Human rights and the transformation of property by Stuart Wilson

Abstract

Housing is one of the most prominent themes around which statutory urban policy intersects with human rights. Stuart Wilson’s Human rights and the transformation of property examines this intersection through the tension that exists between the hierarchical common-law framing of property rights and the transformative reading of the right to access to adequate housing, as intended by the South African Constitution. Continuity in colonial and apartheid property law has entrenched inequality, as Wilson details in Chapter 3. However, post-apartheid housing rights litigation has chiselled away at the dominant common-law-informed reading of the property clause in the Constitution. Wilson demonstrates that this has created space for agency from below.