This thesis is about the prospect for social justice in post-apartheid South Africa. It explores the possible contribution of regional planning in general and land reform in particular to promote, order and organise the country's transformation from an autocracy to a socially just democracy. The major focus is on the period between 1994 and 1999. <p>
Post-apartheid South Africa inherited a regionally varying and complex planning system which primarily reflected minority interests Apartheid planning led to a distribution of land and other resources to the advantage of a predominant White minority of the population. This distribution has a distinctive spatial pattern, developed on the basis of what the party in power regarded as just.
The majority of the population lives in densely populated areas which cannot support them. Very often pressure on the land is so high that a vicious circle is set in motion: progressing degradation of the arable land increases the pressure on the remaining land. With the inheritance of apartheid, the first post-apartheid government was faced with the problem of many people wanting their share of the wealth that in the past had been reserved for the White minority. <p> Land is one of the issues central to the debate about social justice after apartheid. It has therefore been identified as one of the priority areas of the Reconciliation and Development Programme’s (RDP) focus to satisfy basic needs.
Every person needs a piece of land to live on. Land is one of the three production factors: land, capital and labour.
These three factors give access to three kinds of income: land rent, profit and wage. In the case of South Africa, the majority of the population used to have very limited access to land and capital. <p> Wage income was also very limited. During apartheid the non-White majority was systematically made to live in overpopulated areas with extremely restricted sources of income, be it wages, profit, land rent or subsistence strategies. To earn a supplementary income, the men were forced to migrate to the industrialised areas such as Witwatersrand, the area around Johannesburg and Pretoria which holds the majority of the country's mineral resources and where cheap labour is needed to exploit them.
This distinctive livelihood strategy of a split source of income and food was the result of the systematic planning approach under apartheid. <p>
The implementation of most land reform projects has been much slower than expected. This limits the contribution of land reform projects to a more just distribution of the country's resources. Besides this, many of the projects have not been able to deliver the expected result because of a simple focus on redistributing land in terms of hectares. The sustainability of people’s livelihood, once settled on the land, was not properly taken into consideration. <p>
Due to political pressure, the redistribution and restitution of land is being carried out at the same time as the transformation of the inherited planning system.
This has caused a lack of integrated planning which has rendered many of the projects less successful than they might have been.
The link between the newly evolving planning system and the land reform process on the one hand and the theoretical basis of the government’s effort for social justice on the other have not been explored systematically yet. This is what this paper intends to do. |
