Planning and Transformation

Learning from the Post-Apartheid Experience

Philip Harrison, Alison Todes, Vanessa Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134238170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Planning and Transformation provides a comprehensive view of planning under political transition in South Africa, offering an accessible resource for both students and researchers in an international and a local audience.

In the years after the 1994 transition to democracy in South Africa, planners believed they would be able to successfully promote a vision of integrated, equitable and sustainable cities, and counter the spatial distortions created by apartheid. This book covers the experience of the planning community, the extent to which their aims were achieved, and the hindering factors.

Although some of the factors affecting planning have been context-specific, the nature of South Africa's transition and its relationship to global dynamics have meant that many of the issues confronting planners in other parts of the world are echoed here. Issues of governance, integration, market competitiveness, sustainability, democracy and values are significant, and the particular nature of the South African experience lends new insights to thinking on these questions, exploring the possibilities of achievement in the planning field.

PART 1
SETTING THE SCENE

INTRODUCTION

PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

Change within planning systems in most parts of the world is incremental. As the demands of context change, as new development pressures emerge, and as existing planning systems increasingly appear to be out of step with reality, so adjustments are made which usually take the form of modifications to what has gone before. Rarely, if ever, do nations consider that they could be faced with a moment at which they could design a planning system, or any other aspect of policy for that matter, from scratch. Such opportunities usually present themselves only at times of cataclysmic change, after war or revolution, and in the past few decades it has been primarily those countries in transition from socialism (Eastern European countries, China, and Tanzania and Ethiopia in Africa) that have been faced with this task.

It was this situation that also faced the new democratic government of South Africa in April of 1994 as it emerged from a political system based on racial segregation. Confronted with a full array of policies, at all levels of government, which had been crafted under apartheid and which for the most part had been designed to support or at least fit in with the aims of racial segregation, the new Government of National Unity as it was called at the time could quite legitimately argue that all aspects of South African policy, along with supporting legislation, regulations and bureaucratic structures, would require review and renewal. And given the central role that planning – both in the forms of ‘forward’ planning and land-use control – had played in the spatial segregation of races in South Africa, the planning system was marked as a target for thorough change.

While the complete transformation of a country’s planning system may be a rare event in most parts of the world, we would nonetheless argue that it presents a significant learning opportunity for planners in all contexts. There are four central aspects to this. First, it presents the opportunity to pose fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of planning: the ethical values that should guide it, and how universal or particular these should be; its role and scope in relation to particular contextual issues; its relationship to related professions and policy streams and ways of integrating with these; its location within changing structures of governance and its relationship with other stakeholders involved in the built environment; and the nature of the tools, techniques and processes that it deploys in order to be effective. Second, it allows the testing and evaluation of new policies and new ways of acting. A good example of this is the problem of achieving integrated policies and action in government, an issue that confronts governments in most parts of the world today. In South Africa the process of integrated development planning, as a tool for municipal management, was designed as a new policy initiative in the mid-1990s, has subsequently been monitored and revised, and potentially provides a testing ground for integration in other parts of the world. Third, it allows an examination of the possibilities of the process of change itself. While there may be acceptance of profound change at the national level (in terms of adopting new economic and political systems), there will always be the problem of bureaucracies peopled with individuals who are likely to be resistant to change, perhaps for political reasons, for reasons related to a desire to maintain particular positions of power and influence, or perhaps due to ignorance and a lack of understanding of alternatives. The problem of historical inertia in bureaucracies and in organizational structures of all kinds is one which is confronted whether changes are incremental or fundamental. Fourth, a situation of transformation opens up an important debate on the transferability of knowledge and ideas. Many of the new policy and planning ideas put in place in South Africa after 1994 were not ‘home-grown’, but were introduced by international aid and development agencies and first-world policy think-tanks. The concept of three spheres of government (national, regional and local) as opposed to hierarchical tiers of government was one of these ideas, as was South Africa’s new housing policy. While these policies were to some extent shaped to fit local conditions, the assumptions on which they were based remain, opening up an important avenue of inquiry regarding the articulation between imported policy ideas and the materially and socially situated nature of citizens at whom they are targeted.

In a sense transformation in South Africa has been more limited in scope than in those countries that confronted economic as well as political change – the countries of Eastern Europe are of relevance here and they, as well, offer significant insights into planning and change. The South African case offers other particular attributes, however. Important here is the juxtaposition of a modern, developed economy with large-scale informality; and great wealth adjacent to extensive poverty, which also shapes and is shaped by the form of South African cities and rural areas. South African planners thus confront issues that will be familiar to those working in both the global North and global South. South African planners also face an issue that is emerging as a central concern in many parts of the world – that of multiculturalism – and the problem of dealing with planning issues in places increasingly characterized by social and cultural conflict. As Bollens (2004:121), in an analysis which includes Johannesburg (South Africa), correctly argues: ‘differing value systems are a defining characteristic of ethnically polarized cities and also appear to be an increasing attribute of planning and resource allocation debates in North America and western European cities’. There may be no clear answers yet emerging from the South African experience of multiculturalism, but the sharpness of the divides in this society certainly allows a questioning of some of the assumptions embedded in mainstream planning thought.

This book thus in part speaks to an international audience, arguing that South Africa is an instructive case of political and planning transformation, which raises questions for planners elsewhere who are concerned with change. Linked to this aim, we realize that some readers may not be familiar with South Africa, and this assumption informs our explanation of events and concepts. The book also speaks to a South African audience. Planning (and related) professionals in this country have lived through tumultuous times. Some have been excited and energized by the potentials and possibilities that transformation has opened up; others feel marginalized and resentful. A good number have left the planning profession entirely while new recruits, increasingly black and female products of the tertiary education institutions, bring their own ambitions and concerns into play. It is an appropriate moment to reflect comprehensively on the successes and failures of the South African planning system during the last decade, so that we can be conscious of the road travelled thus far, build on this experience, and confront the future with a greater sense of purpose.

The remainder of the introduction gives an overview of the position taken in this book with regard to political transformation and changes in the planning arena, the theoretical perspective that has informed this account, and an explanation of the organization of the subsequent sections and chapters.

POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: AN OVERVIEW

The territory that ultimately came to be called South Africa has been settled for many thousands of years. The ancestors of the nomadic Khoe-San people were probably responsible for the engravings found in the Blombos Cave on the Cape South Coast which have been dated at 70,000 Before Present (BP). Archaeologists now believe that the first Iron Age farmers moved into South Africa about 1700 BP, although they came in larger numbers in a substantial southwards migration of Bantu-speaking people about 900 BP. The Iron Age settlements were generally small and clan-based and so South Africa does not have the sort of pre-colonial settlements that West Africa has, for example, but there are some notable exceptions. Most important is the thirteenth-century capital of the Mapungubwe kingdom located on a striking hilltop in the Limpopo River Valley, which has been excavated since the 1930s, and which has become a potent symbol of the ‘African renaissance’.

In 1488 Portuguese navigators first rounded the Cape, opening up a sea route from Europe to the East, and in 1652 the Dutch East India Company established a permanent refreshment station at what is now the city of Cape Town. Dutch control of the territory came to an end in 1795 when Britain occupied the Cape in order to secure its trading route, although British rule only became permanent in 1814 when the Dutch formally ceded the Cape to Britain. In 1910 South Africa was granted the status of a self-governing colony, this lasting until 1961 when the country declared itself a republic and withdrew from the Commonwealth. As a result of these early Dutch and British influences, current South African common law still contains many elements of Roman Dutch law and English law, although the system of administrative law – and to a large extent the inherited planning system – is strongly British.

The concept of racial segregation, a defining characteristic of the pre-1994 apartheid government, in fact had its roots in nineteenth-century British rule.¹ The first specific allocation of urban land for people other than whites can be traced to the city of Port Elizabeth in the 1850s (Mabin and Smit 1997) and became common towards the end of the century as ‘native locations’ were established in and around the larger urban settlements, with the right of Africans to own or rent any land outside of defined rural ‘reserves’ (or homelands) finally withdrawn by the 1913 Natives Land Act. It was not until 1948, however, and the succession of the National Party in government, that the full apparatus of the apartheid project came into being.

In the post-1948 period, apartheid (meaning ‘apartness’) involved the extension of various forms of segregation, which previously applied to Africans, to Indian and coloured people as well. By the 1960s it involved racial discrimination in almost every area of life, with spatial separation in place at the local urban scale (in the form of planned segregated residential areas) and at the regional scale (in the form of demarcated African homelands). In essence it was a policy that allowed white, and particularly Afrikaner, supremacy to survive in the face of growing African nationalism through the division and repression of people of colour. At no time, however, was apartheid unchallenged. By the end of the 1980s, increasingly organized resistance, largely orchestrated by the African National Congress (ANC), succeeded in bringing the apartheid government to the negotiating table and to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.

Political transition in South Africa can be described as transition to a liberal democracy, but this was coupled with the increasing insertion of the economy into a globalized international economy, giving rise to what may be considered as a double transition. The magnitude of these transitions may not equate to those experienced by countries undergoing a shift from communist and totalitarian regimes but nonetheless, compared with the relatively stable political economies of most developed and even many developing countries, change in South Africa in the 1990s was dramatic. Significantly, the apartheid government entered negotiations with the ANC in the early 1990s from a political position which was severely challenged, but not defeated. The ruling National Party had been able to maintain an effective system of administration, security and defence (strongly challenged in the black urban townships, however), a highly developed, if regionally uneven, system of infrastructure and communication, and operational systems of tax collection and welfare for at least part of the population. The National Party also retained cautious support from elements of capital, and, in the first democratic elections, showed that it had retained 20.4 per cent of the support of the total electorate. It retained the ability, therefore, to be a powerful player in the negotiation process and to influence the path of reform significantly.

The opposition movement, in the form of the ANC and its alliance partners, the powerful labour movement Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), historically had strong socialist leanings. However, negotiations were occurring at a time when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc discredited left-wing economic policy, and ensured that the prime international players in the transition were the United States and its allies. Inevitably, ‘the price these powers demanded for disciplining the apartheid government and extending promises of material aid to the ANC was a commitment by the ANC to embrace western-style free-market principles’ (Webster and Adler 1999:369).

Analysts of the South African political transition debate the extent to which the process was shaped by elite negotiators or by the extensive mass action that was occurring outside the negotiating chambers (Saul 1991). The negotiations were highly conflictual and repeatedly threatened to derail, but in the end compromises were made on both sides. The ANC’s original draft politico-economic policy was revised to the extent that when it finally emerged, in the form of the Reconstruction and Development Programme, it was eagerly adopted by all political parties and by business. And in the negotiation process, the ANC conceded to the important ‘sunset clause’ which safeguarded the positions of existing civil servants. The possibility of both economic and administrative continuity was thereby greatly strengthened. Clearly a break with the past of some significance was made in 1994. The obtaining of full political rights by people of colour was not without importance, and it is also possible to point to a new constitution regarded as progressive in world terms, new policies in almost every field of government, major institutional reorganization, and important new legislation, particularly in the field of labour. But the continuities (particularly in terms of the economy) are there as well. In fact in the years following the 1994 election, macro-economic policy shifted closer to a neo-liberal position, and an emphasis on economic growth replaced the previous concern with redistribution. In the very recent period there has been a further shift: some individuals in government believe that there is a need for a stronger state (a ‘developmental state’) to ensure service delivery and administrative efficiency.

Institutional and legislative reforms were primary items on the agenda of the new government, given that all had been previously framed by racial categories. The extent of planned governmental reorganization was hugely ambitious, with South Africa unique among those countries undergoing political transition in its attempts to reform both national and subnational level...

Table of contents

• THE RTPI Library Series
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• TERMS AND MEASUREMENTS
• PART 1 SETTING THE SCENE
• PART 2 PLANNING AND GOVERNANCE
• PART 3 DISCOURSES OF PLANNING
• PART 4 PLANNING AND SOCIETY
• APPENDIX
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX