Managed Land Settlement

Incremental settlement is a pro-poor approach to settlement development that is being promoted and advocated for by Afesis-corplan and others.

Incremental settlement is the process by which legally recognised settlements are created over time in an incremental manner through the involvement and actions of a range of role-players including government, communities and the private sector. It includes the development of such settlements from:

• an in-situ context where people have already occupied the land in an illegal manner and the area is then formalised and upgraded over time (This is called Upgrading of Informal Settlements UIS); as well as
• a greenfield context where the land is undeveloped and the area is prepared for future settlement and upgraded over time (this is called Managed Land Settlement – MLS).

For more information on Upgrading of Informal Settlements see:

• Afesis-corplan upgrading of informal settlements page
• Buffalo City Upgrading Informal Settlement Strategy
• National Upgrading Informal Settlement Programme
• Planning 4 Informality

For more information on Managed Land Settlement see.

• Annexure 3: Managed Land Settlement – from research conducted by the Housing Development Agency on Managing and Curbing Unauthorised Land Occupation
• Managed Land Settlement: An Incremental Approach to Human Settlements  (see article on page 185)
• Between a Shack and an RDP House: Managed Land Settlement
• Towards managed land settlement – a review of five South African case studies and its summary annexure table
• Managed Land Settlement (Video – 15 minute version)
• The Missing Middle: A smallholding Land Subsidy (learning brief)
• Basic Organising and Active Citizenship (learning brief)
• Motivation for a Housing Development Support Programme (learning brief)
• Land Acquisition and Development for Human Settlement Development (learning brief)
• A New Land Records System (learning brief)
• Rethinking Land and Housing Allocation (learning brief)
• Managed Land Settlement: Increasing Densities  (learning brief)
• Creating Quality Environments: Managed Land Settlement  (learning brief)
• Equitable Access to Land (learning brief)
• Good plans – Bad implementation (learning brief)
• Motivation for Managed Land Settlement (PowerPoint presentation at Metropolis conference Aug 2018)
• Managed Land Settlement and Woman (draft ‘thought piece’ from 2011)
• A new human settlements programme (Transformer Journal article, 2019)
• Linking incremental settlement and job creation (Transformer Journal article, 2019)
• Land assembly policy for the human settlements sector (national Department Human Settlements discussion document – August 2020)
• Sisulu’s new plan for informal settlements and formal housing a welcome break from the past (opinion piece, Daily Maverick, 5 December 2020)
• From re-blocking to pre-blocking (learning brief, 2021)
• Increased housing subsidy will result in more informal settlements (opinion piece, GroundUp, 8 July 2022)