ABSTRACT
Although present government policy is to provide housing, services and security of tenure to people living in informal settlements, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) (1996, p292) estimates that 20 to 80 per cent of urban growth in developing countries is informal. Therefore, it is unlikely that the formal land delivery system in South Africa will ever catch up with the demand for formal housing. In the interim, this demand is being met by the informal land delivery system. In other words, informal settlements are likely to continue to provide shelter for many poor people who are waiting for a house within a formal development. Therefore, local authorities should develop mechanisms to manage existing and future informal settlements. This chapter will describe a land management approach for informal settlements from a local authority perspective. A number of themes are explored. They include:
• the role of local authorities in land management and informal settlement upgrading;
• the definition of informal settlements for the purposes of local level land management;
• a social change approach, used to understand and predict changes in informal settlement land tenure, based on Fourie (1993);
• the design of a land record using land information system (LIS) technology, based on an informal settlement in East London; and
• some important aspects for future research.
