ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some of the complexities of pursuing the New Urban Agenda (NUA) directives at the local government level in the developing world, by reflecting on the attempts of South African urban local governments to comply with the dictates of the right to adequate housing. It seeks to illustrate the importance of law in clarifying and capacitating the actors and systems responsible for implementing normative commitments. The chapter highlights some of the drawbacks of assuming that such implementation is possible without the explicit realignment of prevailing legal frameworks. The severely fragmented, starkly unequal and racially exclusionary cities that the South African government inherited from the apartheid era were the near-complete antithesis of the kind of cities that would subsequently be envisaged by the NUA. Moreover, the South African government rightly assumed that the constitutional right of access to housing required a new suite of aligned housing legislation and policy, which duly followed.
