The Promise of Planning: Global Aspirations and South African Experience since 2008’: Reflections for New Forms of African Urban Planning

Abstract

This paper reflects on findings from our new book, The Promise of Planning: Global Aspirations and South African Experience since 2008 (Routledge, 2024), in relation to southern urban planning. It shows that planning in practice has developed in different ways across the globe, with significant variations across the global south, shaped intricately through global and national influences, with Africa an especially complex planning landscape given the multiplicity of influences and agendas. New planning approaches have been posited by agencies such as the UN-Habitat, and through the New Urban Agenda. Several aspects of post-apartheid planning legislation, instruments and programmes in South Africa have embodied the intentions of this new thinking, some are even seen as models. There are also the influences from other parts of the world including, for example, East Asia. However, South African planning has not been able to realise its promises since 2008, except in limited ways, raising questions about the new expectations of a reinvented planning and its broader relevance. The prospects for new forms of planning have been influenced by an inauspicious global context, with economic fragilities, global pandemics, technological shifts, political populism and institutional complexities. South African planning is profoundly impacted by the performance of government as it consists largely, not entirely, of state-led practices. The crisis in state structures in South Africa, rooted within a broader process of political economy and political settlement, has serious implications for planning’s ability to make good on its promises for socio-spatial transformation. This has affected the way in which planning has been reformed, its appropriateness contextually, and importantly how it has been implemented. The study thus raises questions about the prospects for new forms of planning in Africa.