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Walking through Joe Slovo Park,1 a recently established low-income housing scheme situated in the historically white middle-class suburb of Milnerton, Cape Town, is a rude reminder of the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to acknowledge the complexity and heterogeneity of everyday social life and lived experience. In the early 1990s an ambitious housing scheme had sought to transform the 'chaotic' shack settlement of Marconi Beam2 into an orderly working-class suburb, Joe Slovo Park (JSP). However, instead of the anticipated neat rows of brick houses with grassed front lawns, this housing scheme is now barely distinguishable from the informal settlement that was demolished to make way for it. Peering behind the high walls surrounding Slovo Park reveals the full extent of the disjuncture between the planners' idealised model of 'suburban bliss' and the actual lived reality of this low-income housing scheme.3 While planners and developers envisaged a highly regulated formal housing development devoid of backyard shacks, shebeens4 and spaza shops,5 Slovo Park's core brick structures ('RDP' subsidy houses)6 have been swamped by informal structures built from corrugated iron and a mixture of other improvised building materials. It appears as if these brick-and-mortar houses have been recolonised by corrugated iron, plastic and wood. In other words, the 'formal' suburb of Joe Slovo Parkseems to have reverted back to its original 'unruly' state. While there are significant improvements in the living conditions, infrastructure and amenities at Joe Slovo Park as compared with the former settlement, elements of informality have nonetheless come back to haunt planners who envisaged a neat and orderly low-income suburb.7
In addition to this 'return to informality', the planners' Utopian vision of a harmonious 'multicultural', multi-class and non-racial housing scheme is contradicted by socio-spatial segregation and the tensions that have emerged between the mostly Xhosa-speaking working-class Slovo Park residents and the predominantly 'coloured' and white residents of the middle-income Phoenix housing development adjacent to Slovo Park. Although Phoenix was planned as an integral part of the upgrading scheme, tensions along race, ethnic and class lines culminated in the erection of high concrete walls between Slovo Park and Phoenix. How did this planners' vision of multicultural planning and integrated urban development collapse like a pack of cards? Did planners imagine that individual home...