Building better: The EDP’s Built Environment Programme
Author/s: Anna Du Plessis
The spaces we inhabit — where we live, work, move, and gather — shape our lives in profound ways. They shape how we access opportunity, how safe we feel, and what futures we imagine for ourselves and those around us. But across South Africa, our built environments still reflect profound inequalities. They carry the legacy of apartheid planning, face growing environmental pressure, and often fail to meet the realities and needs of the people living in them. These challenges are too complex — and too urgent — for any one actor to address alone. The EDP’s Built Environment programme connects the people, systems, and sectors that shape our spaces, supporting more inclusive and sustainable cities.
Building a city of hope together Built Environment programme lead Anna du Plessis facilitates the plenary discussion at the City of Cape Town’s Urban Planning Indaba.
The challenge: A system shaped by history and strained by new pressures
South Africa’s built environment has been shaped by a long history of spatial exclusion and inequality. More than thirty years into democracy, race and income still play a defining role in determining who can access safe housing, decent infrastructure, and the opportunities that come with well-planned and managed built environments.
This inequality is visible everywhere – in the growing divide between city centres and peripheries, in the concentration of opportunity in certain areas, and in the way systems are designed and maintained. For many, particularly in low-income and peripheral urban areas, this means spending significant time and income on transport just to access quality services or jobs. At the same time, rural areas face disconnection from infrastructure, investment, and opportunity.
At the same time, these systems are under growing strain. Urbanisation is increasing pressure on cities, where almost 70% of the population now lives. Infrastructure is ageing, service delivery is struggling to keep up with growing populations, and spatial divides are deepening. Climate change adds another layer of complexity, with extreme weather threatening those in the most vulnerable, often informal, areas.
Fixing a fragmented system requires coordinated responses
The built environment brings together a network of interconnected systems — from housing and transport to infrastructure, public space, and local economies — all intersecting in a shared physical space. Yet far too often, interventions are developed in isolation by individual departments or sectors working within narrow mandates or areas of focus. The result is inefficiency, misalignment, and a failure to respond to the complex, systemic nature of our challenges.
A key ingredient for successful growth Collaborative approaches are necessary to meet existing housing backlogs and ensure sufficient housing supply for a growing population.
In many communities, especially those historically excluded from decision-making, trust in government is low. People are often treated as passive recipients of planning decisions, rather than active participants in shaping the spaces they inhabit. Public participation happens too late, or in ways that feel tokenistic, and this undermines both delivery and accountability.
To do things differently, we need to rethink how roles are distributed — and whose knowledge is recognised. The built environment isn’t just shaped by engineers and planners; it’s shaped by the people who live in it every day. Recognising that means taking lived experience seriously and working with communities as partners, not just beneficiaries.
Why collaboration matters: The housing example
The housing crisis is a useful illustration. With a national backlog of 2.3 million people, and over 12% of the population living in informal dwellings, it’s clear that we need new ways of working. Many affordable housing developments have ended up on the urban periphery, reinforcing spatial inequality and placing additional strain on infrastructure and public services. It’s a model that isn’t sustainable — environmentally, economically, or socially.
There is growing recognition that state delivery alone won’t be enough to meet the need. We need partnerships that include government, the private sector, small-scale developers, civil society and communities themselves. But these partnerships have to be carefully held — they require shared understanding, honest engagement, and a willingness to work through the tensions that often arise when mandates, resources, and interests don’t fully align.
We’re starting to see what this could look like. In Cape Town, for example, collaboration between government, academia, civil society and small-scale developers has helped micro-developers provide affordable rental housing in better-located areas. This has included recent amendments to the City’s Municipal Planning By-Law — making it easier for these developers to participate in the formal system. Other approaches, like inclusionary housing, are being explored to better align private development with affordability goals.
Importantly, addressing the housing crisis isn’t just about providing shelter — it’s facilitating access safety, services, opportunity and dignity. In this system and in the built environment in general, collaborative and systemic approaches to solving complex, intersecting challenges are key.
Everybody’s welcome The built environment isn’t just shaped by engineers and planners; it’s shaped by the people who live in it every day.
The EDP’s approach
At the EDP, we focus on building the enabling conditions for collaboration in the built environment. This includes creating space for shared learning, helping stakeholders see the bigger picture, and supporting more inclusive and responsive governance processes, particularly in contexts of low trust or high complexity.
This work has taken several different forms, including convening learning processes around sustainable building materials, supporting collaboration in the small-scale rental housing sector, co-designing governance for the Adam Tas Corridor, and more.
All these projects reflect the same core idea: collaboration, if done well, can lead to more grounded, responsive, inclusive, and sustainable approaches to urban development. And we are only just getting started – watch this space!
Looking ahead
If you’re working in this space and want to help build more inclusive, resilient environments, we’d love to connect. Sign up for the EDP newsletter or reach out to our team.