South Africa, RDP housing
With the transition to democracy and the end of apartheid in South Africa, the millions of citizens living in shantytowns became an urgent problem for the government. To disband these neighborhoods, Nelson Mandela promised that the government would build a million houses over the next decade for those in need.
These 40-square-meter Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) houses were provided free of charge to the country’s poor. Today over 3 million of these instantly recognizable dwellings have been constructed, but those critical of the plan complain that their cheap construction has exacerbated the problem they were attempting to solve.
