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Writing the World from an African Metropolis

This article historicizes the contemporary urban development and governance strategies in Cape Town, South Africa, by focusing on two periods: the British colonial era (mid to turn of the nineteent...

Colonial Present Legacies of the Past in Contemporary Urban Practices in Cape Town, South Africa

The paper examines the progress made since 1994 to reduce the deep social and spatial divisions in South African cities, focusing on the impact of current development trends in Cape Town. Basic pub...

Persistent Polarisation Post-Apartheid? Progress towards Urban Integration in Cape Town:

Town‐planning measures adopted by the infant Union Government were worded in the fashionable new language of international planning and were not explicitly concerned with the regulation of African settlement. Nevertheless, the planning regulations introduced in the 1910s were part of the emerging racial framework of urban government of the South African city. Dr Charles Porter, Johannesburg's first Medical Officer of Health, was a major force behind the introduction of British planning ideas to white South Africa. The inclusion of town‐planning clauses in the 1919 Public Health Act and the 1920 Housing Act were aimed at entrenching urban privileges for whites. By establishing colonial city management standards in selected areas of the city, the position of urban Africans was marginalised. Moreover, the passage of public health and town‐planning laws which prevented overcrowding and rent racketeering and enabled slum rehousing, offered state assistance to unskilled whites. The social and political problems...

Creating racial privilege: the origins of South African public health and town planning legislation

Planning and development regulation amid rapid urban growth:explaining divergent trajectories in Africa

During each period of extreme stress and turmoil in South Africa’s past century the idea of reconstruction has loomed large. A primary tool for reconstructing society has been presumed equally, by many parties, to lie in urban planning. As less turbulent times return, governments have attempted to reshape the society and, more particularly, the cities by developing new institutions, laws, visions, systems, personnel and plans. In each major case until the present, however, the programmes of progenitors of such ideas have been overtaken by the accession to power of new regimes, at government or merely planning system level, which have co-opted the new institutions, etc., to their own programmes; or such programmes have, less spectacularly, faded away as the complexities of government overwhelm initially exciting but idealistic visions. The paper describes aspects of the emergence and reformulation of planning at several of these stages: after the South African War, beginning in 1901; after the First World ...

Dan Smit

Papers

Reconstructing South Africa’s cities? The making of urban planning 1900–2000

Reconstructing South Africa's cities 1900-2000: A prospectus (or, a cautionary tale)