Shaping shores: An exploration of the interplay between law, spatial ontologies and the power to plan at Milnerton, Cape Town

Abstract

The landscape of coastal planning is being transformed by the emergence of new scales of informal planning both alongside and between established statutory planning frameworks. As informal planning arrangements seldom operate within an institutional vacuum, they are frequently confronted by the path-dependent influence of pre-existing statutory planning institutions. However, there remains a marked dearth of knowledge surrounding the interplay between formal legal planning frameworks and informal planning arrangements at the coast. In response to this lacuna, the current paper endeavours to expand the existing comprehension of the influence of formal legal planning frameworks on informal planning processes at the coast by amalgamating legal geographical insights with the expanding discourse surrounding the function of actors' ontological understandings of space in structuring power relations and discursive interaction within planning processes. These insights are applied to a focussed case study of the operation of an informal planning process, the Milnerton Erosion Forum, at Milnerton, a coastal suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. The empirical findings presented in this article demonstrate the involvement of legal planning frameworks in constituting space and structuring power dynamics among actors at Milnerton, as well as the ways in which spatialised legal power is mobilised to influence socio-spatial decision-making within informal planning processes through actors’ ontological understandings and representations of places-to-be-planned. Through visibilisng the dialectical relationship between law, space and the power to plan at Milnerton, this article offers nuanced insights into the complex interplay between legal planning frameworks and informal planning practices at the coast.