Paper short abstract:

Evidence from Johannesburg suggests that SA’s low income housing programme reflects an intricate and complicated relationship between state ambitions, peoples’ practices, and the socio-economic context. Together these forces effectively co-constitute the resultant complex urban environments.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa's vast low-income housing programme manifests predominantly as new-built detached houses for individual ownership, in planned neighbourhoods funded by the state. The programme can be seen as a rational, orderly, improvement scheme, modernist in its orientation, which has a huge physical impact on urban areas, on city management and on intended beneficiaries. Some scholarly criticisms of the programme, and some unanticipated outcomes of it - such as beneficiaries selling or renting out their houses soon after receiving them - encourage an interpretation of the housing programme as an inappropriate intervention at odds with the lives of poor urban dwellers. However qualitative research from Johannesburg reveals a more complex situation. I discuss aspects of the housing benefit and peoples' attitudes to it that echo the expectations and desires of the state: for disciplined, rooted, conformist lives centred on the new house. But I also discuss how the similar aspirations of state and people play out in unexpected, complex and intriguing ways, which challenge and confound the state. South Africa's modernist improvement intervention is thus embraced, experienced, appropriated and transformed in multifaceted ways; partially and imperfectly understood by those in power. Reasons for these modifications relate to the wider context in which the programme unfolds, which is little understood and acknowledged. In this paper I argue for a closer and more nuanced examination of the interwoven relationship between the state's ambitions, peoples desires and practices, and the prevalent socio-economic context; and the ways in which these together co-constitute complex urban environments.