Planning after the fact: the recognition, regularisation and regulation of small-scale rental in Cape Town

Keywords: planning, planning after the fact, co-produce, lobbying, coalition,
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Urban residents in Cape Town have built and provided rental housing, with varying degrees of compliance to building regulations, in backyards of houses in formal, fully serviced neighbourhoods. Conventionally, these units have been ‘invisible’ to planners because they are viewed as transitional housing and do not comply with ideal of homeownership. However, recently, the City of Cape Town has acknowledged that it is neither possible nor practical to provide subsidised houses to all its residents. Therefore, regulatory provisions have been introduced to facilitate homeowners and small-scale landlords to regularise these units. The regulatory provisions are a result of lobbying by a complex, unstable and dynamic coalition of diverse and embedded stakeholders and an underwhelming realisation that small-scale rental sector has the potential to provide housing at a scale and pace unmatched by the state, and is functioning in response to, outside of and in spite of planning regulations.

The paper examines how the City of Cape Town, NGOs, academics, financial institutions small-scale developers and urban citizens are 'engaging transversally' to co-produce, regularise and regulate affordable rental housing. The paper analyses how conventional categories of the state, planner, developer, NGO and resident collapse, providing the opportunity to construct new, overlapping categories of stakeholders that co-produce urban spaces. Drawing on the context of Cape Town, it makes a theoretical contribution to understand how cities in the South plan ‘after the fact’ (Caldeira, 2017: 7), theorising 'planning after the fact' as a mode of socio-spatial production which is tactical, transversal, relational and speculative.