Abstract
The housing challenge is a global challenge which mostly affect developing countries. In South Africa it can be blamed to the apartheid legacy, as it produced fragmented and unjust spatial patterns that kept poor people of colour on the edges of cities/urban areas. This resulted to an increased need for housing in well located areas, when South Africa entered into democracy in 1994. This study is important in the sense that it provides the progress made in terms of how human settlements have transformed from 1994 (a period where government was concerned with rolling out houses) to 2014 (a year which marks five years after the shift from housing to human settlements) and beyond, and it also identifies the causes of housing backlog and the challenges faced by the Department of Human Settlements. The aim of the study is to investigate how human settlements have transformed in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality from 1994 to 2014. A qualitative research approach was applied, and qualitative methods of collecting data were utilised to gather information. The study discovered that the City of Johannesburg has a wide range of housing programmes and policies/framework in place which have a common aim of combating housing backlog and creating integrated and sustainable human settlements, which includes amongst other Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme (UISP), and Inclusionary Housing Policy respectively. It recommends that future studies in the housing or human settlements field in South Africa focus on formulating mechanisms that can be used by the government to raise funds in order to eradicate housing backlog, as well as looking at ways the government can use to fast track spatial transformation.
M.Ing. (Sustainable Urban Planning and Development)