Martin Legassick

N2 Gateway and the Joe Slovo informal settlement: the new Crossroads?

Updates are being added below - scroll down to see them or click here to see the Joe Slovo solidarity digital archive.

http://www.capeargus.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=3131

Since the launch in 2004 of N2 Gateway, Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s pet ‘flagship’ project has run into problem after problem: delayed delivery, cost over-runs, above all lack of consultation. In their 2004-5 report the Development Action Group, an NGO, wrote “The top-down approach in the N2 project undermines its overall sustainability… The casual, continued and increasing practice of excluding people from decision-making about development processes that directly affect their lives is an obstacle that communities are unlikely to tolerate for much longer.”

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Martin Legassick: Background to Delft evictions

Submitted by abahlali on Wed, 2008-02-20 16:50. article | Martin Legassick

http://westerncapeantieviction.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/background-to-delft-evictions/

Thoughts provoked by being interviewed by Keketso Sechane, Heart 104.9 radio, 19/2/2008

Today people have been evicted from houses in Delft at police gunpoint – despite their non-violence. But this situation, arising from illegal occupation of N2 Gateway Houses, was not caused, as the Housing DG said on your programme earlier, by DA councillor Frank Martin. It is a product of a contradiction between two things: on the one hand a desperate and worsening housing crisis in the Western Cape; and, on the other, the inflexible bureaucratic attitude of the tops of the national and provincial Housing Departments and the management of Thubelisha Homes in the N2 Gateway project.

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Cape Town: Sisulu gets eviction order against Joe Slovo

Submitted by Abahlali_3 on Fri, 2007-09-21 08:37. Call for solidarity | Martin Legassick

Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:04:08 +0200
Subject: Lindiwe Sisulu gets eviction order against Joe Slovo informal settlement

Cdes,
Today Lindiwe Sisulu, housing minister, Richard Dyantyi, provincial MEC for housing and Thubalisha homes got an eviction order against Joe Slovo residents. The issues and background have been already presented on this list.

This is apartheid-style forced removals, now on the basis of wanting to evict the poor to the outskirts of Cape Town to make way for the better off, rather than on the basis of race. It is no less dictatorial. The order will be resisted, in courts and through direct action in Joe Slovo.

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