Town and Regional Planning in South Africa
Inconsequential and a waste of money ?
Burgert Gildenhuys Director , BC Gildenhuys & Associates burgert @ bcga . co . za
The extent to which urban planning has degenerated into a more or less meaningless selfcentred humdrum with little or no impact on the future of our cities stands out like a sore thumb to all experienced and capable town and regional planners in South Africa .
Any perceived impact could be considered negative and constraining development rather than making any positive contributions to the future of our cities . The result is that urban and regional planners have sunk to become the bottom feeders in the built environment and city development food chain .
The harsh reality is that the input of urban planners on spatial development is inconsequential or even harmful when viewed in the context of the outcomes and “ results ” of spatial planning . One can use two examples to illustrate this :
Firstly , the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act ( SPLUMA ) and spatial development frameworks ( SDF ’ s ) are the holy grail of urban planning and the instrument to bring prosperity to our cities . However , it is hard to find a single SDF in South Africa that achieved any of its ( and SPLUMA ) objectives in even the slightest measure . Instead , spatial planning morphed into a generic guideline-driven compliance exercise with little or no regard to local issues and problems .
Secondly , the value of the urban and regional planner declined to a level where the profession must seek legal protection through agitation for job reservation when it cannot survive based on the value of superior services to its clients and the community at large . Underlying this is ‘ land use planning ’ relegated to a legal-administrative process requiring little or no planning skills .
The challenges mentioned above highlight the need for weighty intro-spection by all stakeholders involved in town and
regional planning ( TRP ). This article addresses the issues that may contribute to the low value and inability of town and regional planning to impact our cities ’ future positively .
The core issues underlying the current state of TRP are :
Lack of Technical Skills Work produced by town and regional planners reflects the low quality ( qualitative and quantitative ) of town and regional planning . There are two reasons for this in our assessment .
The nearly complete lack of technical skills in the armour of town and regional planners is reflected in the team requirements , for example , in Terms of References for SDF ’ s .
Why should a professional town planner require GIS support ? Shouldn ’ t the town and regional planner be the expert spatial analyst by default or , for that matter , have sufficient understanding and working knowledge of transport planning , economy and infrastructure delivery and finances ?
The fact that the technical armoury of the town and regional planner disappeared from their skills base may also be attributed to the fact that town and regional planners became planners . We lost our identity and focus and started to drift without direction in the process .
Planning is a generic mental activity every person does every day and does not have any conceptual substance and hence , is unfocused . Being a town and regional planner is entirely different ; it has meaning , context and focus .
Secondly , low quality of planning is driven and exacerbated by the supremacy of guidelines and then simply following a box-ticking process . The result is often generic , meaningless outcomes ignoring local problems and issues . The guidelinedriven process leaves little or no room for innovation in responding to local challenges .
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