Law and the city : keeping the poor on the margins

• Pages: 189-201
• DOI: 10.10520/EJC166195
• Published date: 01 January 2014
• Date: 01 January 2014
• Author: Danie Brand

189

Law and the city: Keeping the poor on the

margins

Danie Brand

BLC LLB LLM LLD

Associate Professor, Department of Public Law, University of Pretoria

OPSOMMING

Die Reg en die Stad: Om Armes op die Marge te Hou

In hierdie artikel ontleed ek die Tswelopele beslissing van die Hoogste Hof

van Appèl en die Schubart Park beslissing van die Grondwetlike Hof ten

einde sommige van die kompleksiteite van die verhouding tussen die reg

en armoede te illustreer. Ek fokus spesifiek op die keuse van die twee

howe om direk op die Grondwet te steun eerder as op toepaslike

gemenereg en op die wyse waarop daar in die twee beslissings met die

feite omgegaan is. Ek wys uit dat beide hierdie aspekte van die beslissings,

ten spyte van die positiewe praktiese uitkomste in die sake vir arm mense,

die heersende ideologies-gelaaide siening van arm mense as anders, of

abnormaal onderskraag en bevestig en so saamwerk in ’n ideologiese

projek van depolitisering van armoede.

1Introduction

A defining feature of Tshwane’s cityscape is the extent to which poor

people visibly live apart from the middle-class and more affluent

residents of the city. Most poor (black) people in the city still live in the

townships such as Atteridgeville, Mamelodi, Soshanguve and

Hammanskraal to which they were officially relegated during apartheid,

and in the large informal settlements that have over years developed

there – in a ring around the city proper. But this visible apartheid of the

poor is also a feature of the “new”, post-apartheid Tshwane. The inner

city and some of the surrounding suburbs such as Sunnyside have visibly

become “poor” (mostly black) neighbourhoods, assiduously avoided by

mainstream residents of Tshwane. Even there where poor people have

managed to insert themselves into the general spaces of the rich – such

as the new “estate” housing developments on previously open land to

the east of the city where informal settlements have sprung up on tracts

of land left open in between new developments (or had been there all

along) or where poor people live in business or government precincts

within the inner city – their separateness is graphically enforced through

the enormous security walls and fences erected around the estates and

in some cases the building of walls around the informal settlements

themselves as well as constant attempts by the City and/or residents of

the estates to remove them.1

The law is of course intimately involved in the separateness of poor

people, most obviously when attempts are made to enforce this

separateness through evictions of poor people. In this short article I focus

on two such instances of the involvement of the law: I analyse two