Toward SDG-11: How Social Resilience Affects Urban Settlement in South Africa?

Abstract

The re-engineering of urban city planning and transformation of land spaces should be guided by the vision of creating liveable, secure spaces and resourcefully efficient cities and towns. The study’s objective was to assess the social resilience of Khayalitjha in-situ informal settlement in the Free State Province of South Africa based on service delivery. The household survey sample size consisted of 295 randomly selected dwelling units, and a Multinomial Logit Regression model was applied. The security of land tenure, no secure dwelling unit tenure, and dwelling unit tenure were the indicators used to measure the concept of social resilience as an outcome variable. The model revealed that the essential service delivery (access to electricity, refuse dump/removal, a pit latrine/toilet without a ventilation pipe, and clean water) positively and significantly associated with dwelling unit tenure social resilience status were all statistically significant with secure dwelling unit tenure, in-secure dwelling unit tenure, and no secure dwelling unit tenure. Regarding urban social resilience, 20% of households had a secure tenure, 38% had an insecure tenure, and 42% had no tenure status. Insecure tenure and no tenure participants were thus vulnerable and their urban resilience was threatened. The study recommends that developing an urban resilience framework aligned with a disaster risk reduction and management framework will contribute to guidelines for resilience strategies in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan cities.