Paper short abstract:

In 1994, the RDP house heralded a new future. This paper considers RDP Houses in a place dependent on grants rather than wages. It analyses social (re)production in these houses, and suggests their peripheral locations may render them ruins of the future promised by the post-apartheid government.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2012 the minister of human settlements, Tokyo Sexwale claimed that Reconstruction and Development (RDP) housing was not for the long-term but rather offered ‘emergency shelter’. This seemed to represent an acknowledgement of the limits of state projects and pointed to the ‘near future’ as a more achievable horizon for states in Africa. These RDP houses were imagined by the first Housing Minister Joe Slovo, as central to transforming the country, to producing a new future, with the South African government building at least 3 million since 1994. The paper offers an ethnography of a government housing settlement in the KwaZulu-Natal countryside, reflecting on both state investment in housing and a family’s attempts to socially produce a home they might inhabit for the future. It considers what kinds of welfare and social reproduction such housing might facilitate in the absence of regular wage work or access to larger urban formal and informal economies. Do these houses remain emblems of a transformed future or become representations of the ruins of such futures? Or are they now mere means to the near future?