Sondela - Come Together

Sondela

Rustenburg Extension 22 - a low cost housing project flanking the platinum mining belt on the edge of the city - was built in the early 2000s by the Rustenburg Local Municipality. While originally designed as a one-stand-one-house development typical of the South African low cost housing delivery program, over the years shacks have mushroomed in the backyards giving rise to what could best be described as 'Xhosa Town'. The locals do not speak of Ext. 22, instead they choose to refer to the place as Sondela. In the Xhosa language, 'Sondela' means to 'Come Together', and this is exactly what many rural Xhosa's from the Eastern Cape seeking work in the shafts have done here. It is an incredibly dense residential environment. Some properties can harbour as many as 20 3x2m shacks, some fashioned as zinc boxes, others made from the leftovers of the original development. Its vibrancy would fool you into believing that the people living there were casting a blind eye on the squalor that surrounds them.

The second phase of the Rustenburg Backyard Shack Survey took place in Sondela this past weekend. On the day we were able to complete 280 one-on-one interviews with backyard tenants and landlords in an attempt to unpack the backyard housing environment. The information generated by the Rustenburg Backyard Shack Survey is being used to inform the North West Informal Settlement Upgrading Program (NW ISUP) of the North West Department of Housing. SATPLAN and the CSIR Satellite Applications Centre have been actively involved in the NW ISUP over the last 12 months and have compiled a spatial information framework of informal settlements for all municipalities in the North West Province.