Planning 'suburban bliss' in Joe Slovo Park, Cape Town

Joe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the 're-informalisation' of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of 'suburban bliss' and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended 'beneficiaries', only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modem urban living.