GCRO presents at 2016 RGS-IBG conference in London

Richard Ballard and Siân Butcher attended the annual conference of the Royal Geographic Society/Institute of British Geographers in London from 30 August to 2 September 2016. Richard Ballard presented in a session on housing in the global south. The title of his presentation was ‘Scaling (back) up: South Africa's policy references to Mega Human Settlements’. He argued that the shift in 2014 towards larger scale housing projects can be explained by six factors. Firstly, larger human settlements had been an emerging way of delivering housing since the 1990s, as exemplified by Cosmo City, Cornubia and the N2 Gateway. Secondly, there has also been emerging mega projects mentality which favours large scale projects, a tendency which was promoted by the 2010 world cup. Third, the idea of producing new ‘post-apartheid’ towns is a seductive one for many politicians. Fourth, politicians feel that they are under a great deal of pressure to fulfil the social contract they have with South Africans that all poor households will receive a free house, and they believe that delivering on large projects will accelerate delivery. Fifth, human settlements politicians at provincial and national level believe they can resolve governance related blockages to the delivery of housing. Finally, the policy direction is being shaped by a desire to be spatially equitable, and to reach municipalities and areas that need development rather than necessarily reinforce agglomeration.

The presentation also examined some of the reactions to this policy direction, including questions about whether or not this route will in fact accelerate housing delivery, concerns that satellite new towns will not be economically self-sufficient as promised in the policy, and concerns about unsustainable infrastructure and transport costs.

Siân Butcher presented in a session on the ‘Operations of capital: Studying the nexus of land, housing, and finance across the North-South divide’. The title of her presentation was ‘Private equity discovers Johannesburg’s housing backlog after the crisis: the ‘affordable’ housing-land-finance nexus on the post-apartheid city’s edge’. The paper’s point of departure was the 2008 arrival of the first transnational private equity fund dedicated to ‘affordable housing’ investment in South Africa in a context where there has been little recent exposure of large institutional investors, pension funds and listed property to residential property. Siân argued that although this marked a profound moment in turning South Africa’s affordable housing into an asset class, this ‘assetization’ cannot be read either through a win-win business narrative or one of footloose finance capital easily sucking returns back to faraway places. Rather she demonstrated how the affordable land-housing-finance nexus constitutes a complex terrain of negotiations in place which create new conditions of possibility as well as new contradictions. The making of an affordable asset class in Johannesburg opens up a provincial story of global encounters, adaptations and contingent wranglings with a range of situated actors to realize the required built environment. The paper sketched such encounters with investors, land owners and developers, state agencies, other financial institutions, and post-apartheid citizens themselves.

The presentation concluded with the contradictions emerging. On the one hand, these investments are producing denser, better integrated and more sustainable urban environments than older suburban sprawl. On the other hand, this so-called affordable housing excludes much of the working poor, as its definition stretches ever upwards. The articulation of affordable rental housing in newly-established REITS also means that affordable rents are circulating through capital markets in new and speculative ways, sometimes underwritten by public infrastructure investment and public sector workers’ pension funds.

Sian Butcher with UCT geographers Shari Daya and Beth Oppenheim outside the RGS