Abstract
The Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) was constructed as a ‘new deal’ for South African cities and towns. It outlines a vision with four overarching goals and eight priorities or policy levers meant to overcome the apartheid legacy through comprehensive spatial restructuring and strategic urban–rural linkages. This article is a contextual theological reflection ‘from below’, reading the IUDF through the lenses of five distinct contours. It asks whether the IUDF has the potential to mediate good cities in which the urban poor and disenfranchised can experience integral liberation as equal citizens, or whether it will perpetuate the city as post-colonial satellite of violent empire. It concludes by proposing five areas for theological and political action: consciousness from below, a new economics, a different kind of politics, socio-spatial transformation, and collaborative knowledge generation.
Highlights
The ‘good city’ or ‘post-colonial catch-basins of violent empire’? A contextual theological appraisal of South Africa’s Integrated Urban Development Framework
Amin 2006; Graham 2008)? Or will the Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) mostly serve to legitimise and further perpetuate the South African city as post-colonial catch-basins of violent empire, borrowing from the language used by Sampie Terreblanche (2013)?
The question is whether the IUDF will succeed in keeping our ‘fiction of innocence’ alive, or whether, in interpreting and implementing this framework, city-makers, whoever we are, will be brave enough to unmask the fictional, to tell the truth, and to do what is right, which will require a radical departure from and dismantling of the violent city we find ourselves in today
Summary
The ‘good city’ or ‘post-colonial catch-basins of violent empire’? A contextual theological appraisal of South Africa’s Integrated Urban Development Framework. This article is a contextual theological reflection ‘from below’, reading the IUDF through the lenses of five distinct contours It asks whether the IUDF has the potential to mediate good cities in which the urban poor and disenfranchised can experience integral liberation as equal citizens, or whether it will perpetuate the city as post-colonial satellite of violent empire. It concludes by proposing five areas for theological and political action: consciousness from below, a new economics, a different kind of politics, socio-spatial transformation, and collaborative knowledge generation. I need to declare upfront that I cannot but read the text through my own lived experience as an urban citizen and resident of the inner city, an urban practitioner seeking for socio-spatial-economic justice in solidarity with
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