Urban resettlement and environmental justice in Cape Town

In this paper, we acknowledge that the literature has successfully articulated processes that have brought about environmental injustices. However, it remains weak in its engagement with processes that can or should contribute to the realisation of environmental justice, which can be attributed mainly to the limited but popular perspective that has been championed principally by the North American literature. We suggest that concerns with environmental justice should go beyond the preoccupation with the evidence of injustice to encapsulate processes and strategies for achieving environmental justice in its various forms. Empirically, this implies the need to move away from the preoccupation with toxic waste as the main central focus of the environmental justice literature. We argue that the processes and strategies for achieving environmental justice are as important as the end results that we strive for, particularly in areas of human settlements. To this end we used the case of Mfuleni Flood Relief Project in Cape Town, as an empirical evidence of the complexity of resettlement as a ‘just’ process.