MICHAEL MORRIS | A city’s soul is a sum of hard choices - Business Day

Michael Morris 

With stout liberal heart, I applauded inwardly Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla’s observation last week that “[a] city’s architecture tells the story of its soul”, for I instantly perceived an effort to place the individual human figure at the centre of the metropolis.

Not that there’s anything airy-fairy about a city’s soul ― it can only ever be a sum of hard choices.

And this cuts to the quick of Mhlantla’s observation, and its location in a Constitutional Court judgment justly called a “landmark” ruling that, as Business Day rightly reported, will “have ramifications for property development”.

The judgment concluded a long-running case over the sale of prime provincial-owned Sea Point land which dissenters believed should be used instead for building affordable housing for people who worked nearby but could not afford anything other than what so often remains, in effect, the dormitory working-class housing built by design on the city’s periphery by the racial calculations of apartheid planners.

The question at the heart of the case is, what do we do about that? Or, more formally, how do we live up to the injunction of the 1996 constitution ― section 26 (1) of the Bill of Rights ― that “everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing”?

The case brings two things to mind.

The first is property economist Francois Viruly’s 40x40x40 concept to describe the millions who remain economically and socially peripheral – living in a 40m² house situated 40km from work and with transport to and from work costing up to 40% of household income. (In Cape Town, reporting suggests, some 900,000 commuters, of whom more than 60% rely on an estimated 12,000 minibus taxis, are living essentially where apartheid determined they should live.)

The second is a Covid-era column of mine from April 2020, which began: “The strange unreality of the lockdown … is less the seeming desertedness of usually bustling places, but that most of us – in the tens of millions – have gone separately to our homes in the teeming townships and the still streets of suburbia as if there remains a law that still separates us by the inerasable logic of apartheid.”

I added ― though I see now, perhaps too cryptically ― that there was, of course, such a “law”, which was the law of economics.

By this, I suppose I meant the mechanism by which all who live in the modern free world make remarkably similar judgments and choices about how much we have, what we need, what we want, what things cost, what we can afford, what more we can do to widen our choices, and all of us ― the millionaire, the parent, the business owner, the housekeeper, and the labourer ― knowing what it means when the money runs out.

What I think it means for South African cities ― already home to 67% of the population ― is that unless the property developer and the labourer can more or less recognise themselves and their interests in policy instruments directed at overcoming the apartheid spatial plan and everyone’s right to “adequate housing”, the truly transformative answer to our long-delayed reimagining of a liberated or democratic or just South Africa will remain elusive.

We can all be compelled – to act, to abide by. But what matters is what impels us.

To me, society’s dynamism – the soul of its cities – can only, as I suggested in that 2020 column, be “an amalgam of assets and capacities that well from the choices of people, not the determinations of the powerful”.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-07-06-michael-morris-a-citys-soul-is-a-sum-of-hard-choices/#google_vignette