Leon Barnard
The article correctly identifies inequality as Namibia’s unfinished business. From an urban design perspective, however, one further point must be made: economic inequality is not merely visible in geography; it is reinforced by the way we continue to plan, regulate and build our settlements.
Apartheid deliberately created the divided city. Residential areas were separated by race, income and function. The majority of people were placed far from employment, education, commerce and public institutions. Roads, railways, industrial areas and undeveloped buffer zones were used as instruments of separation.
Political independence ended the legal basis of that system, but it did not automatically reconstruct the physical city.
In many respects, we have continued building according to the same spatial logic: low-density suburbs for those who can afford them; distant dormitory settlements for those who cannot; isolated housing projects without employment; rigid separation between residential, commercial and industrial activity; and ever-expanding roads to connect places that should never have been placed so far apart.
The result is that poverty is repeatedly pushed to the urban edge.
A low-income family may receive a house, but if that house is kilometres from employment, schools, healthcare, shops and reliable public transport, the family has not necessarily been brought closer to economic opportunity. It may merely have exchanged an informal structure for a formally planned form of exclusion.
Distance becomes a tax on poverty.
The person living farthest from opportunity spends the greatest proportion of income and time reaching it. Several hours may be lost every day travelling between home and work. Money that could have been used for food, education, savings or business development is spent on transport.
This is why the housing crisis cannot be understood only as a shortage of houses. It is fundamentally a crisis of location, access and context.
A house does not create a livelihood.
A plot does not create a community.
A road does not create an economy.
Successful settlements require the deliberate integration of housing, employment, education, trade, recreation, public transport, social services and dignified public space. People must be able to participate in economic life close to where they live.
We must stop reproducing the divided city
The continued outward expansion of Windhoek is financially, socially and environmentally unsustainable. Every new peripheral settlement requires more roads, water lines, sewerage, electricity, schools, clinics and public transport. The city becomes larger without necessarily becoming more functional.
At the same time, substantial areas within the existing urban footprint remain underused. Large single-use properties, infrastructure servitudes, fragmented open land and low-density development separate communities from one another and prevent the city from functioning as a coherent whole.
Urban inequality will not be solved by endlessly extending Windhoek into the surrounding landscape. It requires the restructuring of the city from within.
That means developing a poly-nodal city: a network of identifiable urban centres where people can live, work, trade, study and access services. Goreangab, Katutura and the rapidly growing northern parts of Windhoek should not remain dependent on the central business district or the eastern suburbs for employment and higher-order services. They require strong centres of their own.
These centres should include markets, offices, workshops, schools, clinics, housing, cultural facilities, public institutions and well-designed squares. They should become places of dignity and economic exchange rather than merely transport interchanges surrounded by roads.
The same principle applies to smaller Namibian towns and settlements. We cannot simply subdivide land into residential plots and call it development. A settlement must have an economic reason for existing and a spatial structure capable of supporting community life.
Informal settlements are also a planning warning
Nearly one million people do not choose informal settlement life because they reject order or dignity. Informality is often the rational response to a formal land and housing system that cannot supply well-located, affordable places at the speed required.
Informal settlements tell us where people need to be.
They reveal the demand for proximity to employment, transport, schools and social networks. Simply removing people to distant land may tidy the map while deepening their economic exclusion.
The answer is not to romanticise informality, but neither should it be treated merely as an enforcement problem. It must be addressed through incremental upgrading, secure tenure, basic services, street frameworks, mixed-use opportunities and the reservation of land for schools, parks, clinics, markets and future public transport.
Most importantly, the government must make serviced and structured urban land available before desperation forces people to occupy it informally.
We have to lay the table before the guests arrive.
Public space is part of economic inclusion
Poor communities are frequently given shelter but denied meaningful public space. Yet streets, squares, markets, playgrounds and community facilities are not luxuries. They are the shared living rooms and workplaces of people who do not have large private homes, gardens, offices or commercial premises.
A well-designed public square can support informal trading, events, public transport, social interaction and local identity. A walkable street can give small businesses visibility and customers. A shaded market can allow a household enterprise to develop into a sustainable livelihood.
Urban design therefore contributes directly to wealth creation.
The active edge of a street, the position of a taxi rank, the accessibility of a market stall, the distance between housing and employment, and the availability of small affordable premises can matter as much to an emerging entrepreneur as access to formal finance.
When all commercial opportunities are concentrated in expensive shopping centres or distant business districts, the poor remain consumers in an economy owned by others. Inclusive cities must provide places where ordinary people can become producers, traders, landlords, craftspeople and business owners.
Ownership must become spatially possible
The article rightly distinguishes between income and wealth. Urban planning must make that distinction too.
A city dominated by large plots, expensive subdivisions, rigid zoning and high infrastructure standards makes property ownership inaccessible to most citizens. It protects the value of existing property while excluding new entrants.
We need more varied forms of ownership: smaller serviced plots, incremental housing, sectional title, cooperative housing, rental-to-own models, mixed-use buildings and opportunities for families to generate income from their properties.
A home should be capable of evolving. It may accommodate a rental room, a workshop, a small shop, childcare, professional services or food production. Overly rigid zoning often criminalises precisely the activities through which poorer households attempt to improve their circumstances.
Planning should guide and protect communities, but it should not police economic life out of them.
Oil revenue must build a different Namibia
The coming oil economy will test not only Namibia’s fiscal governance but its spatial imagination.
Oil revenues should not merely finance more isolated housing schemes, wider roads and monumental buildings. They should be used to restructure settlements around opportunity.
That includes acquiring and servicing well-located land, upgrading informal settlements, establishing public transport corridors, creating new urban centres, strengthening regional towns, supporting productive agriculture near settlements and providing infrastructure for small industries and local enterprises.
Investment must create places in which economic participation can multiply long after the initial resource revenue has been spent.
Otherwise, Namibia may become richer while its cities become more unequal.
The purpose is not infrastructure. It is community.
The built-environment professions must recover a common purpose. Roads, buildings, infrastructure and regulations are instruments; they are not the purpose.
The purpose is to create successful, dignified and economically productive communities.
Urban designers, architects, planners, engineers, economists and public officials must therefore work within a shared framework. Planning alone cannot regulate Namibia into equality.
Architecture alone cannot design isolated buildings out of poverty. Engineering alone cannot construct enough infrastructure to overcome a fundamentally inefficient urban structure.
We need a national commitment to spatial transformation.
The long shadow of apartheid is real, but we must also acknowledge that every subdivision, zoning decision, housing project and infrastructure investment made today either begins to heal that inherited geography or perpetuates it.
Thirty-six years after independence, the central question is no longer only what Namibia inherited.
It is what we are continuing to build.
*Leon Barnard is a Namibian architect and founder of Barnard Mutua Architects, with a long-standing commitment to equitable, affordable and humane city layouts. Through initiatives such as the Windhoek Riverwalk and Urban Spine concepts, he has argued for cities that connect people to opportunity, movement, public space and nature. Barnard believes all building professions ultimately serve one purpose: the creation of healthy, dignified and prosperous communities.
