ABSTRACT
At the start of 1992 Regional Services Council planner Peter Tomalin had taken over the task of chairing the Metropolitan Development Framework Coordinating Working Group (MDF-CWG). This was the group which had been formed after the Caledon Conference of mid-1991 (see Chapter 2) and was made up of planning officials from the Regional and Cape Town City Councils, the Provincial Administration, the Regional Services Council planning consultants, and a representative from the Chamber of Commerce. Tomalin was a graduate of the University of Cape Town planning school in its early days. He had since worked in local government for some twenty years, mainly in the Regional Services Council and its predecessor (the Cape Divisional Council). He has been described by other planning officials in metropolitan Cape Town as ‘politically astute’: that is, he understood planning to be a politically imbued arena and used this understanding to get things done without alienating other major players in the game. At this point in time he held the position of Deputy Chief Director for Planning, answerable to an engineering department head.1
