In this section of the book we turn to the materiality of living conditions in Yeoville, in particular the house and home, and the neighbourhood micro convenience store. Ways of occupying houses, yards and flats in Yeoville, as in some other parts of Johannesburg, had become dense and intense, multi-use in nature, and frequently non-compliant with City regulations. Throughout the city there was no effective response to housing trends emerging from changes in the socio-economic and demographic context, reflecting a gap in national housing policy, limited and unreformed urban management tools, and municipal capacity overwhelmed or distracted by other pressing issues. In Yeoville, stressed buildings and living conditions had become a major concern for our Studio partners.

From diverse angles the Studio scrutinised physical conditions, residents’ experiences, social and management arrangements, and the contestations and innovations around these. Analysis of local and micro dynamics became the basis on which to build policy commentary and to facilitate discussion of it – a form of engaged research interactive not only with ordinary residents and community partners but also with its policy, regulatory and institutional environment. Authors’ contributions in this section thus extend beyond analysis to propose ways of intervening – through policy proposals, pilot projects or governance mechanisms, for example – in other words, to ‘recommend’.

Ambitious to use grounded research to inform more directly policy impasses and conundrums, the Studio convened a series of ‘roundtables’ or dialogues with housing practitioners and local authority officials at the end of the project. Despite frank discussions, these ultimately had limited success in shaping inner-city housing approaches, as Sarah Charlton's chapter reflects on and accounts for. Amongst the constraints – such as restrictions in the policy environment, alternative political imperatives and limited pressure from residents – was also the disconnect of City departments from the Studio: they had neither partnered in the work nor invited housing policy input. Nevertheless, a core member of Yeoville Studio with direct and important fieldwork experience, Simon Mayson, subsequently became a key driver within the City of a fresh and innovative inner-city housing plan.

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.

At first glance the spatial pattern of post-1994 publicly funded low-income housing in Johannesburg appears to reinforce the historical spatial pattern in which poorer people are peripheralised to the edge of the city. Alarmingly, and contrary to policy intentions, in some cases housing developed after 1994 appears to extend apartheid geography, locating housing beneficiaries on the outer edges of apartheid townships.

But a closer look shows significant examples where state-funded low-income housing breaks from this pattern. A ‘public housing’ view of Johannesburg therefore shows both continuities and ruptures with the past. The situation is not simply one of earlier projects falling short of objectives and more recent developments aligning better with postapartheid visions. So what explains this diverse pattern, and why do some developments accord directly with the post-apartheid city's spatial objectives and others continue to appear not to?

In this chapter I discuss the reasons behind this pattern of development, citing explanations offered by provincial and city officials, as well as explanations presented in other analyses. However, a further factor is key to understanding the spatial dimensions of public housing, namely the living conditions of many poorer people. Private, oft en unauthorised, living circumstances are not only relevant to an overall description of how and where poorer people live in Johannesburg, but also help to explain patterns in publicly funded housing. However, before I develop these arguments, it is necessary to describe the dominant pattern of low-income housing development, and the nature of this type of housing.

Spatial description and the nature of low-income housing

The capital letter ‘G ‘, written with a tail, offers a graphic sense of the dominant spatial pattern of low-income housing projects in the city. If the Johannesburg metropolitan area is roughly oval in shape, with its long axis running north-east to south-west and tapering to a tail in the south-west, state-funded low-income housing projects delivered since 1994 can mainly be found tracing the outline of a sloping G: from the north-east perimeter of the city, arcing up to the north and sloping down to the north-west along the metropolitan boundary, then down to a cluster in the west of the city, and still further down along the south-west tail (Figure 9.1).

On any weekday in any street in Johannesburg one might encounter a lean, bowed person straining to pull a vast load up a hill, round a bend or across a busy traffic intersection, cramping to the side of the road out of the way of impatient cars and trucks, or pausing to lean on the trolley handles to catch a breath. Bulky brown hessian bags squatting on flat platform trolleys are stuffed with cardboard or paper, metal or plastic, making their trundling way by human muscle power alone to a recycling depot where their contents can be exchanged for cash.

Daily the waste discarded by businesses and residents of Johannesburg is actively salvaged in the transition between private property and public landfill. In the dark early hours of the morning, empty trolleys and deflated bags rumble briskly from central areas to the suburbs, scheduled for the city's refuse removal service that day. The journey out can be many kilometres and several hours of walking. Reclaimers must arrive at bursting wheelie bins before the Pikitup trucks do, before the formal recycling companies collect their hauls, before pedestrian competitors arrive with rattling trolleys hungry for loading. Bins and bags are systematically trawled for particular goods: white A4 paper perhaps, PET plastics or scrap metal. When hessian bags are full enough to make the long journey back worthwhile – today, or perhaps only tomorrow, after another suburb is scoured – the backbreaking journey to the depot begins.

Both physically and institutionally, recyclers operate in in-between places and spaces: recycling businesses use their hauls – indeed depend on them for source material – but the recyclers are self-employed, without wages, job protection, insurances or medical aid. Their strenuous manual labour, eye for the cash value in rubbish, diversion of volumes of material from landfills, and low carbon footprints are not lauded and applauded. City residents and businesses generating waste are mostly ambivalent – occasionally recognising and facilitating the reclaiming process on their doorstep, sometimes complaining and chasing away ‘dirty vagrants’, but mostly ignoring their fellow residents and road users. City authorities, too, mostly overlook recyclers while they do their work – indeed, appear blind to their existence and their labour. A different response, however, is provoked at the gathering points for sorting and storing accumulated materials, and by the recyclers’ nightly sleeping arrangements.