The Enduring Relationship Between Civil Engineering and Spatial Injustice

Abstract

Immediately after the repeal of the apartheid laws, the international academic community paid a lot of attention to the housing situation and the built environment in South Africa (Newton C, Schuermans N in J Housing Built Environ 28:579–587, 2013). Town planners and engineers, buoyed by both their subliminal political ideology and the sentiment of their political principals, participated actively and passively in the incorporation of injustice in development planning and infrastructure delivery. This was presented as a professional imperative and carried over as part of the science underpinning civil engineering practice. The engineering profession, regarded as a direct application of science [(Brook H in Res Policy 23:477–486, 1994), is not value free (Bahm AJ in Policy Sci 2:391–396, 1971) and is thus capable of contributing to the entrenchment of both justice and injustice. Racial segregation is the most idiosyncratic feature of colonial and post-colonial urban landscapes, and it is essential to elucidate how the undercurrent of segregationist town planning has been perpetuated in the provision of public infrastructure. Engineering science has inherently biased processes and techniques that entrench injustice. Practical interventions that must be actioned by the Civil Engineering profession to make cities more inclusive are presented with examples. There are both systematic design errors and philosophical issues in the sciences underpinning design issues that perpetuate the provision of sub-standard infrastructure in low-income areas.