As landmark court victories on urban land rights face implementation delays, the Urban Land Justice and Redistribution Gathering will convene from 22 – 23 August 2025 at Workshop17 Watershed, V&A Waterfront, a week after the proposed National Dialogue convened by the Presidency.
The third iteration of the event, the 2025 edition will be co-hosted by the Housing Development Agency (HDA), Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI-SA), the Institute of Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape (PLAAS-UWC), a City Occupied Collective, and Ndifuna Ukwazi, it comes at a critical juncture in South Africa’s land reform efforts.
South Africa’s spatial apartheid endures, townships and informal settlements remain scars of displacement, while prime urban land sits vacant or hoarded.
Even landmark legal victories like the Bromwell Street ruling haven’t dismantled this entrenched injustice, exposing the gulf between courtroom wins and material change.
Nomzamo Zondo, SERI-SA director, connects these cases to the broader struggle:
“In the Constitutional Court victory of Bromwell Street, the courts agreed public land must redress inequality. This gathering must transform legal wins into tangible change, because justice delayed in our cities is justice denied.”
Professor Ruth Hall, director of PLAAS, reflects on the budgetary allocation of land:
“Land reform funding tells the truth: at its peak, land reform received only 1.09% of the national budget in 2009. For 2025/2026 allocation, it sits at a paltry 0.4%, which will only maintain and perpetuate apartheid’s geography. Justice demands more than words — it requires resources. This gathering exists to force that reckoning.”
Mpho Raboeane, executive director of Ndifuna Ukwazi, frames the urgency:
“We’re seeing apartheid’s geography rebranded for speculation. With the Tafelberg case awaiting judgment from ConCourt, the Western Cape Government has begun public engagement around converting the site into affordable housing. This shows that we can reclaim well-located land — and we must scale this to all cities. This modern land grab must end here.”
Significantly, the urban land crisis disproportionately impacts on women, who sustain most households yet face systemic barriers to ownership. While managing survival in informal settlements, they remain locked out of their land rights — an injustice this gathering tackles through feminist land justice frameworks that convert domestic labour into formal ownership and power.
The need for radical land reform is at a crisis point. President Cyril Ramaphosa has warned that the “continued monopolisation of a key means of production like land is not just an obstacle to advancing a more egalitarian society; it is also a recipe for social unrest.” We must see this reflected in the National Dialogue on 15 August.
Urban land reform cannot be sidelined in national discourse, it has the potential to dismantle economic apartheid and restore dignity to the dispossessed.
