Inkululeko Community Centre, Salvokop

Salvokop is an old railway community behind the Pretoria Central Station. The land is owned by the Department of Public Works. There are 174 formal houses, hundreds more backyard tenants, and on the western hill an informal settlement called Bagdad has grown over the last fifteen years. An estimated three thousand people live in Salvokop. On the southern hill sits the Freedom Park monument, a struggle memorial juxtaposed against the much older Voortrekker Monument and linked to it by a road named Reconciliation.

This is the neighbourhood the Christian Reformed Church in Salvokop was sitting in.

The process

The church made a decision that does not appear in many discernment frameworks: it sold the building. But the sale was structured, and to whom mattered more than the sale itself. The buyer was Yeast City Housing — a Christian housing company already working in inner-city Tshwane — and the price was set far below market value.

The submarket sale was the load-bearing decision. A market-rate sale would almost certainly have produced gentrification: the plot is close to major transport, government headquarters, and the Pretoria CBD. By selling low, the church put a floor under what could be built and to whom it could be offered.

What was built

On the same plot of land, Yeast City Housing developed:

• a multi-purpose community centre,
• a daycare centre, and
• a high-quality block of flats with 88 self-contained housing units.

The Inkululeko Community Centre — referenced by the Tshwane Leadership Foundation as a partner project — anchors the social and developmental work on site.

What they learned

The Salvokop story sits inside a longer, harder neighbourhood story. As early as 1998, local residents and faith-based organisations had drafted an integrated development proposal for the area. None of those proposals were taken up by government. Fifteen years later, an informal settlement had emerged on the same hill that holds the Freedom Park monument. The church's decision to sell its plot below market — and to a partner whose mandate was Christian, not commercial — was one of the few moves that actually changed the trajectory of any piece of Salvokop ground.

For a church considering what to do with property in a neighbourhood that is already contested, the lesson is sharp: the question is not just whether to sell. It is who you sell to, and what they are bound to build.

Sources

• Powell, C. (2021), Fostering a Praxis of Spatial Justice in Suburban Churches, MTh thesis, University of Pretoria. Download PDF
• Powell, C. & Mlambo, N. (2022), Space, Place and the Church, International Journal of Public Theology 16(1), pp. 74–88. Download PDF
• de Beer, S.F. (2014), "Between life and death": On land, silence and liberation in the capital city, HTS Theological Studies 70(1) — neighbourhood context for Salvokop. Download PDF
• Yeast City Housing, Inkululeko Community Centre project page.