Reconciling competing claims to justice in urban South Africa: Cato Manor and District Six

This article examines two sharply divergent cases of urban land justice. Cato Manor is a massive, low-income housing project in central Durban that largely excluded land restitution claims to redress apartheid- and colonial-era forced removals from the area, and Cape Town's District Six is currently being developed for resettlement by land restitution claimants, thus far without incorporating potential housing beneficiaries. The article critically appropriates Nancy Fraser's work to conceptualise land restitution as a demand for 'recognition' and housing as a form of 'redistribution', and considers how these programmes might be reconciled in an integrated framework of justice. A more fundamental problem, however, is that these official programmes of justice administration fail to adequately deal with the basic demands for shelter and land in South Africa's vast, informal settlements, and the article concludes that the primary imperative of justice is for far-reaching urban land reform.