Vaissnavi Shukl
For those of us who have grown up in India, we were introduced to the concept of segregation and apartheid very early on, as we were taught about the discrimination Gandhi faced while living in South Africa and how that marked the beginning of the independence movement in India, with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. We speak to Land and Housing activist Adi Kumar about the history of apartheid in Africa and how land policies continue to affect the supply of affordable housing in Cape Town today.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl, and this is Architecture Off-Centre. A podcast where we highlight contemporary discourses that shape the built environment but do not occupy the center stage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

Since this season, we are looking broadly at the themes of home, house, housing, shelter, one often historically speaking. You know, when you look at architectural texts and the evolution of how one came to designing and living inside a home, the most pretty form of it is always a shelter. You know, the typical diagram that you know of the wooden trusses like a little pitch roof on top. And you always see them being used interchangeably, maybe not as frequently interchanged as home and house, because home is something personal. Houses are somebody else’s, but they carry very different meanings. Now, in your experience, how do you differentiate between the two, especially legally speaking, how does law associate shelter, house, home?

Adi Kumar
Yeah, that’s a difficult question. And like you said, the home has many quotations, you know, from the feeling of being kind of safe and security, feeling of being with family, community, cultural representation. So often, our imagination around a home like to describe is very often the brick and mortar, the cement and concrete, or, you know, the classic kind of pitched roof house that kids draw. And, you know, in many ways, it draws its inspiration from kind of even fairy tales, like the story of the three pigs and the wolf. You know, “I huff and I puff and I blow your house in”. And ultimately, the house that survives and the house that gets recognition is the one that’s made of water. The house that was made of a, you know, gets blown in. The house made of wood gets blown in. So this idea of a proper home, a brick home, a pakka home, is what defines, in many people’s imagination, what a home stands for. But in many ways, you know, people who live in inadequate shelter define it with a sense of inadequacy, the lack of compliance, the lack of appropriate material, the lack of services, and defining anyone’s home as inadequate. So in a way, the normative definition of a home, and you’re absolutely right, has a dramatic impact on how we understand society, how we understand housing rights, how people’s housing decisions are structured, how the market works, and eventually how even things like homelessness are addressed. So to the question of kind of legal definitions, there are two ways in which, generally, kind of the international community will describe a home, and all of this is under the broad and Bill of inadequacy. First is a kind of regular occupation, which is coupled with some degree of permanence, which means that regular occupation means you have some possessions in it. You have some, you know, those kinds of items that you use everyday. And then the second idea that links to this idea of permanence, whether a person has lived there for a specific duration, both of these intentions really give a kind of legal definition for a home. Could be, for instance, in South Africa, in one of the litigation cases, courts have been very broad about the definition of they say it doesn’t matter where they live, in a tent or a plastic sheet or a brick house, a home is where a person sleeps and dresses body at night and feel safe. In many ways, it broadens this idea of home outside of its materiality and its permanence. So I mean, in a very simplistic way, trying to define it would be any completed structure made of anybody that appears to be capable of performing the function of a shelter and dwelling should be regarded as someone so and so. I think in many ways, this ambiguity of what a home is creates complications. Because if a home does not have a bed if it’s unoccupied. Shelter often is used as an excuse to so in legal terms, it allows both flexibility for people to inhabit in ways which are suitable to their current living conditions or current economic conditions, but also is used and weaponized when it comes to issues of evictions and forcing others.

Vaissnavi Shukl
If I were to probe you a little bit, and we just had to think this out loud, so in a purely kind of Venn diagram situation, would you say that the home falls into the category of a shelter, but not necessarily vice versa, because a shelter could be anything that gives a certain kind of protection or coverage to an individual. So a home is a shelter, but a shelter is not necessarily a home, because you could be seeking refuge in an office building, in foyers of residential buildings or hotels or supermarkets, and do all those places of refuge then become shelters. But it’s only the function and the utility and the emotional, sentimental part of it that sets the home apart. I’m just, I’m just probing this a little bit to get into very context specific questions.

Adi Kumar
I think that’s an excellent point. I think you’re right. The home is about identity. It’s about personal, familial identity, or community identity and so on. And it’s quite distinctive from this idea of shelter, like shelter as Meritor, and could be very different things in different contexts. So in many ways, the feeling of home comes with what you carry with you and the people that you carry. So I think that sense is very important to making that distinction now.

Vaissnavi Shukl
You’ve been living and working in South Africa for a while, and I thought we could get into specific questions. So race and religion, of course, everybody who’s from India has known about the history of race and religion in India because of Mahatma Gandhi, and, you know, because of how he was pushed out of South Africa, moved back to India and started the whole freedom struggle. So race and religion, of course, were historically used to forcibly remove people in South Africa and also created racially segregated ghettos. And ghettoization, again, is something that people in urban planning, urban design use very frequently and very sparingly. Now. How does this history continue to shape, specifically the housing landscape in South Africa today? And if you can speak a little bit about the long term effects that the secretion has had on the urban fabric, and if you could speak to the current situation?

Adi Kumar
It’s a little bit of a complicated question to answer. I think in most planning education, including my own education, like land use planning, is sort of brought as a technical science in a way that you know, if you understand the demographic trends, if you understand the economic trends, there’s a there’s a degree of prediction, you’re able to say that if these actions are done, this will lead to certain outcomes and so on. And we know that that hasn’t worked in many of the global south cities, like the outcomes aren’t predetermined through land use planning and so on. What I miss in my education, and perhaps in any other people’s education, is the deep influence of kind of land use planning and politics in determining how the city is structured and how that can be used as a way of advancing colonial practices of segregation, of separation, of creating ghettos. So in many ways, a lot of the practice of planning is around segregation. Whether you take India, whether you take South Africa or many other countries, the practice has been, how do we segregate people and differentiate people on the basis of race, religion, sometimes around caste, sometimes around gender. Things are implemented and institutionalized through town planning and city planning. So in most of the colonized countries, we will see that segregation comes with a large degree of dispossession of land and property, and South Africa is no different than that. South Africa, despite it being a democratically adopted system, experienced a political system that used planning as an instrument for segregation and separation. So the group areas Act was instituted with the culture of separating people across race, so white, whites, mostly predominantly well located areas, and blacks, coloreds and Indians and townships often had enormous dormitories, townships living in really poor and inadequate conditions most of the time. So this was enacted through kind of planning laws which allowed and gave the state to power to dispossess and that they were residing on, and move them into areas that that were poorly serviced, that didn’t have the adequate amenities, that didn’t have schools, education facilities, hospitals, or any of the other community amenities that people would need. So it created a spatial pattern in the city and a spatial fabric in the city, which was built on keeping people apart and keeping these cultural identities apart and the racial identities apart so poor and working class people were forced into these ghettos and created a very inadequate environment for people to to make their community and invite their community in that particular name. So what happens 30 years after apartheid ended in South Africa, particularly and in most South African cities, that despite the very of trying to remove the spatial apartheid and the spatial segregation, the spatial segregation has only grown in the last 30 years, and so it really brings into question, like, why the planning systems that are intended to do exactly the opposite they’re supposed to integrate communities across class and race, are unable to enact those systems in in the city. So a number of factors have contributed to this piece. One of the main factors is the way the property market was structured. So while a lot of the issues around land were addressed as part of the democratic dispensary. Redistribution of land took place, which meant that a lot of people that were living in townships and peripheral areas of the city continue to live there without ever having access to the inner city to live in. So what we see currently in a place like, for instance, like Cape Town, most of the people are living in in either informal settlements, tiny 40 square meter houses on the periphery of the city, and often commuting square meters to economic center of the city on the income, spending about 40% of their income, you know, on on commuting, and then end up traveling back, spending about four hours commuting between their place of residence and and and where they work. So in many ways, this transformation hasn’t happened because the way the market logic has played itself out. So this planning regime is really reinforced and, in fact, perpetuated and made worse. A lot of the kind of intentions of spatial planning in South Africa has been, which is to integrate and enter from a kind of spatial segregation. So sadly, I think this, this, this Paramount question, has also led to a number of other pieces of regulatory issues that have shaped the way land is managed. So for many years, people could occupy land, and people could build their own homes, and could use the housing policy in South Africa to be productive. But that situation has changed as land is becoming more and more limited and more and more expensive, leading to fairly destructive evictions that are taking place across the board. So beside it being sort of like a humiliating experience, people experiencing an addiction. It is also leading to this idea that very little has changed in those ways, from pre apartheid to post apartheid. South Africa because the forces were alive were allowed during the apartheid meeting, then similar types of forced removals and illegal evictions are being enacted by a democratic dispensation. So in a way, I think of this conundrum of, how do we address, how do we change the planning regime to allow for a different way of thinking about land, both in terms of private property, but also in terms of how the state owns and controls its own land. So we have, you know, many countries across the world that especially particularly local governments and national governments own massive amounts of land. Very little has been done in economically viable areas and well serviced areas to transform some of these things. The last that I would say, in terms of kind of the long term, is that despite 30 years, there hasn’t been a single affordable housing unit that’s been built in the inner city in playscape, and that is a staggering figure, like you would imagine, that one of the first efforts would have been to bring affordable housing in the inner city, where it was an exclusive place for predominantly whites. So these are the kind of things that I think are the levers which need to change. Bring the question of land, center of of the planning, figure out a way in which spatial justice and spatial transformation is to integrate people living in wealthy, well serviced areas with people poor and working class people living on the and then build as much affordable housing in the inner city to equalize what the property markets and exclusionary markets, you know, operated through Asian, operated through Airbnb, through many of the other things, market instruments that are currently operating in a place like South Africa.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Now, I think that’s where I was going to go for the next question as well. But you mentioned something about evictions. Now it kind of indirectly implies that if you are having people evict their place of residence, it’s either two things. It’s one because they are either living there, residing there illegally, or you are evicting them because you have a certain kind of land ownership that you want to change the nature of, and you want to evict the people who are occupying that space. If you’re already saying that there is a housing crisis and affordable housing is something that hasn’t been made available to people who it should be made available to. How do you think one can, in a place like Cape Town, address that issue without inherently looking at land ownership? So if you’re saying that the apartheid regime, you had the whites occupying a certain part of the city and the blacks were living in dormitories or crammed up dense areas. It kind of implies that the whites had a much larger portion of land that they owned that could not be forcefully evicted from, whereas the other people could be evicted from right now, if you’re now saying that it is the state governments or your local governments or national governments owning larger part of these land banks, without looking at ownership as an underlying issue or change in the ownership. How does one really look at the supply of housing, whether it’s affordable housing, middle income housing? How are the two related? And how does policy or law come into play when you are trying to correlate?

Adi Kumar
To start with, kind of where the housing debates may start at the top, like where the housing debates globally. In many ways, one of the victories that many of the kind of housing activists globally have hailed is their ability to create some very progressive constitutions in certain countries and certain very progressive laws and in countries to prevent forced removals and illegal evictions. So I think that has been a major step forward in the preventative side of things, and we see a number of aspects. So for instance, New York has free legal representation for people facing evictions. In South Africa, for instance, there’s a law against any illegal evictions that does not go through a court process. So in a way, what the laws are defining is that the state should never have a government or even a private owner, should never have the impunity to enact an eviction without a court order. There must be some form of an oversight to the legitimacy of the reason why people occupy land, and particularly in a place like South Africa, where people historically have been dispossessed. Land occupation has always been an instrument to land transformation. It’s about exerting power, exerting force against a very oppressive regime. So in the current context, what this means is that when the way the law is structured, which is called the prevention of illegal eviction, act, really looks at what the responsibilities of state and private owner are, both in terms of preventive measures, which means going to a court, asking for a court order to evict a particular set of community that might have occupied a piece of land, but also the onus on the Street to provide alternative accommodation, which means any eviction that renders people homeless and on the street has to be avoided at all cost, because that’s been the genealogy of the country and so. So in many ways, any kind of eviction that would lead anyone to be living on the street will be prevented by the state having an obligation to provide alternative accommodation. Now, something like that is obviously easier said than done, because the amount of resources that you would require to evict the 3000 odd informal settlement statement that exist in the country is enormous, like, Where would the people go, the amount of resources that would be required to house people, but it is part of a very clearly stated legal obligation, and many countries have a similar obligation that they replicated, which is the onus of the state alternative accommodation to people that face eviction in many of these kind of debates around around illegal evictions. The one aspect that hasn’t been used in great detail is the issue of tenure security, and all of this eventually boils down to 10 year security. In a way, there are laws in places like Brazil. In Sao, Paulo in Bucha is where the 10 year security is determined by the duration of your occupation. So if you’ve been occupying land for a certain number of years, I think even India has similar laws. If you’ve been occupying land unencumbered, without any legal cases, for a period of 10 years or 20 years, and they came to that piece of land in many ways, there are different ways in which the tenure security is enforced in South Africa. Specifically, the tenure security is bolstered by this particular law, which allows the state to go through the court process and provide return of accommodation. Now this hasn’t resulted in the state or private property owners not enacting illegal evictions, which means, first, removals based on gaps in the in things which the Constitution or constitutional law can very seldom cover, things like, what is a home? A good example is one of the evictions in one of the affidavits by the anti land invasion unit, one of the people that evicted a person said, I went I looked into the window. I didn’t see a bed, I didn’t see a mattress, I didn’t see a soap. I just assumed that no one was there, and I demolished the home. And so lot of the time, the state is asking for this power to determine what a home is, very big description, because you get caught into this kind of legal circular arguments about define what a home is, if you don’t know what a home is and who determines it, can the police determine what a home is? Can the state determine who the home is? Do the courts? And so it makes the matter very, very complicated when it comes to understanding the legalities of this, I think the broad basis of understanding the history of colonial practice of disc implores us to understand that evictions and dispossession are inherently bad and they are destructive. So what the families experience, on the other hand, and UN Habitat has documented some incredible documents on the actual cost of evictions. It’s not just the loss of your home, it’s not just the loss of your material property. It’s the loss of your ID cards, your chronic medications, your ability to stay in a particular neighborhood that has access to economic or other social amenities, the loss when you kind of start start accumulating, and the dispossession that you start accumulating keeps repeating itself in cycles for people who are poor and marginalized, and it creates this kind of stereotype of understanding poverty as people who are living on the street or pavement dwellers, or people living in slums or informal settlements and so on. So in many ways, if you were to boil down this debate and move it out of the concept of prediction, you really have to look and like you mentioned, the question of land has to be front and center of this, the question of public land, whether it’s the sale of public land to the private sector, whether it’s long term lease to the private sector to develop, you know, large complexes, malls, big exclusionary developments of condominiums and things like that, or whether it’s private land which must have conditions around how we Use our development, use the far which is awarded by the state to a private developer to do certain things. And I think there are some really good examples that are being tested in Cape Town around how private developers could have conditions attached to the development approval and the planning approval, which forces them to think of broader consequences on the city rather than just looking at the development, I mean the numbers that determine how one particular development in the particular building interacts So, in a way, compelling developers to make contributions towards affordability or contributions towards other social housing that may be developed in in the inner city and so on. So without having the stop gaps into the market forces that determine how housing is shaped in a city, there’s very little incentive for the state to reform the house is in place, to be able to unlock a different type of potential of the market, to perform in the favor of majority of the people, rather than the

Vaissnavi Shukl
minority. What’s interesting is to see this kind of as a cyclical problem where land ownership and law policy are kind of chasing each other, because of the sense, but the development also impacts the policy. What is also kind of striking is how different the definition of a home is when you’re legally talking about it and falling it down to literal bullet points is kind of a very objective outlook. And I was just recently reading Toni Morrison’s essay on home and the way you look at it outside of the legal language. It’s described very emotionally, very poetically, and then you kind of condense it into these things to fit within the legal framework. But speaking of that, Adi, I think your journey, personally also has been very interesting, because you’ve transitioned from working with the big architectural agency to focusing more on the grassroots effort. If you could talk a little bit about your work, your journey, you know, how did this shift happen? And what right now?

Adi Kumar
Yeah, so my journey starts with architecture. So I studied architecture and finished in the late 90s, and quickly got into, you know, internships and practice around looking at residential practice, looking at Interior Design and small renovations, the usual stuff. And, I mean, I quickly, kind of, like, got a taste for that type of work and realized that that type of design wasn’t for me. I wasn’t meant to work with this client. Relationships with the client, you know, who has money determines these kinds of things. So I wanted to break out of the norm. And a big earthquake happened in Gujarat in 2001 and the day it happened, the next day, you know, I had a kind of dream at night and kind of lightning bolt in my head saying, like, you must go and work with that. That’s what you must do. And sort of became kind of obsessed with this idea of, like, going to Gujarat post earthquake, trying to do some construction work. And I found some avenues through a market company, and decided to go there and test myself. And I hadn’t necessarily even built a single house before I landed up there, like the ask of the homes in this village. And so it was intellectually, and, you know, from a professional perspective, a huge challenge for me to leap. How do you do this at scale, and how do you build quick, fast with the people bringing along? So it unfolded in a series of participatory processes. And, you know, we not only built the 250 odd houses, we ended up building close about like 1600 homes in two years, and about 3000 sanitation units in rough space that, you know, I had a small team of like six people, or something like that, and we managed to keep track of all the houses being built across these six villages spread out over 80 kilometers. So while the participatory process was very unique, I realized in hindsight, but like that, was perhaps the wrong way of doing participatory work in itself. We had to make certain choices, and the choices in hindsight were not all appropriate, because inevitably, what we ended up doing was reinforcing, you know, lines of caste and religion in the villages, which was very dominant in that place. Also the complication of building at that pace meant that you had a lot of kinds of political games between contractors, between the large charity that was financing it, the local committees, and the leadership structures in the villages. So it meant you had to embrace power in very awkward ways. So I mean, I would do it very differently if I was to do something like that. So that experience really defined for me, a different practice around how to do participatory builds, how to do participatory design, and I honestly learned the hard way. So I spent about five years after this experience in the US, so I did a master’s in strategic planning, particularly metropolitan and city city planning, and then worked on affordable housing in Los Angeles, and again, learnt in that experience that, you know, affordable housing in many of the global north countries is very insular compared to the kind of housing work that we do in the Global South, where it’s all about the people. Global North housing is about finding a P line, something, putting a building up there and people applying for a lottery and getting in there. So it’s this kind of faceless, nameless type of development, but still a very useful experience to understand how the financing and the planning aspects of affordable housing is structured. I’ve moved and worked, and did a lot of work around kind of planning through a coffee shop in the Boston area, which was a really interesting experience for me. I learned a lot, but I also learned that this developer driven model is the real driver and force behind how our cities are shaping. They are the developers that are determining what develops in our city. It’s never the spatial vision of the city. It’s never what the state wants. It’s never what the people want. It’s always determined by how the property markets and the property developers determine what is good for for revenue generation and the balance sheet and so on. So while it was very rewarding and exploratory for me, I quickly realized that this type of planning itself and this type of design that works with the niche market of like property developers visit for me. So after probably about, like at least, about 500 applications in different development agencies, I ended up moving to Lebanon, and I spent two years there. In Lebanon working on the reconstruction of a Palestinian refugee camp. There, thanks to a number of incredible activists and incredible people who were working, they managed to do something quite extraordinary in the way of using people’s memories, people’s cultural identity, as a way of determining, how would you how would you reconstruct a Palestinian refugee camp that’s destroying war and so relevant in the context of what is happening in the world at the moment, in a way that was a moment, I guess, in my own professional journey, really understand, like how to use and how to use design and planning as an instrument of change, but not just for shelter and home and building those kind of things, but really as an instrument of organizing communities, of Helping people regain power, and as a result, force a different type of democracy or a different type of interaction with state institutions or with the private sector. So I really wanted to deepen this idea of how to organize and how to use planning and design as an instrument for that change. And in fact, I spent probably the first five years looking at some upgrade and developing different tools and different techniques around how to do upgrading, when people are living on the land. So how do you upgrade when you have densities approaching 450-500 to operate in that sector. And also, how do you leverage municipal finance to do the type of upgrading that the people want to see in their own settlements. It could mean a myriad of things, from roads, infrastructure, community facilities and so on. So probably tested every possible aspect of type upgrading that you could do, both in Cape Town, but also in some of the other cities, in Johannesburg and so on, and translating some of these ideas in Nairobi and and in other places, really helped me understand what, what working with the grassroots could look like, what a proper system and ethical system and a morally and ethically sound system of working with people could look like. And then probably the last eight or 10 years, I’ve really kind of stepped up into a into and more executive role, running different nonprofit organizations and both doing very interesting work, both around working with micro developers, people who building small scale rental units, or working on the issue of land, or organizations that are compelling the private sector to have a contribution towards affordable housing, or working on 10 year security around pieces of land that have been historically occupied for the last 30-40, years, and compelling the state to release that piece of land. So those kind of campaigns have only once, you know, you’ve been through the washing machine of doing all these experiences, and that really helped in understanding how the inner workings of the state and inner workings of the private sector interact with the grassroots, and what are the kind of advocacy and, you know, pressure points that exist in the sector to really transform what are urban spaces like?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, if you had one piece of advice or guidance for any young architect who wants to pivot into the kind of grassroots nonprofit activism role and move from the building object scale to the scale at which you are working. What would you say to them, how does one, how does one shift gears?

Adi Kumar
I would think the biggest shift and gear is, I would say passion, persistence and and and self care. Passion is, is the core of this thing. I think if you’re not passionate about this topic, you’ll end up in like a large, multi Multilateral agency and push papers, but if you’re really interested in substantial change, then you have to put where you have to go, where your heart tells you to go. So I think passion is important. I think persistence is critical, because often this sector is very demoralizing. There’s a lot of value in experience, but there’s also a lot of power play around, like, who says what and who operates what? And, you know, self identity around like, oh, you know, “that person is an activist?”, “Is he really an activist?” “Is he just playing the market?” You know, that kind of thing. So I think those identity politics you have to persist through, and also persist through the conditions of getting into into that space and interacting with the right kind of stakeholders, and then, obviously, like, it’s really, really critical to have, you know, these, these pieces of passion and persistence interact with each other, so that you you look after yourself, because the sector is very self absorbing. I mean, I have worked, you know, in Africa, then sometimes 14, 15, 16, hours days for weeks on end. And often people underestimate not just the hours that you put in, but also what you see in front of you. I mean seeing people living without access to water or sanitation or without a home in the kind of conditions that we see in many cities across the world, you know, in flooded areas and so on. That impact is very cumulative. And so self care in the development sector is hugely important, because people just get lost and become cynical, and then, you know, it becomes difficult to justify why to do this work if your mind is so cynical around the passion that you started with. So be passionate, be persistent, and look after yourself while you’re doing this type of work, because it’s hard.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, that’s a lovely note to end this on. Thank you so much Adi for sharing your insights and your experience and we wish you all the best for your venture.

Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.