, even less provincial and municipal resources are being allocated to informal settlement upgrading.

President Ramaphosa set up an inter-ministerial task team earlier this year to look into land release and the National Department of Human Settlements has a rapid land release programme with a number of metros developing their programmes in this regard. However, this has not resulted in an increase in delivery of serviced sites. This increased focus on land release does not have an explicit focus on well-located and brownfield land, and thus in-situ upgrading, but appears to favour greenfield land which is often located on urban peripheries. In addition, regulations affecting public land release have not received sufficient political and policy attention, in order to simplify and accelerate these processes.

The factors highlighted above need to be addressed holistically – and with a sense of urgency – to effectively increase the delivery of serviced sites. In addition, incremental self-build housing construction must be enabled and supported by the state through technical and financial means, if the status quo of undignified and unsafe informal structures is not to be replicated on serviced sites. Technical support can take the form of an institutionalised municipal-led Housing Support Centre model, providing information, advice and referrals to aspirant homeowners, while financial support could be provided via a strengthened and appropriately resourced individual subsidy scheme.

The deepening housing crisis dictates that the status quo needs to change, and the state needs to put in place the factors to enable people to express their agency and choice in creating a dignified and safe home for themselves and future generations.

Please check out the recently updated Planning for Informality web tool here.