[imagesource: David Ritchie/ANA]

The apartheid government sought to separate South Africans according to race.

This was not just executed through pass laws, but also in the ways that cities were planned around living spaces, especially in the urban areas.

The legacy of apartheid spatial planning has persisted since democracy was instituted – something which organisations such as Reclaim The City and Ndifuna Ukwazi seek to address.

These organisations, along with individuals who collaborated with several “working class” residents, took the Western Cape government and the City of Cape Town to court following the sale of the Tafelberg school in Sea Point to the Phyllis Jowell Jewish Day School NPC in 2015, reports News24.

Mandisa Shandu, a director at Ndifuna Ukwazi, says that they brought the application before the High Court because the sale of the land had been “very short-sighted, in the context of a huge land and housing crisis… and people struggling for access to housing, in places like Sea Point”.

It was argued that site presented an unmissable opportunity to start addressing the exclusionary spatial planning put in place by the apartheid government.

Now, five years after the sale, a landmark ruling in favour of these groups and individuals has been put forward by the Western Cape High Court.

The primary reasons for the ruling outlined by Judge Patrick Gamble, along with Judge Monde Samela in their judgement are as follows:

• “The Court also held that the Province had not correctly applied the provisions of the Government Immovable Asset Management Act, 2007 in disposing of the state land upon which Tafelberg is situated, in that it did not first offer the land for use to the provincial department of housing”.
• “The Court further held that the Province had erred in concluding that the Tafelberg site did not fall within a restructuring zone for the purposes of developing affordable housing under the Social Housing Act, 2008”.
• “The designation of such a zone would have entitled the Province to apply for a reconstruction grant from the national Department of Human Settlements in the event that it decided to develop affordable [housing] on the Tafelberg site.”
• “The Province and the City of Cape Town were in breach of their obligations under sections 25 and 26 of the Constitution (and the legislation promulgated thereunder) to advance access to affordable housing to those people who qualified for that form of accommodation”.
• “The Court held that the Province and the City did not have suitable policies in place to facilitate and promote such access. The Court found that, as a consequence of these constitutional breaches, the Province and the City had not taken adequate steps to address the legacy of apartheid spatial planning in central Cape Town and its surrounds”.

The Court has ordered the Province and the City to formulate a policy to address their respective violations of the Constitution, which they have to present to the Court by May 31, 2021.

Legal costs were granted in response to a second application by the Minister of Human Settlements and her department to set aside the sale of the school.

Shandu describes the judgement as a “huge victory”, and says that they look forward to “advancing urban land justice”.

[source:news24]