ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters I have tracked the challenges and difficulties of spatial planning in metropolitan Cape Town. I have shown that despite the opening of what appeared to be a window of opportunity during the early days of the political transition, late 2000 found city-wide spatial planning marginalized and delegitimized. The ability of spatial planners in the early 1990s to build a discourse coalition which synchronized with both macro-economic philosophy and political sentiment of the time, allowed them a degree of status, across the political spectrum, which they had not enjoyed before. The concept of the compact, integrated and equitable city, as an antidote to the segregated, apartheid city, proved to be an influential one: it found its way (in various forms) into spatial planning efforts in many of South Africa’s major cities, and into national planning legislation. But while the new discourse around spatial form was a useful one for planners, the discourse it was displacing had contained understandings on the nature of the plan (blueprint, and focused on land uses) and on the planning process (plan implementation through statutorization) which lent power to planners in a range of important ways. Within the Cape Town metropolitan authority (and to a greater or lesser extent in other local authorities across the country) elements of the old discourse were retained and interwoven with the new. The potential for continuity within spatial planning which this offered was reinforced by the essentially modernist nature of both apartheid and postapartheid planning. Both envisioned an ideal urban future and assumed that spatial planning could be used as a central tool to achieve it.
