South African Urban Planning in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries—Continuities between the Apartheid and Democratic eras?

Abstract

This chapter analyses urban planning in South Africa in the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. A key contention of this chapter is that notwithstanding progressive policy shifts since 1994, there are also some remarkable continuities between the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. Until 1990, urban and regional development policies in South Africa were intended to implement apartheid, and the planning discourse was organised along the lines of racial separation and operationalised through spatial partition. In the early 1990s, as democratic initiatives gained momentum, urban planners in South Africa attempted to reconstruct apartheid cities by offering alternative development discourses to reverse the effects of racial planning. The first wave post-apartheid urban planning and development strategies were driven by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) which was adopted in 1994. The government argued that the pressures of global economic restructuring forced a shift in the macro-economic framework with the adoption of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) structural adjustment strategy in June 1996. However, a major issue was whether the poor would benefit from such partnerships. In 1998 the White Paper set the foundation for a new developmental local government system with an emphasis on integrated development strategies. The neoliberal bent continued with successive policies such as National Development Plan (NDP) introduced in 2012, and Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) in 2016. An analysis of contemporary urban realities reveals that the desegregation of the apartheid city was generally taking place within the inner city and on the fringes of affluent suburbs. Decades of institutionalised segregation in South Africa will not be eliminated overnight. Segregation has been deeply entrenched in the social fabric, and is further reinforced by the socio-economic differences between blacks and whites. Also, the spatial inscription of class is becoming an increasingly conspicuous feature of South African urban space.