Strategies to help poor people access urban land markets

City planners mostly agree that poor people need to be better located in cities to improve their access to social amenities and economic opportunities. Living, trading or producing goods on better located land also gives people access to markets, which improves the potential for sustainable poverty alleviation.

This vision has been at the heart of planning for cities in developing countries for decades. And yet it has not happened to any great extent, at least not in South Africa. The poor remain in poor locations and on low value land, disconnected from physical and market networks.

Urban land that would give poor people the means to create wealth is in high demand and thus sought after by the more powerful sectors of the economy. Given the ‘logic’ of the market, poorer communities, and state actors such as municipalities that act on their behalf, are often unable to bid competitively on valuable land. State interventions can distort the market in favour of poor people, but they are still vulnerable unless they are also using the land in ways which extract sufficient value. Low-income housing and small-scale production and trade are rarely profitable or intense enough to compete for good locations in market terms within the current predominant South African urban form. Therefore the development planning vision of equitable and integrated cities remains unrealised, not to mention the achievement of slum-free cities.

The paper looks at this conundrum in the South African context and suggests ways in which poor people can be spatially and economically integrated into cities by increasing their bidding power, including improving the intensity of land utilisation. These strategies include:

• providing access to suitable land;

• supporting higher intensity of land use;

• enabling local value capture on desirable land;

• promoting partnerships and associations;

• introducing pro-poor land access policies and incentives such as well-designed municipal rates systems.

Accordingly, achieving all of this will include, apart from a growing economy in which the benefits of growth reach all sectors of society, state action to manage land, creating enabling and efficient regulations and administrative systems, deepening land and property rights, improving tenure, directing infrastructure investment, and understanding markets while targeting spatial planning towards the needs of the poor.