Upgrade Where They Are, or Move Them 26 Kilometres East?
Kgalalelo City has grown from 210,000 to 470,000 people in 19 years. Thirty-eight per cent of residents live in unplanned settlements on the western edge, most without piped water or paved roads, and many work in the nearby industrial area or trade from their own plots. The city loses 24% of treated water to leaks and illegal connections. The council has P900 million from a national urban development fund and two options. Option A is in-situ upgrading of the four largest settlements: roads, standpipes, drainage and 30-year leasehold titles for 9,400 households, at P800 million, with residents staying where they work. Option B is a site-and-service scheme on cheap land 26 km east: 12,000 fully serviced plots at P850 million, on condition that households relocate and the western settlements are cleared. Transport from the new site to the industrial area would cost about P450 a month per worker, roughly a fifth of a minimum-wage income.
1. Recommend Option A, Option B, or a modified option. Justify your criteria before applying them.
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Criteria. Cost per household served; affordability to residents, including transport and service charges; speed of delivery; effect on existing livelihoods; security of tenure; political feasibility; and whether the option prevents the next settlement from forming.
A. P800m for 9,400 households is about P85,000 per household, with no relocation and no added transport cost. Residents keep market access, customers and social networks that function as informal insurance. Delivery is messy because upgrading happens around occupied plots, and existing landlords who rent out rooms may capture part of the gain.
B. P850m for 12,000 plots is about P71,000 per plot - cheaper per household and 2,600 more of them. But a plot is not a serviced house, and the P450 monthly transport bill (about P5,400 a year) is a permanent charge on households earning minimum wage. Many western residents earn from home-based trade that cannot move. Clearance of 9,400 occupied stands is also likely to be resisted and litigated, which delays delivery.
Recommendation. Modified A: fund in-situ upgrading with leasehold titles, and add a land-release and serviced-plot programme on the eastern side for new household formation, so that demand is absorbed before new unplanned settlement appears. B's stronger arithmetic does not survive the transport and livelihood costs.
2. A councillor says: 'Titles and tarred roads in unplanned settlements just reward people for breaking the planning rules. Proper housing is planned housing.' Evaluate this view.
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The claim confuses the symptom with the cause.
Why people settled there. Unplanned settlement is the result of a supply failure: over two decades the city added 260,000 people and did not release or service land at anything like that rate. Households built where they could, often on land they bought in good faith from someone with a dubious claim. Treating them as rule-breakers assumes an alternative they could afford, and there was none.
What titling does. Security of tenure is what makes a household invest in a permanent roof, a toilet, a shopfront. Denying title does not remove the settlement; it keeps 9,400 households unable to borrow, insure or improve, and keeps services unfinanceable because the utility cannot bill households it cannot identify.
Where the councillor has a point. Upgrading can reward whoever grabbed land, including absentee landlords and officials who allocated plots. Titles must go to occupiers, including women, with a disputes process and a cutoff date, or the programme entrenches a different inequality.
And on planned housing. Planning is a means, not a standard. A serviced plot 26 km from work, unaffordable to travel from, is formally planned and functionally worse than an upgraded settlement. The test is whether a household can live, work and pay for both.
3. Beyond choosing between A and B, what must the city do if upgrading is not to be repeated in ten years?
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Upgrading treats the backlog; it does nothing about the flow that created it. Four measures matter.
Release serviced land ahead of demand. The city should project household formation and prepare trunk services and layout plans on the eastern side before people arrive, so that the cheapest option for a new household is a legal plot, not a subdivision on the edge.
Cut the cost of supply. The 24% water loss is the single cheapest source of new supply. Reducing it funds connections for upgraded areas without new abstraction, so loss reduction should be sequenced before or alongside the upgrading works.
Protect the investment with recurrent finance. Roads and standpipes fail without maintenance budgets and billing. The council must set service charges that recover operating costs and collect them, or the upgraded areas will decay and the political case for the next upgrade collapses.
Manage the transition, not just the construction. Upgrading disrupts traders and landlords. Phased works, temporary trading space and a disputes mechanism are what stop a well-designed scheme from stalling. Finally, publish a land and housing waiting list - transparency is what makes the next allocation defensible.