How a city came together to rewrite its future in the age of climate change

Complaining about government inaction is practically a national hobby for South Africans – and I get it. Taxes are paid, yet services go undelivered and infrastructure crumbles. But by law, it’s the government’s job, not ours, to protect the most vulnerable – to ensure safe housing, emergency relief and basic services, especially when disaster strikes.

But what happens when ordinary citizens decide waiting isn’t good enough? What happens when communities, academics, activists and city officials gather, in churches, libraries, and community halls (wherever they can find a free room) to build the system they wish already existed?

In April 2022, catastrophic floods devastated KwaZulu-Natal, causing landslides, collapsing apartment blocks, sweeping away informal settlements and leaving about 489 people dead and more than 40,000 displaced. It is widely considered one of the deadliest storms of this generation in South Africa.

Read more: A Perfect Storm: How the deadly 2022 Durban floods hold crucial lessons for the future of the city and others like it

A year later, the City of eThekwini’s 2023 Integrated Development Plan (IDP) came out, and the 1,000-page document was widely criticised as a copy-and-paste job.

It reused outdated content from previous integrated development plans (2002 and 2015) and failed to meaningfully address climate adaptation or disaster risk in human settlements. Despite a promised R1-billion flood relief fund from the National Treasury, the money had still not been accessed by the province. 

“We didn’t want them to fix the city back to the way it was, which was very unequal,” said Kira Erwin of the environmental justice group groundWork, and part of the Durban Coalition’s leadership. “It needed to be fixed in a way that also addressed inequality.”

After the floods, groundWork, along with civil society, academics and residents, grew increasingly concerned that eThekwini wasn’t adapting to climate risks.

“The question was, what do we need to do to become better prepared the next time a disaster like this comes?” said Professor Rajen Naidoo, the head of Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. “ Because the disaster is going to come.”

International scientists from the World Weather Attribution group found that human-induced climate change had made the type of extreme rainfall that hit KZN in April 2022 at least twice as likely, and 4-8% more intense.

“We were not seeing a substantive shift in the municipality that recognised how we were going to adapt our infrastructure and keep people safe,” said Erwin.

“It was a very difficult time,” recalled Thapelo Mohapi, general secretary of grassroots movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (meaning ‘Residents of the Shacks’ in isiZulu). “The government was nowhere to be found.”

Nicole Daniels from Springfield said that after the floods flattened formal housing in her area and claimed three lives, residents began waking up. “It’s our constitutional right to expect decent living conditions and proper infrastructure,” she said. “But if we don’t hold them accountable, no one will.”

“We decided civil society could drive such a process … we really started to think through what it would take to keep ourselves safe,” said Erwin.

And so at the end of 2023, the Durban Coalition was formed. For 18 months, people from informal settlements to suburban neighbourhoods came together with urban planners, grassroots groups, academics and officials to imagine a just, climate-resilient city built from the ground up.

In community centres, boardrooms and libraries, they debated, listened, and co-drafted a bottom-up alternative to conventional planning.

The result was a living document, the People’s Plan for the Right to Housing in an Age of Climate Change: a 20-page blueprint for the city, built like an integrated development plan, but one that is concise, readable, (published in both English and isiZulu) and puts human rights, climate resilience and social justice at its core.

Vusi Zweni, chairperson of Ubunye Bama Hostela, a community group of hostel dwellers in Durban and part of the coalition, said the People’s Plan helped residents understand why they were “always fighting a losing battle” – because key issues weren’t included in the city’s integrated development plan, and therefore had no budget.

“Many councillors don’t understand what’s inside the IDP themselves,” he said. “So you can’t expect them to explain it to people on the ground.”

With the People’s Plan translated into isiZulu and discussed in hostel meetings and workshops, Zweni said residents could finally understand what to expect from government planning.

“We call it the People’s Plan – it may sound like we’re tossing in a populist term, but I think that phrase captures the process into the final document,” said Naidoo.

“This was written by the people, for the people. It’s not a politician telling us what they think is best – it’s what we’ve lived through, and know what we need,” said Daniels from Springfield.

The People’s Plan is built on five key pillars:

• Human rights-centred housing: The plan recommends that the revised housing strategy, as part of eThekwini’s Integrated Development Plan and Housing Sector Plan, must be grounded in human rights principles. That means planning and service delivery should prioritise safety, health and inclusivity. Basic services — water, sanitation, waste removal — must be prioritised and maintained.
• Inclusive governance: The plan proposes creating a municipal climate change high-level working group, including civil society, business and academia, to coordinate resilience planning. It also calls for a formal multi-stakeholder forum for integrated human settlements.
• Climate resilience in human settlements: Housing must account for climate risks like heat and flooding. The plan calls for vulnerability mapping, early warning systems and updating strategies like Durban’s Resilience Strategy with current research.
• Support for displaced and vulnerable groups: Targeted responses are required for displaced people, refugees, and residents of informal settlements. The plan recommends tenure security, access to affordable, well-located housing, and support for inner-city social rentals. It calls for inclusive, community-driven rental housing solutions.
• Implementation and accountability: For the plan to succeed, municipal capacity must be strengthened, which includes increasing capital and operational budgets for housing, filling critical municipal posts and fostering a culture of innovation and responsiveness. Civil society and academia should monitor progress and share knowledge.

Unlike many policy documents, the People’s Plan is designed with clear institutional reforms and practical steps. It proposes high-level structures, budget allocations and performance indicators tied to measurable outcomes. And it insists on partnerships for monitoring and adapting over time.

“The floods are because of climate change, but the consequences are because of poor management and poor planning,” said Naidoo, whose decades-long experience in occupational and environmental health was crucial in helping communities after the 2022 floods and in creating this document.

Vulnerable groups – children, the elderly, pregnant women – bear the brunt, he explained. “If government doesn’t have the skills, then we bring in technical experts. That’s the role we want to play as civil society.”

For Naidoo, the plan’s launch was historic: “I think for the first time we had representation in a single room from communities across eThekwini. It may not have been like the Freedom Charter, but it followed the same consultative route.”

But getting the city to take the plan seriously wasn’t straightforward. Initially, things looked hopeful – officials participated in workshops throughout the plan’s creation and attended the launch in November 2024, indicating it would inform the next integrated development plan.

However, when the draft 2025/2026 integrated development plan came out, the coalition was disappointed. Though improved in structure, it still lacked meaningful climate action. The People’s Plan was pushed to an appendix – meaning no budget, no department ownership and no power.

Still, the coalition kept on working with the municipality – with Durban coalition members, including GroundWork, sending in official comments during the official public comment period calling for the proper implementation of their plan.

In late May 2025, after sustained advocacy, city officials reportedly agreed to formally reference the People’s Plan in the integrated development plan and to advocate for its implementation in partnership with civil society. 

Then, on Thursday, 29 May, while I was speaking to Erwin about the plan’s significance, she interrupted excitedly: “Julia, you’re not going to believe this – I just got an email saying the 25/26 IDP was adopted by council today.”

Bongumusa Zondo, the chief strategy officer for the eThekwini municipality, whose office oversees the integrated development plan processes, confirmed this, and told Daily Maverick that, “the People’s Plan is aligned with the Municipality Resilience Strategy, Durban Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan.”

While those municipal strategies exist, Erwin noted that implementation had lagged. What made the People’s Plan different, she explained, was its integrated approach to housing and climate – a shift from siloed thinking. It promotes community-led disaster preparedness and envisions local systems – water, food, energy – that can function independently in crises.

Zondo added that the city had included a performance indicator in its 2025/26 Service Delivery and Budget Implementation Plan, reporting on projects aimed at improving municipal resilience. He said the municipality was strengthening partnerships with civil society to improve neighbourhood-level disaster planning and response.

United by similarities

“There’s a long history of tension between ratepayers’ associations and informal settlement organisations in South Africa, especially in Durban,” said Mohapi.

Formal residents often see shack-building as a threat to property values and services, while shack dwellers build near jobs and transport.

“It’s always been survival of the fittest,” Mohapi said, “with the ratepayers feeling they are subsidising the poor when the government isn’t doing enough. But in the coalition, we’ve come to see that we are all victims.”

He described how powerful it was to engage with people “who had never seen us as human beings… to have that audience for the first time was great”.

He said it was also important to be heard by academics, “and write what we are saying and put that in a form of research and then of course put it in a plan that is going to be handed over to government”.

The coalition, he said, allowed honest exchange. “We shared our pain and they shared their views.

“Today, we’re friends. No one is undermined because they come from an affluent area. We discuss issues as equals.”

Mohapi called the ratepayers’ group in the coalition progressive “because they managed to sit with us, listen to us, and they actually now realise that we are the same and we have the same issues”.

Nicole Daniels, founder of Springfield Disaster Management and a former ratepayers’ association member, agreed.

Though she had long empathised with informal settlements, she said the coalition made shared realities clearer. “The process opened up space for people from all walks of life to realise we’re facing the same problems in eThekwini,” Daniels said. “Whether you live in formal or informal housing, the challenges – poor infrastructure, unresponsive government – are the same.”

In April 2022, mudslides killed three people in Springfield. Though the area has formal housing, it’s on a floodplain. Poor maintenance and extreme weather lead to damage, sewage spills, power cuts and water outages.

Daniels recalled how their councillor, who comes from an informal settlement, was shocked. “He said, ‘I had no idea people in formal housing have the same problems as us.’ ”

Zondo from eThekwini municipality said that, “the People’s Plan is very important because it demonstrates the bottom-up approach, organised society taking responsibility to work with their government to address local governance matters for the benefit of all.”

Mohapi, as well as the other collaborators, are happy that their document is finally in the process of being implemented into real policy. 

“And I think it’s very important to realise that even though we are poor, we can think for ourselves and we can come up with solutions,” said Mohapi.

“And it is only the people who are affected directly by the problem of disaster that can come up with solutions on how to get out of that problem. And the People’s Plan is just about that.” DM