Top court failed to consider farm evictees’ right to dignified housing
Wolwerivier’s rows of tin shacks on shadeless gravel expanse and isolated from jobs, schools and hospitals embody the resilience of spatial apartheid
In theory, the progressive right to housing contained in the Constitution also safeguards the dignity of people being evicted from their homes. In the Claytile judgment handed down on July 13 however, the Constitutional Court endorsed Wolwerivier, a "human dumping ground" on the outskirts of Cape Town, as acceptable housing for evictees. The court sanctioned the eviction of 21 residents, 11 of them minor children, from a Western Cape farm, on the basis that it met the constitutional requirements of "meaningful engagement" with the residents, and because the City of Cape Town offered "suitable alternative accommodation" at the Wolwerivier relocation camp to those who would be rendered homeless by the eviction. The residents, many of whom were born on the farm, began living there from 1978. The relocation camp, 30km from the city bowl, is home to hundreds of families who have been evicted from their homes and cleared off land in the name of Cape Town’s "development" and "regeneration"...
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