Here’s a tale of two developing countries. South Africa on the one hand, Venezuela on the other.

Each coutry’s development has been profoundly shaped by the past, and for South Africa that’s meant dealing with the painful leagacy of Apartheid. During the apartheid years, the government implemented a policy of ‘resettlement’, to force people to move to their designated ‘group areas’. Some argue that over three and a half million people were forced to resettle during this period.

The country now faces the challenge of reparing the damage but sadly, not much progress has been made. Brutal divide: fortified town plays on middle class fear of crime

The nation’s recorded rates of violent crime, though still among the world’s worst, have dropped in recent years but paradoxically the fear of being hijacked, raped and murdered has risen - and with it the obsession with security.

“We have taken a leaf or two out of the medieval past and placed it in our future. To be precise, we have stolen the concept of whole town fortification to create a crime-free state,” boasts the website of the developer, George Hazelden. Many apartment complexes and private homes across the country have more sophisticated security measures but Heritage Park is thought to be the first self-contained town entirely ringed by electric fencing.

Heritage Park, at 200 hectares (494 acres) slightly bigger than Monaco, is resolutely middle class. Of 1,500 residents, 1,495 are white. Beyond the fence are three townships, home to tens of thousands of poor black people and coloureds, the term given to those of mixed race. It is a brutal juxtaposition: inside the fence, pastel-coloured two-storey homes in Cape Dutch, English Tudor or Tuscan styles, neatly divided into seven suburbs with names like Beaulieu, Cape Heritage and Tuscana Close. Walk outside the wire and within metres you are in a sea of tin shacks and low-cost government-built houses

What a bleek picture! The reasoning and support behind the project is even more disturbing than the project itself.

Gisela Jespersen, a city councillor for the white-dominated Democratic Alliance party and a member of the planning commission, praised the town as a model for other gated developments in South Africa. She also welcomed the outreach to township dwellers and said people had to be realistic about what it could achieve. “It’s virtually impossible to integrate a community that has been divided for centuries.”

People had to be realistic about what it could achieve? Fair enough, but how being realistic translates into building a fortress is beyond me. How do you integrate communities when they’re separated by electric fencing and armed guards? This is of course only one private property development and does not reflect government policy. It does highlight a growing trend, reflecting the feelings of the people themselves…

Now Venezuela is dealing with a past that I know very little about. So comparing it to South Africa might be completely unfair. That said they both face a serious housing problem and gone about solving it in different ways. I think South Africans can a lot from Venezuela’s approach to the problem…

The discovery of oil in Venezuela in the 1920s, followed by the rapid collapse of agriculture, meant this process happened earlier and in a more complete way than in the rest of the continent.

When this wave of rural people came to the cities they found few jobs, no infrastructure and nowhere to live. There were no houses free so they built their own where they could. These were often on land owned by others. As a result, the barrios where created.

When Hugo Chavez came into government in 1998 he made promises about social housing but improvement was not rapid.

Then, on February 04, 2002 Chavez issued Presidential Decree 1,666 and the CTUs (the Urban Land Committees, known in Spanish as Comites de Tierras Urbanas) were born. The Presidential Order said that any family that could prove they had built their own home could apply to become the legal owner.

To do this they had to join with 100 to 200 other families to form a CTU. When this was done, each family could provide the details to the Technical Office for Urban Land Tenancy and Regularization (OTNRTTU) and become the owners of their own homes.

The CTUs bring up the question of property ownership from two different directions. On one hand it can be seen as another example of the Chavez government’s radical disrespect for the sanctity of private property.

The people of the barrios are taking ownership of land that technically belongs to someone else. The fear is that with social organization and a legal mandate from the government the poor will start to turn their attention outside of the barrio. They might want to expand their property at the expense of the rich, invading their pockets of wealth and security.

Similar fears in South Africa are what actually lead to the rise of gated developments. White farmers were “being attacked by black workers, with land being one of the motivating factors. Venezuela seems to have avoided those troubles.

The CTUs are about much more than property ownership, whether it is politically interpreted as privatization or as the right to a home. They are also the most widely accepted form of participatory democracy in Venezuela now.

The CTUs are about people debating, agreeing, and taking action collectively about things that directly affect every aspect of their daily lives. Self organization is the most striking thing about them.

What the Committees discuss besides land registration is up to them. Each CTU decides its own agenda collectively. Some things discussed can be quite technical and related to housing, such as clean water supply or electricity.

Other things talked about are more abstract, such as culture, education, or social production. Many CTUs have drawn up popular charters or constitutions for their barrios.

And thats the profound difference. In South Africa there’s no dialogue, no cooperation and most significantly no involvement. The private developments, like the one mentioned here, are out to satisfiy purely commercial interests and as a result only end up reinforcing the historic disparities.