ABSTRACT
Why and how is it that a left-of-centre government not hobbled by heavy external leverage, with (previous) developmental state precedents, potentially positive macroeconomic fundamentals, and well-developed alternative policies for housing and urban reconstruction, came to settle on a conservative housing policy founded on ‘precepts of the pre- democratic period’? Arguably, this policy is even more conservative than World Bank strictures and paradigms, whose advice the incoming democratic government ‘normally ignored’ and ‘tacitly rejected’. The paper proposes an answer residing in the mechanics and modalities of knowledge production in the shelter sector; the filtering of this knowledge through the workings and logics of post-apartheid state construction; and the (associated) state technologies of societal penetration and regime legitimization. The absence of a map and compass to guide, direct and assist post-Cold War statecraft; the weight of history and legacy; strategic blundering, and the blunt (government-engineered) techniques of consulting and advising, collectively contribute to the inherited and present defects and deformities of our two decade-old developmentalism, writ large in our dysfunctional human settlements. Alternatives to the technocratic market developmentalism of current housing praxis spotlights empowering shelter outcomes which strategically wrestle with the dynamics and dislocations of land, property and financial markets; urbanization and the wider spatial economy; and, a reconstruction and transformation project that affirms and strengthens citizenship and basic human rights. The role and contribution of planners, the rhetorical and argumentative framing of development/policy discourse, and the rewiring of the relationship between the elite and poor, are central and pivotal to democratically empowering and socially responsive housing praxis. Public policy teaching, in this context, must be alert and awake to the limitations and machinations of autopoiesis, rhetoric and agnotology.
