Urban Planning in the Global South

This chapter sets out the purpose of the book, the methods used to generate the research, the background of the authors and the sequencing of the chapters. It opens with the following questions: how different does planning theory and practice need to be when it happens in different parts of the world, and to what extent does planning require a deep understanding of the context in which it proposes to intervene and how should this understanding shape what planners do? It explains that the book aims to foreground the importance of recognizing place and location in planning if it is to achieve the kinds of ambitions which it usually sets itself and avoid the unintended consequences which so often ensue.

Framed within a wider shift across a range of disciplines, including planning, which consider how perspectives from the global South might be different, the chapter explains the book’s intention to test the concept of conflicting rationalities in planning, and to use a case study of a public housing megaproject in a poor township of Cape Town (South Africa) to consider this concept. It asks how this idea might need to be expanded and elaborated if it is to have value in understanding and acting on state-society relations in global South planning interventions.

This chapter provides the theoretical framing for the rest of the book. It explains how a ‘southern turn’ in several areas of scholarship, including planning, has raised awareness of the relative neglect of global South perspectives in theory development, as well as the tendency to assume the universality of theoretical ideas even when they have been entirely shaped by global North experiences and ideas. In urban planning, various scholars have pointed to the essentially parochial nature of much of mainstream planning theory which often assumes that the nature of cities and their societies, economies, culture and governance is so similar from place to place that the need to geographically specify the relevance of ideas is not necessary. The generalisation of ideas and policy transfers across very different societies has often resulted in serious planning failures.

However, the idea of a southern planning perspective requires clarification as it is all too easily interpreted as a geographically bounded approach to theorising, hence creating problematic binaries with imagined global north perspectives. This chapter therefore explores what southern perspectives in planning may, and may not, offer.

New lines of inquiry need to theoretically frame an understanding of what goes on in cities which are rapidly growing and resource poor. From a planning perspective, the book offers the concept of ‘conflicting rationalities’ arising at the interface between the different logics (or rationalities) of various urban actors. This chapter explains how the book tests and refines this idea.

This chapter indicates the kind of impact which context-less planning ideas have had on Sub-Saharan African cities, using the continent as an example of impacts and processes which are echoed in many other parts of the global South. In Africa an earlier wave of colonial and postcolonial planning fundamentally shaped the urban built environment, planning laws and institutional processes which still persist today. These planning ideas, with origins in older British and European concepts of what a well-functioning and ‘orderly’ city should look like, are completely at odds with the ‘on the ground’ reality of African cities which have experienced rapid jobless growth under conditions of weak and resource-deprived local government institutions. A more recent wave of context-less planning ideas is attempting to impose visions of cities such as Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore on cities which are largely informal and poor. This new era of planning (using terms such as eco-cities, smart cities and world-class cities) is again imposing a concept of ‘good cities’ derived from other and very different contexts. Again the impact of these interventions, driven in part this time by the international property development sector, has highly negative impacts on African cities. The conflict of rationalities emerging between this new grouping of urban actors and those attempting to survive in rapidly growing and impoverished cities in Africa is stark. Yet there is little in the way of theoretical resources in the planning field to suggest how these conflicts can be explained or the kind of positioning needed to address them.

This chapter introduces an in-depth case study which examines the planning and implementation of a housing megaproject in Langa, the oldest African township in Cape Town. It reviews the emergence of housing policy in South Africa and provides a history of Langa as a basis for understanding some of the contestations over space, place and belonging triggered by the N2 Gateway megaproject. The purpose of the case is to combine place-based historical and contemporary ethnographic research to challenge and develop theoretical concepts which can be more widely applicable. This case tests the idea of conflicting rationalities and refines it to contribute to a positioning of a southern perspective in planning theory.

South Africa has had a different political history to the rest of Africa and to many other parts of the global South, but there are also many aspects in common. The township of Langa affords analysis of the genealogy of urban planning approaches and housing policies across the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid eras and the ways in which these have impacted on city dwellers and rural migrants.

The chapter provides insights into the enduring fissures within the complex social edifice of Langa and examines the ways in which these shape and reflect rationalities and drive contestations over space. It reveals the strategies of struggle of different actors in response to the planning and implementation of the state-driven megaproject and its bid to formalise the informal.

This chapter draws on interviews conducted with officials in various branches of the state and affiliated technical and managerial actors with diverse histories of engagement within Langa and the N2 Gateway. These cast light on the rationalities and practices associated with the ‘will to govern and improve’, which also includes the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) involved in this project. The informants provide diverse perspectives on the systems of governmentality and changing biopolitical orders. They reveal the complex workings of the state apparatus and the interface between the technical and the political.

The chapter illustrates the fundamentally elusive and internally contested nature of the state. Interviews and secondary sources illustrate how officials and politicians across different departments and spheres of government read and interpret their respective scripts, and how actors within Langa and the state intersect with numerous ‘trustees’ (NGOs) who share in the imperative to govern and improve, and mediate state agendas with those of targeted actors within Langa. Collectively these narratives provide the basis for deconstructing the workings of governmentality and identifying the political, bureaucratic and juridical rationalities which shape the practices of power. Again and again the findings reveal the many fault lines and switches in political polarity that blur the imaginary of the ‘developmental state’ (the term frequently used to describe the nature of the South African government). These changes also impact on how the residents of Langa come to have sight of the state.

The narratives of Langa residents affected by the N2 Gateway project are drawn from three clusters of informants who occupy different social and physical positions in the township. The interviews reveal diverse local encounters with, and responses to the wills to govern and improve advanced by the different spheres of state and associated intermediaries. The plethora of contending voices and perspectives presented here exposes the inadequacy of neat binaries which seek to aggregate the wills to survive and thrive of the ‘poors’ under the rubric of ‘community’ and submerge the practice of politics within the imaginary of a unified developmental state.

Langa ‘borners’ claims on place reflect a range of dense social and spatial entitlements associated with diverse histories of urban belonging. Borners are differentiated from established and new migrants who advance place and space claims in a variety of hostel and informal settings. Many of those in the shacklands struggle to enforce more tenuous claims on ‘diluted’ urban space as a prerequisite for bare survival. Their narratives illustrate the instability of life in these settings, the ever-present threat of fire and displacement, threats to the safety to children, the shame of bucket toilets, the disparaging social attitudes of many neighbouring residents, random acts of violence, the frequency of enforced moves, together with the unpredictable presence of a seemingly arbitrary and often partisan state. In this setting claims on space are strategic, emphasising the affordances of location, the proximity of home mates, the availability of livelihood opportunities and proximity to health care and functioning schools.

This chapter draws together narratives from the state and from Langa residents to test the concept of conflicting rationalities as a way of understanding state-society relations in planning and development projects in contexts of this kind. It shows how deep are the differences not only between state and society but also within and across this range of actors, and the nuanced nature of the tactics and strategies pursued by various groupings of the ‘poors’ in their attempts to retain a hold of their place in or near the Langa site, and how these interface with tactics and strategies used by various elements in the state (and Non-Governmental Organisations) in its attempt to impose a particular form of urban development and shelter. This entanglement of rationalities, together with the contradictory impulses that energise them, lies at the heart of the theoretical insights afforded by the N2 Gateway. This warns against reliance on simplistic interpretations of public participation or assumptions that dialogue between parties will reach required levels of consensus. The case shows that the concept of conflicting rationalities has its value but cannot be interpreted as a simple binary between state and society. It also shows the importance of understanding ‘place’ and history as a precursor to any form of planning intervention.

This chapter summarises the theoretical and practical implications of approaching planning from the perspectives outlined in the book. We ask why it so frequently happens that urban megaprojects in contexts such as this one fail, and we draw on a wider literature which argues that such megaprojects are often the product of ‘high politics’ which seek to make a national statement of technical prowess or social significance. When megaprojects are conceived for their symbolic value and to ‘rebrand’ national policy shifts, it is inevitable that they come into conflict with ‘on the ground’ and highly variable and messy realities of those designated as beneficiaries. This chapter therefore asks if the failure of megaprojects is inevitable, or if there might have been a different approach taken by government to addressing the issues of Langa. Some broad pointers are put forward to suggest possible alternative approaches.

The chapter then follows the trajectory of the retroductive case study method to ask how the Langa case can ‘speak back’ to theory and help to build a southern theorising project in planning. Five theoretical propositions are put forward, generated by the Langa case, but surfacing concepts which remain to be tested in further case study work elsewhere and which start to build up ‘meso-level’ theorising which may provide insights in other settings in the global South and beyond.