Press Release (re-issue of statement 4 September 2023) 21 September 2023
Do the People have a right to access information on Public Land?
The People’s Land Map Launch takes place Friday 22 September
In 2016 NU asked the question, how much vacant and underutilised public land is really available in the City of Cape Town in the face of a growing housing crisis.
In Cape Town there is a recurring narrative that there simply isn’t enough public land available for affordable housing. Where sites have been identified for affordable housing, especially when these sites are well-located, like the Tafelberg Site in Sea Point, it has been subject to much contestation from NIMBY’s and politicians, and is currently tied up in lengthy litigation, now in its 7th year.
In the face of this, NU made requests to find out how much land is available from the various government agencies. On numerous occasions, NU requested the list of land parcels owned by the City of Cape Town, and was rejected. Multiple requests to acquire the list of available land via the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) were also rejected.
Maps which transparently display public land are not uncommon practice in the West (Like New York and the UK) and are also available in developing countries like Lebanon. However in South Africa, a cohesive list of available public land proved impossible for us to find as an organisation working in the public interest – whether it exists at all remains questionable. While we weren’t able to access a full list of parcels owned by the state, we found a way to use publicly available information to build our own map of vacant and underutilised public land in Cape Town.
NU spent five years doing basic, manual research, identifying and plotting all the public land parcels that we were able to find that have the potential to be used for housing. The results, with a degree of imperfection, were nonetheless astonishing; there is more vacant or underutilised public land in Cape Town than the entire area of Barcelona.
“All three spheres of government claim that there is a shortage of public land to build well-located affordable housing, but is this true? This map, which was manually developed over a number of years, clearly demonstrates that there is more than enough publicly owned land available to help address our housing backlog and desegregate our city.” – Robyn Park-Ross, Researcher
What follows is what should be done with the data that has been researched. Should this information on each parcel of land be made accessible or remain inaccessible? The information is in fact publicly available, but requires several hours of research.
What potentially makes this information even more difficult to access or share, is that the City of Cape Town has as recently as 2021 enacted a by-law (the Unlawful Occupation By-law) which makes it an offence to ‘incite people to occupy land’ – which NU would be accused of doing by sharing information about publicly owned land.
NU does not incite people to occupy, and has this year already supported nearly 26 applications to the President and Premiers of various provinces to donate parcels of suitable public land directly to communities in need of homes.
While Reclaim the City occupies two buildings in Cape Town, this act of occupation was taken up as a protest against the resistance to develop the Tafelberg site for social housing. These public buildings both sat empty for years and now provide homes to hundreds of poor and working class families in well-located areas. The two buildings remain an act of protest against the refusal by the City of Cape Town and Western Cape Provincial Government to develop affordable housing in the inner city, a feat which they have never achieved since 1994, despite several promises to the contrary.
Only with the arrival of Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis at the end of 2021 has any real progress been seen, and even then, there still is no sign of any real development in Salt River, Woodstock or the inner city. Since then the two buildings have demonstrated the only real creation of affordable housing in those areas, an indirect outcome of the protest action for the Tafelberg site.
NU, on legal advice, is not releasing the detailed information it has gathered over five years, because it has been whispered amongst political circles that a legal challenge has been drafted in response to the potential release of this public information.
The thrust of NU’s original point of enquiry remains,
If nearly 3,000 land parcels in Cape Town are potentially suitable for human settlement, where are the homes and why not this land?
Why has the government willfully ignored the demands for human rights and in turn created criminalising by-laws to arrest those who seek to occupy land in the face of limited alternatives?
Why has the national conversation amongst multiple political parties been to decrease the protections from unfair or illegal evictions in the PIE Act?
Why is the national housing policy unclear on the way forward – where are people supposed to go, and where are they supposed to live?
The release of the information contained in this research could mount public pressure for the state to fulfil its constitutional duty to provide adequate housing, it might revive the necessary public pressure to develop land for people and not for profit.
The People’s Land Map will launch on Friday 22 September at the District 6 Homecoming Centre. A performance dedicated to mourning the loss of public land will take place at 11:30, with the official launch and discussion taking place at 13:30.
For more information: click here.
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