Noor Mazhar: Incremental Densification: The production, regularisation, and regulation of rental housing markets in Cape Town, South Africa

Supervisors: Professor Minna Sunikka-Blank and Professor Charlotte Lemanski

Research overview:

Residents have incrementally built, developed, and provided rental housing, with varying degrees of compliance to building regulations in backyards of houses in formal, fully serviced neighbourhoods. Backyard dwellers have previously been ‘invisible’ to planners because backyard housing has conventionally been viewed as transitional housing, a cooption of planning outcomes and a strain on the infrastructure capacity. However, recently, the City of Cape Town has acknowledged that it is neither possible nor practical to provide subsidised houses to all its residents. Therefore, regulatory provisions are being put in place to facilitate small-scale developers and homeowners to formalise and regularize rental units.  The research explores how the City of Cape Town, NGOs and think-tanks, small-scale developers and urban citizens are engaging transversally to co-produce, regularize and regulate rental housing. It explores the motivations of stakeholders involved in the transformation of rental housing from what initially emerged as an incremental practice by individual households to a concerted program, that brings together an array of (often incompatible) stakeholders and offers insights with regards to how cities in the South plan and are planned and mediated citizenship.

Biography:

Noor is a third year PhD candidate with joint supervision from the Department of Architecture and the Department of Geography. Noor’s research is funded by the ESRC and the Newnham College and Cambridge Trust scholarship. Prior to the PhD, Noor has a MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge, a MSc in Sustainable Development from the University of Sr Andrews and a BSc (Hons.) in Political Science from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, and has worked at think tanks and for the public sector in Pakistan.