Durban’s Back of Port Project: a Local Spatial Knowledge Production Process Framed by Urban Entrepreneurialism

Abstract

Cities position themselves to compete in the global economy using large-scale entrepreneurial interventions, which have the potential to significantly alter urban landscapes (Harvey 1989). Within this broad urban entrepreneurial approach, it is useful to reflect on localised knowledge production processes and the actors and power embedded in them, which result in particular urban development outcomes in cities. This paper analyses a spatial planning exercise, the Back of Port (BoP) Project, initiated in Durban in 2007 by its administrative entity eThekwini Municipality, and produced by local consultants, which reflects a particular form of urban entrepreneurialism. The BoP Project aimed to increase the competitiveness of the Durban port through improving city infrastructure, addressing congestion at the port-city interface and ensuring economic growth in the city, in a highly contested and political space. The resultant knowledge production process and the spatial framework that was produced, were shaped by global urban policy and the politics and practices of local government, civil society organisations and the knowledge fields of specialist consultants. The BoP spatial planning exercise reveals how urban policy is unfolding in a city in the South, in response to global processes of urban economic development, national imperatives and local challenges. The research reveals that knowledges associated with an economic and functional discourse-coalition became hegemonic, whilst counter-hegemonic knowledges around social and environmental justice struggled to frame the spatial plan.