The New South Institute (NSI) is pleased to share its third working paper, Urban Settlements on Traditional Authority Land: Four Case Studies, authored by NSI research affiliates Andries du Toit and Andrew Charman.

This paper explores a paradox at the heart of South Africa’s urbanisation dynamics. Many Black South Africans—across both working- and middle-class households—are choosing not to invest in historically white urban neighbourhoods. Instead, they are directing their resources toward land and housing outside of the formal property regime, on land allocated through traditional authorities. While these settlements are socially and economically urban, they develop outside municipal land-use planning systems, cadastral registers, and conventional fiscal frameworks.

Drawing on four in-depth case studies—Dassenhoek, KwaMhlanga, Hammanskraal, and Kabokweni—the paper examines a significant yet poorly understood feature of South Africa’s urban transformation: the rapid development of urban settlements on land governed by traditional authorities.

Through detailed, field-based research and the careful use of artificial intelligence (including Google Earth imagery) to interpret changes in infrastructure and built structures over time, the authors show that these spaces are not simply sites of governance failure. Rather, they are ordered settlements that display a high degree of institutional inventiveness. They are characterised by hybrid systems of land administration and service provision, shaped through institutional bricolage, informal markets, neo-customary allocation practices, and limited municipal involvement. These arrangements—while often institutionally invisible—frequently function as adaptive and locally legitimate forms of governance.

At the same time, this disjuncture has serious implications. Exclusion from statutory systems weakens municipal financial capacity, complicates long-term infrastructure planning, and leaves residents without the full protections associated with formal recognition. The research also highlights the political and symbolic dimensions of land access, showing how these processes reshape state–citizen relations and forms of spatial citizenship.

The findings speak directly to current policy debates, particularly the Equitable Access to Land Bill, which seeks to recognise legitimate land rights outside the formal cadastral system and proposes governance mechanisms that bridge statutory and customary domains. The paper welcomes this policy direction, while cautioning that poorly designed implementation could entrench unaccountable authority, deepen institutional fragmentation, and/or enable elite capture. The authors argue that successful reform must be grounded in the daily realities of people living with hybrid tenure systems—and must support, rather than undermine, existing forms of negotiated and adaptive governance.

The paper concludes by identifying key questions for future research and policy, including:

• improving our understanding of the scale and economic significance of these settlements;
• the sustainability of informal service provision;
• the functioning of neo-customary tenure systems; and
• the long-term implications for urban form, municipal finance, and a just energy transition.

We invite you to engage with this working paper and look forward to continued dialogue on how South Africa’s “cities outside the cities” can be more justly and sustainably integrated into the country’s urban future.

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