The role of land registers in the expropriation of urban land in South Africa

Scholars often lament that urban areas in post-apartheid South Africa are beset by a shortage of affordable urban residential land and informal settlements. This shortage will never be addressed through market-based land reforms. The redistribution process is criticised for being slow and ineffective; the state cannot afford to purchase urban land at the high prices demanded by landowners and the scale of support needed to deliver land to the majority who are poor is not fiscally sustainable. Two decades after the 1996 market-led land reforms, the arguments most often adduced to justify the ‘willing-seller-willing-buyer’ approach appear unsound. Hence, solutions to the redistributive challenge that are being suggested in the current national debate on land reform include newly mooted ideas around expropriation without compensation. The paper uses desktop research to explore the role that registers on landownership, land value and land-use can play in the redistribution of urban land. As a background, the paper uses the lack of detailed parcel-based land registers to motivate for an integrated land register at municipality level. The paper concludes by making recommendations that are less focused on technical policy solutions but more on creating an urban land administration system that is socially credible and functional.