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Background

The Empower Shack social housing pilot project is a transformative intervention to upgrade the BT-Section informal settlement in Site C Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Spearheaded by Urban Think Tank Empower (UTTE), founded by Architect Alfredo Brillembourg in collaboration with local community facilitators Ikhayalami and Sikhona Nathi, the initiative involves the BT-Soweto community and various local and international partners. The project was predominantly funded by philanthropic Swiss Foundations, with the City of Cape Town providing land and subterranean infrastructure. The project resulted from an experimental, research-based approach to informal settlement upgrading with three primary goals: increasing housing density to enhance the urban environment and community living standards, promoting community participation and consolidating community resources—time, land, and income—for a successful outcome. With no relocation, 72 homes, 4 commercial facilities, a shared public open space playground and a community centre have been developed in six phases on the site previously occupied by the families.

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Approach

Whereas a typical approach on the 3672m2 site would have resulted in 28 typical one-size-fits-all 'stand-alone units', the Empower Shack approach shifted to a double-storey rowhouse typology accommodating all of the 72 families who initially occupied the site. This strategy recovered approximately 40% of the site, creating space for essential community infrastructure such as roads, service reticulation, public courtyards, children's playgrounds and a community centre. The co-design process, which acknowledged the diversity in every family, centred on affordability and individual spatial needs, resulting in a double-storey design whereby residents could rent out the ground floor or use it to start a business, providing an income stream for residents to upgrade their homes. The project uses construction materials like timber and sheet metal, which are familiar to the community, allowing occupants to develop their interiors with available resources and technologies and allowing for residents to contribute their own labour. This method is more effective than traditional approaches because it integrates community needs, leverages local materials and skills, and provides economic opportunities, ensuring long-term sustainability and empowerment for the residents. Additionally, the funding structure contributed to these factors, with 90% of the project’s funding coming from the Swiss Re Foundation, and each family contributing the remaining 10% of the cost, mainly through microfinance loans.

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Environmental Impact

The initiative's environmental benefits include efficient land use compared to a typical greenfield development, and the creation of public open spaces with vegetation to reduce the urban heat island effect. The houses and the community facility are equipped with photo-voltaic panels, which provide solar power for both the centre and the surrounding community. The top floor of the community centre features organic food gardens, which improve food security and nutrition, and provide 15 jobs for respective community members. These gardens are irrigated with water collected from the sawtooth roof, with some of the water stored in an underground conservancy tank for future use. Collectively, these factors reduce resource consumption and negative impacts on the natural environment.

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Success Factors

Key success factors include strategic alignment with formal land use management procedures, the development of scalable and replicable methodologies for informal settlement upgrading through the use innovative digital planning tools to facilitate transparent and inclusive stakeholder engagement. The greatest triumph of the project, however, was the simultaneous top-down and bottom-up approach, with significant support from local authorities and affected communities. This was always intended as a pilot project, but its success has resulted in an additional 14 sites being identified across the city for similar development.

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Evidence

The Empower Khayelitsha pilot project has transformed the lives of 428 residents by successfully delivering 12 distinct housing prototypes, resulting in 72 two-storey fully serviced housing units with 25 private, semi-private, and public courtyards. The new community centre will further strengthen community ties, provide work opportunities and support sustainable economic activities through its crèche, indoor soccer tournaments, internet café and the sale of fresh produce grown on the rooftop, with the public open gathering spaces catalysing the strengthening the community network. The approach has won multiple awards in recognition, and has received a great deal of media attention.

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Evolution

Over the years, what began as a research project upgrading one shack has evolved into a model for incremental in-situ informal settlement upgrading. Launched in 2023, the next phase of the Empower Khayelitsha project will scale up the Empower Upgrade Model for over 330 residents in the nearby BBT Vukani Community, Site C, Ikwezi Park, before beginning to roll out future developments at scale. The pilot project has confirmed the model can work, but it remains to be seen whether it can be truly replicable and scalable.

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Challenges

Balancing the sluggish procedures of local authority and City legal processes with the immediate and urgent need for housing is incredibly challenging. Residents need assistance urgently however the necessary processes can take up to 4 years before any work can commence. In addition, international funders often stipulate far quicker timelines than local government processes allow. Another challenge has been the difficulty residents face in fulfilling their payment obligations.

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