In 1991, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) convened a housing policy conference in Johannesburg. The organization had only been unbanned by the apartheid government the year before. Alongside negotiations for democratic elections and a new constitution, the ANC and its allies were deep in the throes of policy deliberations to prepare to take power. Thozamile Botha, a previously exiled trade unionist, was the convener of the party’s department of local and regional government planning. He delivered a stem-winder of a speech.

“In many former colonial countries, the post-independence trends are that only the Black elite is able to move to the city center or former white only areas,” he warned. “The people who have been in the forefront of the liberation struggle are easily forgotten. It is essential that the state should ensure that the benefits of freedom are enjoyed by all its citizens.”

The “internal” struggle against Apartheid — made up a wide range of associations and movements within the country while the ANC was in exile — was a big tent. It included the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which grew into the largest union federation on the continent, and the United Democratic Front (UDF), the latter comprised of neighborhood associations, urban social movements, and cultural and religious organizations. Housing, basic services, and public transportation were common complaints.

Almost three decades later, the ANC-led government has built approximately 3 million houses. But the geographies of South Africa’s cities are as divided as ever. In Johannesburg, the country’s economic and, arguably, political heartland, racial segregation has diminished slightly, while class segregation is as persistent as ever, according to one analysis of census data. Related work in Cape Town, has found a similar trajectory in the nature of residential segregation since the end of Apartheid. Furthermore, the percent of the national households in informal settlements has barely budged, declining from 13.6% in 2002 to 13.1% in 2014. Despite the quantitative gains in housing delivery, many may rightly ask if Botha’s warning from 1991 has become reality.

Over the past 15 years, regular demonstrations in peripheral, poor neighborhoods in South Africa’s large cities has led many to dub the country “the protest capital of the world.” Yet these protests retain a distinctly atomized character, rarely moving beyond a single neighborhood. South Africa’s democratic era has witnessed primarily two types of housing movements. Some have carved out limited space to access funds for community-led, self-build projects in formal housing programs, and informal settlement upgrading programs for community-led approaches that minimize displacement from new development. A second set of movements have been more overtly militant, focusing on fights against evictions. However, it is rare to see housing movements move the policy agenda and priorities in South Africa’s major cities.