Informal settlement policies in the Polycentric City: The case of Durban
Abstract The overall aim of this paper is to set out some of the debates about the sustainability of low-income housing projects, including informal settlement relocation, in cities where polycentrism emerges. Housing policies and projects in South Africa have not always been synchronised during the post-apartheid era. The localisation of low-income projects raises some crucial issues for local governments in terms of urban management. This paper takes a step back to gain a metropolitan point of view, using the case of the eThekwini Municipality, Durban, and thus explores the consequences of low-income housing developments. Housing policy has to be thought of as a piece of a bigger puzzle of which the goal is to alleviate poverty and implement a more compact, integrative or inclusive city. The current emergence of polycentric urban shapes is one noteworthy component of the process of ‘metropolisation’, which is defined by Claude Lacour as the “urban imprint of globalization” (Lacour, 1999). Because cities are changing under the influence of urban dynamics (real estate property market, flagship projects, etc.), this policy has to take into account the articulation between the localisation of housing projects and metropolitan centralities, such as the Central Business District (CBD) and the suburban economic nodes.