The imprint of apartheid is still evident in South African
cities. As acknowledged widely by planning academics and recognised in the
National Development Plan and draft Integrated Urban Development Framework,
urban expansion has engendered new forms of segregation and exclusion.
Apartheid-divided suburbs have their equivalent today in
fortified estates catering to an exclusive moneyed minority – a mere 3% of
South Africa’s households. More densely packed, walled townhouse complexes
cater to the aspiring middle class, which makes up barely 10% of South African
households.
Informal settlements sprang up on vacant land during the
transition, sometimes in or near suburbs and central business districts. The
residents of these informal settlements were mostly relocated to transit camps
or dormitory housing developments on the urban peripheries, often beyond
apartheid-era townships.
Urban visions generated by progressive networks of
nongovernmental organisations, activists and planning academics during the late
apartheid years were projections of urban centres shared by all. Well-located
low-income housing, public transport corridors, active streets and public
spaces were to generate opportunities for entrepreneurship and encounters. The
ANC’s Reconstruction and Development Programme of the mid-1990s embraced these
ideals. Today, though, in most parts of our cities, they ring hollow.
The 2004 national policy on sustainable human settlements
sought to address the “broader residential property market”, but with negligible
effect. Protests from impoverished townships and informal settlements,
generated by the world’s highest urban inequality, sparked only a reductionist
urban politics of housing and service delivery. Political debate has avoided
the hard questions about the real obstacles to the spatial integration of the
poor in South African cities.
In 1994, it was understood that the planning and land use
management bureaucracy at municipal level would take time to reform. Following
groundwork by academics and civil society, the department of land affairs
developed the interim Development Facilitation Act (DFA), which was promulgated
in 1995. It was meant to “facilitate” development until such time as the
planning system had been fully reformed in line with the pending Constitution.
The Act allowed provincial tribunals to approve developments within municipal
boundaries.
In the years after the completion of municipal restructuring
in 2000, metropolitan municipalities developed spatial frameworks to transform
the apartheid city. But these had no legal standing, even in municipalities.
One of the obstacles to the metros’ capacity to guide urban
investment in several metropolitan municipalities was the continued application
of the DFA. In the absence of planning reform, provincial tribunals became a
vehicle for overriding municipal planning and land use management.
Two political imperatives reinforced this trend: rapid
subsidised housing delivery on large tracts of peripheral land and economic
growth, fostered by investment opportunities in the built environment and the
construction of residential dwellings to “global” standards.
In the absence of planning reform, provincial tribunals
continued to approve subsidised housing in poor locations within and beyond the
boundaries of metropolitan municipalities. Seeing the sense in economic
investment, provincial tribunals also approved privately proposed gated
estates, townhouse developments, malls and business parks, despite their having
little regard for municipal spatial development frameworks.
In 2006, the City of Johannesburg began to question the
constitutionality of the DFA approval processes. It faced opposition from the
national ministry responsible for planning reform, as well as several
provinces, the South African Property-Owners’ Association and the South African
Association for Consulting Professional Planners. The economy and procedural
efficiency formed the basis of the opposing arguments.
The Constitutional Court in 2010 confirmed that the
provincial tribunals had encroached on municipal planning, which involves
development approval and township establishment within municipal boundaries. It
ordered the government to complete and enact long-overdue national spatial
planning and land- use management legislation.
The Court’s intention was to respect the nonhierarchical
constitutional principles of co-operative government and intergovernmental
relations, and to place the power of approval in municipalities alone.
The new Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act of 2013
inscribes, for the first time, spatial aspects in the right to housing. It
articulates this as a right to “equitable spatial patterns and sustainable
human settlements”. It requires the promotion of “social and economic
inclusion” and redress for the “imbalances of the past”.
It makes spatial development frameworks at municipal,
provincial and national level legally binding, though they will be up for
review every five years.
Still, there remains the potential of a lingering hierarchy:
undefined “national” and “public” interests can override municipal
decision-making. Economic growth, global competitiveness and mass housing
delivery, framed as national or public interest, irrespective of the spatial
configuration they demand, may therefore continue to override municipal-level
plans to redress urban spatial imbalances.
Central-local tensions have been critical in debates on the
urban question. A normative ideal embracing local autonomy, going even beyond
municipalities, that is gaining momentum globally is the “right to the city”.
French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed this concept in the
late 1960s.
The city Lefebvre promotes is home to an urban society made
up of people who appropriate and inhabit spaces, rather than these spaces being
dominated spatially by the state or the market. Land-use management in this
city allows for diversity and for complex entities to emerge. It allows the
poor or excluded to inhabit conveniently located land and is not
over-determined by the need to generate profit.
Lefebvre engages urban strategies and planning at great
length, coming to three concrete recommendations: the city must enter the
political conscience and debate squarely; local autonomy or self-management
must be given space; and the right to the city must be legislated.
Although devolution is often understood as a prerequisite of
the neoliberal rolling back of the state, leftist governments, notably France
under François Mitterrand in the 1980s and Brazil under Luis Inácio Lula da
Silva in the 2000s (though less directly), built on Lefebvre’s idea of the
right to the city. Both governments recognised the importance of cities,
creating dedicated ministries of cities, with key co-ordinating functions.
Already in 2001, Brazil, under pressure from the Urban Reform
Movement linked to the Workers’ Party, then in control of several
municipalities, enacted a city statute that brought all relevant urban law
together.
In a federal system that devolves important powers to
municipalities, the Urban Reform Movement developed the content of the statute
in Workers’ Party municipalities. The party’s model of direct democracy
embraces local autonomy and has built its growing political support on that.
The Brazilian experience suggests that urban planning and
land-use management must be aligned and co-ordinated at national level, and
that urban rights should be expanded from simply access to adequate housing to
a right to the city.
In Brazil today, in the face of strong economic pressures,
the unfortunate need for political compromises and competing ideas from the
political centre and the right, the urban question remains intensely debated.
In South Africa, if we want the approval of exclusionary
developments or peripherally located housing not to be threaded through loopholes
in the spatial planning Act, the spatial state of the city must enter political
consciousness and debate at all levels.
