IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/intjhp/v18y2018i2p335-345.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Housing policy in mining towns: issues of race and risk in South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Lochner Marais

Abstract

Mining has had much to do with the pattern of housing in South Africa today. Under apartheid, the mines housed black mineworkers, classed as migrants, in high-density compounds, while giving white mineworkers company houses. Changes came with the demise of apartheid and the rise of neoliberalism and globalisation. The post-apartheid government emphasised ownership and permanence for mineworkers. This paper critically reviews post-apartheid government policy for mine housing in South Africa. Mining companies privatised mineworkers’ housing, devolving the long-term risks to households. Among the results have been deterioration of houses, lack of a coherent rental-housing strategy, ownership that could lock households into declining mining settlements, an influx of contract workers for whom the mining companies are no longer responsible for providing housing, lack of capacity to manage mining towns and unwanted houses if a mine closes. To date, policy responses to the problems of mine housing have not been appropriate.

Suggested Citation

  • Lochner Marais, 2018. "Housing policy in mining towns: issues of race and risk in South Africa," International Journal of Housing Policy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(2), pages 335-345, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:intjhp:v:18:y:2018:i:2:p:335-345
    DOI: 10.1080/19491247.2018.1448153
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/19491247.2018.1448153
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/19491247.2018.1448153?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marais, Lochner & Denoon-Stevens, Stuart & Cloete, Jan, 2020. "Mining towns and urban sprawl in South Africa," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    2. Owen, J.R. & Kemp, D. & Marais, L., 2021. "The cost of mining benefits: Localising the resource curse hypothesis," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    3. Sesele, Kentse & Marais, Lochner & van Rooyen, Deidre, 2021. "Women and mine closure: A case study of policy in South Africa," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:intjhp:v:18:y:2018:i:2:p:335-345. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/REUJ20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.