Governing housing megaprojects in a South African metropolitan area: the case of Mangaung

Decades of colonial and apartheid urban spatial planning have left South Africa's cities socially segregated and physically fragmented, with poor households confined to the outskirts. These urban realities remain a challenge to most local authorities three decades after the demise of apartheid. Using project data and a set of 30 qualitative interviews, we examined Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality's approach to megaprojects, also known as 'catalytic' projects, implemented through South Africa's Integrated Residential Development Programme, whose vision is to restructure the city to ensure spatial integration and private sector involvement. We use evolutionary governance theory to show goal dependency, path dependency and interdependencies in South Africa's housing policy, and we evaluate our findings against the literature on megaprojects. Our findings point to the shortcomings of this vision: the small scale of the projects, problems with the devolution of the housing function from provincial to local government and power play, difficulties in keeping to project plans, and problems with the implementation to ensure diverse housing options and increased densities, and reduced attention to informal settlement upgrading.