1st Edition

Change and Continuity in Spatial Planning Metropolitan Planning in Cape Town Under Political Transition

By Vanessa Watson Copyright 2002
    190 Pages
    by Routledge

    190 Pages
    by Routledge

    Change and Continuity in Spatial Planning addresses a question of enduring interest to planners: can planning really bring about significant and positive change? In South Africa the process of political transition appeared to create the preconditions for planners to demonstrate how their traditional humanitarian and environmental concerns could find concrete expression in the reshaping of the built environment.
    Integral to this story is how planning practices have been shaped by the past, in a rapidly changing context characterised by a globalising economy, new systems of governance, a changing political ideology, and a culture of intensifying poverty and diversity. More broadly, the book addresses the issue of how planners use power, in situations which themselves represent networks of power relations, where both planners and those they engage with operate through frames of reference fundamentally shaped by place and history.

    Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. 'What's Needed is a Metropolitan Plan'. 2. Cape Town as a 'Compact, Integrated' City? 3. Legitimating the Plan: The Western Cape Economic Development Forum. 4. 'No-One Disputed That There Should be a Physical Plan'... The Participation Process in Practice. 5. South Africa Post-1994: New Systems of Government and Planning. 6. Dusting Off the Old Planning Legislation: Can We Make the Metropolitan Plan Legal? 8. New Discourse Coalitions and the Marginalization of Spatial Planning. 9. Beyond the MSDF: Issues for Planning. References. Index.

    Biography

    Vanessa Watson is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Cape Town, South Africa