‘Temporary’ relocation: spaces of contradiction in South African law
| Author | Duncan Ranslem |
| Position | Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. |
| Pages | 55-71 |
‘Temporary’ relocation: spaces
of contradiction in
South African law
Duncan Ranslem
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada
Abstract
Purpose – This study aims to examine how temporary relocation areas (TRAs), urban forms that
facilitate evictions and forced relocations, have been written into South African legal and governmental
structures through contested urban planning and legal regimes.
Design/methodology/approach – Proceeding from the macro-scale of TRAs spread across the
nation, to the mezzo-scale of the Delft Symphony Way TRA in Cape Town, to the micro-scale of an
individual “blikkie” (housing unit) within this camp, the article looks at the form and function of the
TRA in urban resettlement practices. Special attention is given to relocation areas’ designation as
“temporary” spaces and the consequences of this temporal designation in law and on the ground.
Findings – These sites have developed as technologies for negotiating competing demands on the
state, and their presence foregrounds some of the deeply rooted contradictions in post-apartheid South
Africa. They are places both within and apart from the city, often managed by city ofcials according
to municipal specications, but located proximally to key urban amenities, utilities services and
employment centers. They also place contradictory demands on their residents, for whom making the
TRA liveable also legitimates it as a form of housing.
Originality/value – This article uncovers several concerns about TRAs, including their inadequacy
for long-term settlement, their problematic usage as tools of dispossession and the spatial-material-legal
imbrications by which TRAs exist, persist and act back upon both individual lives and policy spheres.
Keywords Housing policy, Temporality, Legal geography, Urban geography, Constitutional law,
Evictions
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Termed as “temporary relocation areas” (TRAs) in Cape Town, “transit camps” in
Durban and “decant camps” in Johannesburg, temporary housing settlements pepper
South Africa’s urban landscapes. These camps provide stop-gap accommodation for
people awaiting permanent housing after suffering an emergency situation (often re or
ood) or eviction. Built and managed largely by municipal governments, these
structures have antecedents and analogues around South Africa. The camps echo those
that facilitated the forced relocation of Black urban dwellers to townships in the 1950s
and those purposed toward “ordered urbanization” in the 1970s (Chance, 2011). Recent
paradigms of urban governance and slum eradication have re-instantiated TRAs as
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the editors of this issue, the three anonymous
reviewers, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and the residents of the Delft Symphony
TRA.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1756-1450.htm
Spaces of
contradiction
in South
African law
55
Received 19 December 2013
Revised 17 September 2014
11 October 2014
13 October 2014
Accepted 20 October 2014
InternationalJournal of Law in the
BuiltEnvironment
Vol.7 No. 1, 2015
pp.55-71
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1756-1450
DOI 10.1108/IJLBE-12-2013-0041
xtures in South Africa’s urban fabric and legal landscapes. Legal and geographical
relegation of citizens to these camps is a tool by which the state is able to bracket-out
claims against it because the purported “temporariness” of this accommodation
subsumes specic ethical concerns regarding housing rights to a more general ethics of
liberal economism.
TRAs are built into the South African urban form in troubling ways. Their presence
is used to facilitate evictions, in many cases, for private gains through redevelopment
and the capture of ground rents, or as part of urban beautication schema and efforts to
render cities “world class” in search of global capital (Huchzermeyer, 2006;Pieterse,
2008;Newton, 2009). In the courts, the existence of “temporary” housing facilities
provide key legal grounds upon which evictions from elsewhere become permissible
because such evictions are legal only if alternative accommodation is available to
evictees. As such, TRAs are written into South African legal and governmental
structures in ways that undermine redress against the failures of the state to meet its
constitutional responsibility to ensure all South Africans access to permanent, adequate
housing[1]. The camps’ appellation “temporary” is betrayed by the cruel irony that for
many South Africans, these sites are their de facto permanent residences – sites of
interminable waiting. Troubling in their own right, these problems are compounded by
the camps’ material characteristics, which are inadequate to the political, economic,
social and bodily needs of their inhabitants (Development Action Group, 2007;Cohen,
2009;Hunter, 2010). TRAs are places both within and apart from the city, managed by
city ofcials according to municipal specications, but located away from key urban
amenities, utilities services and employment centers (Development Action Group, 2007).
This article provides a brief survey of TRAs, examining the conditions of their
emergence, their material presence and their changing functions in and around South
African cities and in South African law. The analysis presented is thus both geographic
and legal, and this coupling of geographical and legal analysis is done at the urgence of
David Delaney, Nicholas Blomley and others who have developed the eld of legal
geography. In the spirit of legal geography, this article recognizes not only the
inextricably “entangled” (Blomley, 2003a, p. 29) relation of the (analytically) legal and
spatial but also the dynamically fused nature of the discursive and material as these
play out in and condition social practice and experience (Delaney, 2004, p. 859).
In particular, this paper responds to recent calls to deepen engagement with
understandings of temporality at the nexus of the socio-spatial and socio-legal
(Valverde, 2012;Richland, 2008;Lawson, 2011).
The article starts with a macro-scale analysis of the TRA, as it is encountered across
South Africa, with particular attention to its emanation within law and policy. The
article then encounters particular TRAs as glimpsed through case law, before focusing
on the spatio-legal constitution of one TRA, Delft Symphony Way, and the reality of
material existence within it. Thus, the article seeks – in keeping with legal geography’s
search to elicit the discursive-material imbrications through which the built
environment is formed, governed and lived – to notice both the form and function of the
TRA in urban resettlement practices and policies and the lives that take shape within
them[2].
Within this analysis, the TRA is shown to function as a temporal trap. These camps
are places precipitated into permanence: while ostensibly uid, temporary phenomena,
TRAs solidify as spaces where precarious urbanites are forced to settle for years as they
IJLBE
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