Moving on to greener pastures? a review of South Africa’s housing megaproject literature

Abstract

South Africa is a leader in the scholarship on green urbanism in the Global South, but academic progress has not translated to broad implementation. Notably, government-subsidized housing projects have produced peripheral developments featuring low build quality, conventional gray infrastructure, and deficient socio-economic and environmental amenities. Declining delivery and increasing informal settlement spawned a 2014 shift to housing megaprojects to increase output and improve living conditions, socio-economic integration, and sustainability. The shift offered opportunities for a normative focus on greener development mirrored in the discourse surrounding project descriptions. Yet, the level of enactment has remained unclear. In reflecting on these points, this paper employs environmental justice as a theoretical framework and completes a comprehensive review of the academic literature on housing megaprojects and the depth of their greener development commitments. A three-phase, seven-stage review protocol retrieves the relevant literature, and bibliometric and qualitative content analyses identify publication trends and themes. Results indicate limited scholarship on new megaprojects with sporadic and superficial references to greener development, mostly reserved for higher-income segments and private developments. In response, this paper calls for more determined action to launch context-aware and just greener megaprojects and offers corresponding guidance for research and practice of value to South Africa and beyond.