The Current Column

World Cities Day 2026

Regenerating the city – but for whom?

Zondo, Nomzamo / Eva Dick / Jacqueline Wingens
The Current Column (2026)

Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), The Current Column of 26 October 2026

Bonn, 26 October 2026. The housing crisis is gaining high political prominence – across contexts, illustrating its relevance as one of the social issues of our time. In September 2026, Berlin’s left-wing party “Die Linke” marked a clear electoral victory after placing affordable housing and the expropriation of large-scale housing investors at the centre of its campaign. Only days later, the forced eviction of Maricarmen Abascal in Madrid gave way to the collapse of the national governing coalition and anticipated general elections. Meanwhile, in South Africa, a planned amendment to the post-apartheid law against unlawful evictions has sparked protests across its major cities and is likely to shape the outcomes of the upcoming municipal elections in November.

Just right, this year’s World Cities Day (31 October) focuses on “Regenerating the city: Adequate housing for all”. In its World Cities Report 2026, UN-Habitat, the United Nation’s urbanisation agency, states that “access to affordable and adequate housing [is] among the most persistent and complex global challenges of the 21^st century”, highlighting the essential function of housing for social and economic well-being, people’s health, education, mobility and social inclusion. 

The scale of today’s housing crisis, according to UN-Habitat, has reached unprecedented heights. Globally, 44 percent of households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. In many contexts, financialisation, the use of housing as an investment tool by private companies and governments incentivising such practices, deepens unaffordability, leading to rising rents, overcrowding and even homelessness. At present, almost 3.4 billion people worldwide live with some form of housing inadequacy, the highest number in history, while more than one billion residents live in informal settlements, neighbourhoods with unstable houses, inadequate basic services or in which residents have uncertain property or rent status. UN-Habitat research indicates that at least 64 million people were evicted globally between 2003 and 2023 linked to exclusionary urban development processes. 

While the housing crisis is global, challenges are particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa with South Africa being a case in point. The country is amongst the most unequal in the world, with about 86% of its wealth concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest 10% of its population. In urban contexts in which the government has failed to secure affordable ‘formal’ accommodation and large companies and finance institutions have increasing influence on rental and property markets, the spatial inequalities of the past remain deeply embedded. Almost 10 million people live in informal housing conditions (about 24 percent of the country’s urban population) at the cities’ peripheries or in the inner-city, most of them Black, many of them migrants. 

Intended to address these spatial injustices, post-apartheid legislation replaced previous anti-squatting laws, which denied non-White people access to- and residence in the cities. The Prevention of Illegal Eviction (PIE) Act of 1998 decriminalised unlawful occupation and prohibited eviction without due process and alternative accommodation. Currently, the government is preparing its amendment, weakening the state’s obligations towards people facing homelessness after eviction and expanding criminal offences related to the occupation of land. The amendment criminalises civil society organisations who organise with- and provide legal support to affected communities for “inciting” occupation. 

Such an approach reflects a wider tendency of addressing the housing crisis through eviction and policing rather than fulfilling the right to housing guaranteed by the South African Constitution. South Africa’s laws and policies protect people facing eviction and foresee upgrading informal settlements thereby providing basic services and more secure tenure. The existing legal protections are regularly undercut by government’s refusal to resettle evicted communities except when ordered by a court. At times, extra judicial demolitions and evictions are carried out as attempts to stop land occupations or the expansion of informal settlements. Members of government have positioned the residents of informal settlements as enemies and made claims that undocumented migrants are behind the growth of informal settlements. 

What is at stake, is more than housing, in South Africa and elsewhere. Regenerating cities raises profound political questions: who has the right to remain, to belong and to shape the city? What does it take to advance urban social cohesion and (migrant) inclusion? UN-Habitat in its current Strategic Plan highlights the social function of housing and land for all – contrary to understanding housing as a luxury for the few. Beyond sound legal conditions and good policies, as the South African example shows, political will and instruments for rights-based implementation and effective regulation are essential.

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Nomzamo Zondo is a human-rights lawyer and director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI).

Eva Dick is urban development officer in the Africa and Middle East department of Misereor and associated researcher of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).

Jacqueline Wingens is policy officer for urban development at Misereor and associated researcher at IDOS.