Topics and Regions
Rick has over 40 years experience working in the land sector in Southern Africa. He is part of the Land Portal knowledge engagement team working to research and develop knowledge resources including data stories, blogs and in-depth country profiles for Southern, Central and Eastern Africa.
Rick is also a Senior Research Associate with Phuhlisani NPC - a South African land sector NGO and the curator of specialist Southern African land news and analysis website https://knowledgebase.land
He tweets on land related issues Twitter account https://twitter.com/KnowledgebaseL
He has a PhD from the University of Cape Town. His research in Langa, Cape Town features as the central case study in a recent book Urban Planning in the Global South (2018), co-authored with the late Vanessa Watson, which examines the on-going contestations over land and housing in the rapidly growing cities of the global South.
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Land and Conflicts
Le Foncier et les conflicts
‘There’s no future in this IDP camp’: Why Somalia’s crisis needs a rethink
Whispers of Injustice: Socfin’s Decade of Legal Battle Echoing in Communities Across Cameroon
The People's Law Journal
The majority of people in South Africa live in its cities. Here, although apartheid spatial planning has formally ended, people are still struggling with its legacy. South African cities remain largely untransformed. Despite the Constitutional Right to housing and equality, poor and working class people still live on the outskirts of the city, far away from work opportunities, subjected to inadequate housing and violent evictions. This crisis calls for radical policy and action from our metros. This edition of the PLJ helps to present a few areas relating to the urban land question
Wolwerivier
A social audit is a community-led process of reviewing of crucial documents to determine whether the public expenditure and service delivery outcomes reported by the government really reflect the public money spent and the services received by the community. Members of the community collectively participate in a process of verifying government (or private company) documents by comparing them with the realities on the ground and the experiences of the community. Evidence collected during the audit is then reported to the responsible authorities at a public meeting.
Agrivillages and rural settlements
This illustrated report examines four types of agricultural settlement in the Wetsern Cape
- Those initiated by farm owners on large estates with minimal state involvement
- Projects initiated by farm owners to provide workers with tenure security involving sub division of their property
- Projects initiated by farm owners to move workers to new or existing settlements off- farm
- Projects initiated by government to develop new settlements respond to the needs of displaced rural people
South Africa's living law jurisprudence
Nolundi Luwaya examines how the laws affecting rural citizens in South Africa fit together. She examines the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act and highlights key sections of the Act including the requirements for establishment of Traditional Councils, the status and role of traditional leaders. She reviews contested legislation including the Communal Land Rights Act, struck down by the Constitutional Court and the Traditional Courts Bill which threatened to turn rural citizens in the former bantustans into chiefly subjects.
A review of the literature on farmworker housing, access to services and tenure security on and off farms in the Cape Winelands District Municipality
This literature review aims to situate farm labour within the particular history of the development of agriculture in the Cape while providing a critical assessment of the changing approaches to thinking about farm workers and their socio-economic needs by employers and the state. The review aims to provide a knowledge baseline from which to distil key questions to guide an applied process of research and social dialogue in the Cape Winelands District and beyond
The stubborn feudal in us: Rural struggles from late colonialism to a neo-apartheid South Africa
This presentation provides a historical overview of the role of the state in maintaining feudal structures and examines the roles and powers of tribal chiefs in post 1994 laws. It examines rural popular struggeles to challenge unaccountable tribal rule in the 1980s and the role of chiefs in the transition to democracy in South Africa