Where Informal is the Plan: Reconciling Planning and City Making from the Township Perspective.

Abstract

The idea of a compact city spatially ordered around key social and public amenities, whilst logically integrated into neat residential neighbourhoods and separately managed economic spaces has intrinsic appeal to spatial and development planners. The inspiration derives from modernist planning approaches, formulated in Northern contexts. However, the shape, form and socio-economic function of these urban spaces has little resonance with city making processes on the geographic margins. Townships are theoretically situated at the juncture between the planned city and the informal city. The aspiration of these two processes of city making present ambiguities, tensions and conflicts. These are most evident in the disconnect between spatial development plans (along with design guidelines), and actual development practices and investments. The planners, for example, advance transited oriented spaces with pedestrian boulevards, high density residential houses, and public transport. The residents, seeking economic upliftment, advance the economic use of public space, urban sprawl and private transport. Their actions are informed by crime and violence. In this paper we seek to contrast an informal urbanism, shaped by unplanned actions, with the professional urbanism (and its theoretical underpinnings) that seeks to impose an orderliness through (large) infrastructure investment. Northern theories, ideas and concepts of how urban spaces ought to be planned and designed still prevail in the way township development is understood, proposed and supported in municipalities. We argue that the rigidity of this approach does a disservice to the requirement for a Southern urbanism that supports, enables and enhances (and limits harms of) organic processes.