Imagine a public transportation system that combines the low cost and fixed routes of a bus, with the frequency and availability of a private taxi. The system would be idea: convenient, low-cost, and predictable. There’d be no fear the driver was taking you for a ride, and catching one would be as simple as waiting a few minutes at most on the roadside.

Sound intriguing?

If you are lucky enough to live in Cape Town, you could enjoy such a system daily. That city’s minibus taxis are the local version of a type of transportation common throughout the world Wikipedia calls a “share taxi.” According to government data the country has some 126,000 of these vehicles operating mostly in the country’s cities.

Like a train system (which Cape Town also has), the buses run along fixed routes named after their final destination. Each bus is a small Toyota van with customized seats designed to maximize the vehicle’s occupancy. Most displayed signs advertising a maximum occupancy of roughly 16, but we rode in vans with as many as 21 people. Most buses are staffed by a two man crew. The driver drives as quickly as possible and controls the music, which can range from American disco and rap to Cape Malay music, almost always played loudly. The second person mans the van’s sliding door, and carries a sack of change. Most fares are around 4-5 Rand, or roughly $0.75, and generally paid with coins. The door operator also generally leans out the open window continuously whistling or shouting the destination, and otherwise heckling passersby to convince them they really need a lift where he is going. I noticed the city had created minibus-only lanes on the street along busy routes approaching the center city.

The vans will stop to pick up or let off passengers at any point on their route, although bus stops and major landmarks like the supermarket are common points. The routes terminate at government-built transit depots. In a huge structure above the Cape Town train station, thousands of vans converge from throughout the metropolitan area on a depot organized into dozens of lanes, one for each route. The service was clearly for locals: during our month stay were unable to locate a route map.

Although riding the minibuses can be a somewhat snug experience, particularly during peak times, we found the system to be inexpensive and efficient. Despite some harrowing driving, the van operators were almost uniformly polite and professional.

There are at least a couple reasons why such a system might not work in the U.S. First, I estimated that operating at maximum capacity a Minibus crew could earn 100 Rand an hour. If they had seven hours of peak operation a day (an optimistic estimate) they could earn 700 Rand, or roughly $100 dollars. After paying for gas and the van (many are rented from a company) there’s not much money left for the driver and door man. Although the actual wages must be low, we heard of factory jobs that paid $40 a day. Clearly, such a system would have to charge much more to make sense where labor was more expensive.

Second, the system thrives in an environment with low car ownership and relatively high density along most corridors. This ensures enough riders to support very frequent service along busy routes, making the service even more attractive to riders choosing between private vehicles, bus, or train. In rural areas transport was a problem and hitching a ride was common as taxis were much more expensive.

Two South African urban scholars have recently examined urban transport in that country in a text titled “Rethinking Urban Transport After Modernism: Lessons from South Africa.” Although the book is expensive to purchase in the states, Google Books has a preview with many pages from it. They conclude that current public transportation systems are not sustainable and urge a paradigm shift in the way transport is conceived, including:
- creating a decentralized pattern of accessibility to decentralize opportunity in the city (versus the modern, radial model centered on a downtown)
- create pedestrian friendly environments
- link transport to high densities of housing and land use
- design complete streets with a full range of uses in mind, not simply roads for cars
- and link transportation planning with urban design and urban planning.

These principles will sound familiar to American readers as they are also commonly discussed concepts in planning circles here. Although the book rightfully describes how the transportation structure of South African cities should evolve, I can’t help but be struck by the extent to which the minibus taxi system exemplifies many of the goals they envision: providing public, low-cost, pedestrian-oriented, point-to-point transport throughout the city.

The lack of progress bridging the social divides in South Africa has not been due to political will. In addition to a variety of political rights (many which Americans will be familiar with from our Bill of Rights), the South African Constitution includes workers’ rights to join unions, a right to education, a right to a clean environment, a right to access to government information, and a right to “adequate” housing, among others. The housing section reads as follows:

1. Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.
2. The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.
3. No one may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstances. No legislation may permit arbitrary evictions.

In order to achieve that goal, the government’s National Department of Housing has spent considerable funds to construct free or very low cost housing for citizens housed in sub-adequate conditions. Since 1997 the department has constructed 2,355,913 homes. Although I cannot find the precise break-down, I believe most of those were free homes provided first time home owners. This graphic illustrates where in South Africa most of these homes have been built.

Despite the millions of new homes, the government continues to struggle to accommodate the long lists of needy citizens. The model of housing adopted for the early phase was a 6 meter by 6 meter square house, or less than 400 square feet, located on a roughly 2,000 square foot lot. The houses are provided a small bathroom and power and the poor are provided a small allocation of power and water free of charge. These admittedly “starter” homes are intended to house the most needy, although the program has been fraught with criticism. Moralists critique the lack of privacy resulting from more than one family living essentially in the same room. Extensions to the original house often amount to little more than a tin lean-to. Finally, the mass development of these homes at the city edge, where land is cheapest, has created large communities of poor far from jobs and municipal resources. To make matters worse, most of the poor do not own automobiles, and are heavily reliant on public transit. (Luckily, unlike in America, the commuter rail system and shared taxis do service the periphery.)

During my stay in Cape Town we were able to visit a government-funded housing project under construction in the area known as Delft. Here the homes being constructed in an area known as the “Cape Flats,” beyond the airport on a vast flat sandy area miles from downtown. At the site two demonstration houses stood next to a container retrofitted as a mobile office.

We spoke to the employee of a civil engineering firm who was overseeing the construction of basic infrastructure – sewer, electrical, water pipes, and streets. Here a pile of manhole covers and drain grates (designed to have no value as scrap iron to deter theft) stood stacked waiting for installation. We were told the entire project would include some 50,000 homes when complete.

Google Earth captured a similar project under construction that conveys the scale of these developments:

The problems associated with the mass construction of these homes have sparked a sea-change in the thinking of government officials. Currently officials talk about the need to move beyond the single-minded focus on mass construction, and attempt to create “sustainable human settlements,” and this summer have issued a new official policy statement dedicated to creating sustainable communities. The current model of housing construction is also fundamentally at odds with the government’s strict approach to urban growth: each city has an urban growth boundary, and the government is attempting to pursue a policy of “densification” to focus development in already-urbanized area. Newer projects, such as the N2 Gateway project in Cape Town, have experimented with a variety of housing types (condominiums, duplexes, single-family homes) as well as tenure (rented and owned). The reason most housing to date has been small single-family homes is complex, and has to do not only with user preference and the high cost of high density housing, but also a stigma against government apartment complexes dating from Apartheid-era policies.

However, despite inspired policy documents issued from housing authorities, the simple fact remains that the cheapest land is the farthest from the city center, and a house designed at a minimal cost leaves much to be desired. While American government policies such as home loans, freeways, and the mortgage tax deduction have sparked suburban sprawl, in South Africa the government itself is the builder of impoverished, sprawling, low-density communities.

In both cases, residents and city builders are now facing a similar challenge: how to transform these landscapes into something more sustainable and urban to better serve residents’ needs.

The combination of affluence and desperate poverty in South Africa I described yesterday has made the country a world leader in both crime and security technology.

In particular, security measures are pervasive in the physical form of the city. Although some of the security measures date from the apartheid era, sadly many are new. Cement walls or metal fences surround almost every house or apartment building. These walls can range quite widely. Some deter intruders with a traditional spiked wrought iron fence, perhaps embellished with sharp fleur-de-lis. Many have barbed, razor, or electrified wires. One house we found in a trendy neighborhood was defended by shards of glass set into the concrete wall. Oddly, this wall was decorated with widely spaced letters spelling “LOVE”

Other measures were also common. Windows on homes are barred, even in the rural area we visited over two hours’ drive from Cape Town. Metal gates and turnstiles were common to regulate access to businesses, government buildings, and apartment buildings.

Many businesses, particularly in the downtown area, had locked gates at the door. If you would like to enter you had to wait for the store attendant to buzz you in. The store to the right was open.

Nonphysical measures were also common. Uniformed and armed security guards are common in businesses, public spaces, and even patrolling private neighborhoods. Each train station in the commuter rail system has two security officers – one for each platform. A newspaper account I read described how private police were increasingly conducting investigations for the overworked police. At the end of apartheid in 1994, the country created a national South African Police Service to provide police protection throughout the country, and this agency’s retrofitted trucks and vans are ubiquitous.

With urbanization and inequality growing around the world, we should expect a hardening of the public realm. While bollards and gated communities are much discussed in the U.S., the defensive cityscape is much more subtle and persuasive than anti-terror measures around major sites. In this way, South Africa could be a sad harbinger of things to come elsewhere in the developed world.

I recently returned from spending one month in Cape Town participating in a study abroad program. Each day this week I will post a new article exploring, in order, the social context, the defensive architecture I observed, government led low-income urban sprawl, Cape Town’s ingenious Minibus taxis, and a selection of photos from the trip. The posts are intended to be a guided exploration of a topic of interest, based in my observations in Cape Town. This trip was my first to South Africa, and I welcome and encourage comments.

During my recent study abroad trip to South Africa, our faculty adviser described the country as “a first world country and a third world country squished together.” Indeed, for much of South Africa’s history, inequality based on racial categories was legally enforced. Privileged classes benefited from the country’s productive farms and rich natural resources while non-whites were largely excluded. Although it has been thirteen years since multiracial elections under the new democratic constitution, the country remains deeply divided.

According to World Bank statistics, the country has one of the largest gaps between rich and poor of any country in the world. The official unemployment statistic – around 25% – doesn’t adequately explain the context. (As a matter of comparison, the state with the highest unemployment in the USA and generally thought to be in deep economic trouble is Michigan, with unemployment around 10%). In South Africa, the poorest communities can have official unemployment levels as high as 50% and above. In reality, most people in these communities are working: selling candy, beer, drugs, or working in a low-wage or seasonal formal sector job that pays too little to feed their families. A recent teacher’s strike raised concerns students in poor areas would be weak and half-starved after the two week strike because their families have so little money to feed them. Shantytowns are common around large cities, and poor people in rural areas often lack resources to build or maintain homes, and live in overcrowded or substandard conditions.

The desperate economic situation has profound social implications. Cape Town, where I studied for a month, has been struggling with high rates of AIDS/HIV infection, and has a serious crystal meth (or Tik, as it is known locally) problem. During our visit in one neighborhood anti-drug crusaders were battling drug dealers – burning their cars and marching on their houses — while police struggled to contain both the drug gangs and the vigilantes. While in general I’m skeptical of exaggerated concerns about crime, our personal experiences suggested the rates are high and concern is warranted.

The government struggling with these problems is socially progressive by world standards, and operates under a progressive constitution that mandates local municipalities “structure and manage its administration, and budgeting and planning processes to give priority to the basic needs of the community, and to promote the social and economic development of the community.” Although there has been plenty of criticisms of the government’s success implementing the ideals of the constitution, South Africa is in the unique position of having first world funding and technical expertise to tackle the country’s third world problems.

Our studio class is examining housing and economic issues in a small town about two hours from Cape Town called McGregor. Its boosters claim the town is the “best preserved 19th century town” in the Western Cape, however it is also facing a serious housing crisis.

The town sits nestled in a mountain valley:

Here’s are the five studio team members, as well as some students who have been working with the South African Heritage Resources Agency to document the town history:

McGregor is something of a mecca for so-called “earth building” technology in South Africa built using adobe or cobb. This home was being built by a local business owner using local materials (the earth is from the site) and local people with experience in the building techniques.

This man is stomping cobb:

These are historic homes, perhaps 100 years old:

Here is a government-built toilet, shared by the residents of 5 tin shacks (not seen, to the right) and the home to the left. These residents are lucky, many shack residents have no plumbing whatsoever.

In McGregor, perhaps a quarter of the total population live in tin shacks and pay roughly $20 a month to the land owner as rent. Millions more live in massive shantytowns surrounding Cape Town, Johannesburg, and other South African cities. (More on this later)

We worked with the students to survey the community and consider the design and location for new government-subsidized housing:

After spending a week in McGregor, we have returned to Cape Town to start work on the report.

We took the train to Simonstown to see the famous African penguins:

As well as took a drive around the peninsula to visit the Cape of Good Hope.