Introduction

The housing pressures in the neighbourhood were a matter of considerable concern to our Yeoville Studio partners. Many residential living arrangements had come to defy building regulations, urban management norms and policy prescripts, influenced by a significant increase in population over the years, a shift in the typical socio-economic profile of residents to a poorer demographic and a stagnation of the housing stock. When compared with both national housing policy and the practices of the formal private sector, the Yeoville Bellevue situation illuminates key issues for the low-income housing debate in South Africa. These include significant gaps in a state housing policy specifically targeted to assist poor people, the limits of a narrow view of housing that overlooks related income-earning activities, and the opportunities as well as dangers of a hands-off or incapacitated state in responding to these trends.

Housing research from Yeoville Studio illuminated occupation of buildings far in excess of their designed densities, poor maintenance of building stock, fractured relations between tenants and landlords, and the pervasiveness of activities ‘beyond the residential’ in buildings nominally residential. But the research also showed what these circumstances have to offer, and some opportunities and ingenuities in these practices. When brought into dialogue with other experiences of inner-city low-income living through a series of ‘roundtable’ discussions with major players in the sector, held at the end of the Yeoville Studio project, particular concerns elevated attention on pressing housing and urban management agendas. But also evident in the dialogues were the limits to improving the low-income housing situation, in particular the constraints evident in the local state.

This chapter draws on a variety of research conducted in Yeoville (see appendix 1) that goes beyond the main Studio period: the housing booklets, for example, responded to a gap revealed through Yeoville Studio research, and were subsequently developed by the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES) and other partners to provide advice on rights and responsibilities in the rental and sectional title situations. Most of the findings were formatted to contribute to structured discussions with officials and other professionals in the field, which were themselves conceived as a process of further knowledge-construction, through debate and deliberation on the Studio findings.