This year's Conference comes at a time when South Africa is taking stock of the first 11 years of democracy as we gear up towards meeting our growth and development objectives by 2014.
Anyone reflecting on our cities will continue to see, and would most likely lament, the steadfastness of the divisive, inequitable and fragmenting Apartheid landscape - landscapes characterised by low-density urban development, wide road reserves and expansive open spaces that serve as buffer zones between communities.
These landscapes are reinforced by the market-driven spatial development typologies of gated suburban enclaves and golf estates that continue to encroach on the urban edge.
There is no doubt that this urban sprawl not only traps and dislocates the poor into poverty pockets, but critically endangers our unique environmental systems, agricultural areas and biodiversity habitats.
This is of particular importance to the environmental quality and economic viability of the Western Cape:
- We are home to two of the world-renowned biodiversity hotspots - the Cape Floral Kingdom and the Succulent Karoo.
- Our agricultural economy contributes 11% to job creation and 6% to total GGP.
In a context of climate change, and a 14.3% per annum population growth rate in the Province - the environmental stress and quality-of-life factors weigh heavily upon us in terms of environmental management and developmental planning activities:
- 90% of our river systems are critically endangered or endangered due partially to urban development practices
- Increasing demand on our scarce water supply is coupled with the threat to natural resource based livelihoods due to expected sea level rising
- Approximately 45 000 informal household in the metro alone have no access to electricity while our current electricity infrastructure is critically overloaded
- Our country produces over 50% of Africa's emissions due to our extensive use of coal. While in the Province vehicle emissions contribute 65% to air emissions in the Province (1997 Brown Haze Study)
- The Western Cape gini co-efficient, the gap between rich and poor, is one of the highest in South Africa
These are just some of the challenges facing us.
The development of proactive governance mechanisms and policies have a critical role to play in creating sustainable living environments that respond to and affirm the lived reality of a diverse of inhabitants yet which speak to environmental integrity.
As equally fundamental is the role of the planning profession in unlocking development potential and facilitating processes of spatial transformation that are cognizant of the lived-reality of our citizens.
It is therefore a good thing that the planning profession is in a continuing evolution of planning discourse and practice.
This is well suited to the continuous process of reflection and refinement of current and emerging ideas, discourse and policies that frame planning practice in the rapidly urbanizing and unique African environment.
The 2002 Planning Africa conference was a melting pot of existing and emerging ideas.
Key discussions included the role of the planning profession and the need for a paradigm shift.
I believe that this conference was a seminal moment for the South African planning profession in that it enabled it to recognize that not only did we share the African condition and experience as a nation, but it was OK for the professional response to be rooted in African and indeed post-colonial discourse- an important first step towards realizing the paradigm shift.
One of the key outcomes of the Conference was the establishment of the African Planning Association the following year.
Hopefully this organization will be instrumental in shaping future practice through facilitating engagement, sharing best practice and connecting practitioners from throughout the continent.
The Conference identified spatial and development planning as both:
- A tool for responding to complex issues which intersected in the spatial realm
- A means to coordinate development initiatives responding to the challenge of building an African Renaissance.
The complexities to which planning must respond and find creative solutions in African urban environments haven't necessarily changed.
These include issues of context, environmental stress, the urban-rural relationship, good governance and of course the eradication of both poverty and inequality.
In terms of context - we are African, our cities are African and our developmental trajectories are inextricably connected to the dynamics and processes of our fellow African countries.
Factors and processes beyond municipal, provincial, national and indeed regional boundaries have a direct bearing on the way our cities are shaped through formal and informal processes.
Yet 11 years from democracy and 4 years after the inaugural Planning Africa Conference, planning discourse and practice, particularly in this Province, still largely reflects the Apartheid legacy of 'intolerance of the other'.
Naturally, this raises a number of questions:
- Where is the post-modernist and post-colonial discourse that speaks to multi-narratives, identity and contradiction?
- Why is there such a disjuncture between our developmental policies, planning practice and the reality of our people?
- Where is the response to the constantly shifting planning landscape in which everyday people turn nothing into something?
- Why is there an obsession with 'fitting' our development path into Western norms and typologies of space and urban structure?
- Where are the responses that recognize the role of informality/the 2nd economy and even youth sub-culture in shaping our cities?
In Africa there is method to our perceived madness.
You would need to spend some time in the streets of Dar es Salaam or Khayelitsha to appreciate the level of complexity and creativity of people relegated to the so called '2nd Economy'.
Planners need to look harder and see the sense in turning nothing into something. /p>
What we often dismiss as chaos and disorder, reveals our own inability to connect with processes and networks happening beyond our own reality and norms.
I am certainly not trying to romantice the 'edge condition' of marginalized communities - I am merely challenging the planning profession to visualize the role they can play in enabling and validating people who have developed their own means to connecting into our cities through their survivalist activities.
Doing so would mean engaging in multiple areas of discourse that could better illuminate the possible roles of spatial development in a process of transformation.
A few could be:
- Identity and culture - diversity of people and places
- Planning for vulnerable groups like women and the girl child
- Interrogate how planners truly express their notions of equity, justice, and dignity in practice
- Governance
In the absence of a diversity of inclusive and rational debate - most planning, design and development work in the Western Cape lacks real engagement with our challenges of marginalisation, inequality, poverty and environmental degradation.
This disconnectedness represents one of the key challenges the profession has to confront.
The planning profession has to be responsive to new ideas and to our developmental challenge to create a 'Home for All' in the Province. The nature of the profession is one of high visibility due to the political and contested nature of your core role - allocation of scarce resources (water, land, bulk infrastructure etc.) Your success is judged through the impact you have on quality of life for people.
The planning profession must be connected to what's going on:
- Connected with the experiences of citizens at a local level
- Engaged with other planners and built environment professionals working in different fields with a different perspective
- Gaining knowledge of and contributing to our Province's development priorities like the Provincial Spatial Development Framework
- Clarity about their responsibilities and the implications associated with the choices that they make
Abdoulique Simone has taken this further by challenging the Profession to:
'Pay attention to how diffuse and diverse urban actors are assembled and act - this is a practice of being attuned to faint signals, flashes of important creativity in otherwise desperate maneuvers, small eruptions in the social fabric that provide new texture, small but important platforms from which to access new views.'
A possible way to get 'connected' is to revisit the underlying philosophies that underpin planning discourse and practice.
This means challenging the conventional thinking shaping contemporary planning, for instance, interrogating the rhetoric of integration:
- Are we talking about 'integration as assimilation of the other' into our frame of reference as expanded upon by Steve Biko in 'I Write What I Like?
- Or are we talking of the enablement and validation of the 'insurgent citizenry' and connection with the 'edge condition'?
- What value do diverse and divergent 'quarters' and their relationships actually add to the urban environment?
- And what facilitates the provisional and improvised transactions of our informal economy across fragmented urban space?
Perhaps with all these questions there is scope to test an approach.
There's something about planning that inspires me - so indulge me, I'm going to look at three notions that could frame an approach:
- The notion of the 'common good'
- The idea of 'organic intellectualism'
- And the principles of 'earth democracy'
The history of the commons is by and large a story of 'enclosure' - ring fencing of 'public' assets and opportunities in the interests of the market which is perceived as an efficient tool for material progress.
I will also use the 'enclosure of the commons' as a metaphor for the privatisation of the planning profession. We all know that privatisation of an asset in order to achieve efficiency gains can also impoverish those who lose access to it and enrich those who take title of it.
'Enclosure' widens the inequality gap. When the commons are enclosed, prices generally rise and people must gain permission to use the resource. The management and character of a resource also changes. Where as the goal for market governed resources is to maximize financial return, the goal of a resource managed as a common asset is to secure sustainable long-term benefits for everyone who belongs to the commons.
The point I am making through this analogy is that the power to make a difference resides not only in government and markets, but also in the people and the institutions developed to protect 'the commons'.
The planning profession is one of those institutions. This is my case for the role of planning as a tool to reclaiming 'public wealth' through spatial development.
The concept of "the commons" could underpin a new framework of planning activism that focuses on the better management of environmental and spatial resources/assets for the 'common good'. So the question is whether the planning profession is institutionally designed to serve everyone.
The notion of planning as a practice articulating the 'common good' can be further expanded in Antonio Gramsci's notion of 'organic intellectualism'.
Planners would fall into Gramsci's wide concept of 'intellectuals' as they exercise an organizing function in society. Yet Gramsci also describes the role of 'organic intellectuals' as people who:'Express and define the ideas and the will of a group as it enters into historical existence and comes to self-consciousness.
What I am talking to here is the role of intellectuals - like yourselves - in creating a counter hegemony to drive transformation.
Transformation requires alternative discourse to upset the consensus and redefine the 'common sense' of society.
Gramsci believed in the innate capacity of human beings to understand their world and to change it. This goes back to my previous comment on the power of the planning profession to reclaim and protect the 'common good' as practitioners that have that inherent capacity.
Developing this counter hegemony requires the intellectual to harness the capabilities of the average person to think and develop solutions.
This means working with and in communities to develop solutions that are grounded in everyday life:
"The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence - but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, "permanent persuader" and not just a simple orator" (Gramsci, 1971 p10). The challenge for the planning profession is therefore how to become the "organic intellectual" in the context of the African continent?
Finally I will briefly refer to the 'earth democracy' principles of Vandana Shiva.
The concept of Earth Democracy privileges ecological and cultural diversity in form and function. This is what Shiva refers to as 'feeling at home on the Earth and with each other' that is created through inclusive living economies. It is a counter narrative to monocultures which, as byproducts of exclusion and dominance create environments of coercion and loss of freedom. This is an alternative world-view to greed, consumerism and competition as objectives of human life.
The Earth Democracy approach embodies principles that enable people to transcend practices of polarization, division and exclusion. It speaks to a logic of multi-functionality and inclusion as the basis of diversity.
Embedded in the approach is the inherent human and professional duty to ensure well-being of all species, including the environment. Our human and professional responsibility is therefore one of trusteeship, instead of the dominant notion of mastery, control and ownership. Rights are inextricably related to these responsibilities.
This counters the prevailing paradigm where the separation of rights and responsibility is at the root of ecological degradation and gender/class inequality - a situation in which the social and ecological costs are externalized and borne by those who are excluded from decisions and benefits.
Shiva's Earth Democracy speaks to the notion of 'liberating the commons' by breaking free of our psychological legacy of separation and exclusion to instead allow new alternative perceptions to emerge based on our interconnectedness.
Here I have demonstrated the value of digging deeper and connecting with other discourse to create a sound intellectual platform on which to base planning practice and discourse.
I believe that the planning profession has a key role to play in this.
There a number of connections that still need to be made at a practical level like better alignment of environmental management, heritage and planning legislation - we are currently finalizing our Western Cape Law Reform process dealing with just that.
What's more exciting for me are the connections to be made that will link and validate our unique African identities and processes with emerging ideas, policy and practice.
This is what Abdoulique Simone and Vanessa Watson would refer to as:
'The connections of spatial planning and design discourse to meanings of space and relational networks in the everyday life of people'.
These ideas will speak to our diverse and often dualistic context within which planning must operate:
- A context layered by relationships between the 2nd vs.1st economy, poverty and marginalization vs. wealth.
- A context that so clearly reflects the 'insurgent citizenry' of our people in form and process
As we gear ourselves up to a sustained 6% economic growth rate, planning will have a clear role to play in unlocking development potential and ensuring that the growth and prosperity is sustainable, shared and appropriately allocated.
The organization of the profession and training of future planners will need to align and connect with the shifting planning landscape where planning is more of a process and tool than a product.
We must and can revive the integrity of 'the commons' as a public good - by extending the role of the planning profession as a more compelling tool, an alternative narrative to the dominant narratives of the day and an opportunity to embed the principles of sustainable development in our planning practices. Liberating the commons would require developing the imagination needed to conceptualize creative ideas and solutions to our development.
This might all sound very challenging - it is meant to be. The challenges facing the globe, our continent and our country are too immense for the planning profession to be found wanting. We need to leave behind a new legacy. The time is now.
So this has been my call to action to the profession.
Use this conference to commit your profession to go out there and liberate the commons, become true African organic intellectuals and committing yourselves to building our Earth Democracy.
Thank you.
Lynnette JohnsMedia Liasion Officer to
Ms Tasneem Essop
Provincial Minister:
Environment, Planning and Economic Development
Phone: 021 483 3915
Fax: 021 483 6081
