ABSTRACT
Planning for mining communities is a devilishly difficult problem: how is one simultaneously to plan for mining towns that will first grow rapidly and then shrink? This chapter investigates the consequences of mining booms for spatial planning and asks whether the municipal spatial plan for Postmasburg has taken into account both the resilience and the complexities of being a mining town. The findings indicate that while the town’s narrow economic base has been ignored, spatial plans have largely projected only the immediate past. The result is that resilience has been compromised by the adoption of a single growth scenario.
