Informal settlements pose a major developmental challenge for professional urban planners and urban managers and are predicted to continue to do so in years to come. At the heart of this challenge lies the complex relationship between the nature of informality and that of urban planning as a profession and discipline. The greater part of research on informal settlements has focused, and continues to focus, on bottomup approaches. While these approaches are central to global South oriented research, I argue for more focus on what appears to be the overlooked role of the global South planner. Whereas my approach delves into the intersection between managing informal settlements, utopian ideals of urban planning, and a radical push for decolonial thinking, urban planning in both the global North and global South has long been critiqued for its persistent rigid, colonial-modernist approach to the managing and assessment of urban development. The specific emphasis of my approach is on the mindset and sensibility necessary for built environment professionals to adopt when undertaking processes of urban development, a focus which seems so far to have been missing in planning debates. I argue that change cannot fully start from the bottom, that, for several reasons, it needs to start from the top. The modernist colonial origins, influence, and culture of urban planning is critiqued by scholars, particularly in the global South planning field, for ‘saving', ‘hiding', or ‘eradicating', rather than liberating and empowering the ‘other' in urban development processes. Central to this liberation, I argue, is a radical reorientation of planners' consciousness toward the kind of mindset and sensibility necessary when managing ‘the other', i.e. the urban poor, the marginalised, and those living in informal settlements. Any acknowledgement of the importance of both social organisation and identity in informal place-making lies in the shift in urban planning practitioners' mindsets. The focus of my case study is an exploration of the specific ways in which planning practitioners collaborated with each other, and with informal settlement communities. This included the power relations at play within this collaborative process, and the potential this process has to harness and invigorate the informal upgrading process. I explore these by looking at a pilot (Phase 1) Upgrading of an Informal Settlement Programme (UISP) project in Thembalethu, municipality of George, Western Cape Province. Even though the UISP is a housing policy rather than a planning tool, the UISP is actively designed to address and upgrade informal settlements by following a four-phased approach to address broader socio-economic challenges. By exploring the Thembalethu UISP, I explore the degree to which planners are able to intervene and manage the complexities and contradictions inherent in informal settlement upgrading processes such as those in Thembalethu, and the specific factors limiting their role in this process. My study adopted a qualitative case study research design approach. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with the professionals who administered, and were responsible for, the upgrading project, together with field observation. Data were analysed using a system change lens, adjacent to using a deductive thematic analysis technique. The planners were found to have played a marginal role in the upgrading process, and their agency to have been restricted, both by their employers and by the UISP budget, as their role was limited to technical layouts. Even though planning in this case remained ‘powerless' and tended to fall prey to ‘institutional victimisation', the role of the planner as revealed by the interviews was seen as imperative in providing spatial direction and balance in upgrading projects. Nevertheless, the interviews revealed that, in spite of their lack of agency and power in upgrading processes in the Thembalethu UISP, the planners were starting to reimagine informal spaces and the function of these, and, in so doing, challenging conventional ideas of design and layout, as well as the role of the planner, and their participation with communities in the planning process. This was all in addition, and at times in resistance to, policy considerations. While this process of incipient reimagining may have been the case in this study, the collaboration of built environment practitioners continues to mirror a disproportion of responsiveness between the state and the UISP implementing agent, and, in so doing, exposes the strength of governance systems continuing to remain in place. The current study is expected to hold significance both at empirical and theoretical levels. Some of the theoretical significance resides in the move towards an African or de-colonial turn in planning, as well as towards a grounded learning-driven planning approach. While there is a body of research which shows how planning need not overlook power, I suggest specific ways in which ideas of decentralisation have exposed the strength (i.e., distribution of power) of existing urban governance systems and community participation. The empirical significance of the study calls for a greater emphasis on how the role of the implementing agent has been discounted in the literature. The findings also suggest the necessity for neighbourhood design and scale of intervention in upgrading projects, and for these projects to be more appropriate to the specific needs of informal communities than are large-scale one-size-fits-all state funded projects. Even though there has been a shift in scale and exploration in layout design, there remains a need for a holistic approach to urban development. On a policy level, the findings point to both a gap in, and a need for, greater alignment between housing and planning legislation and policies. Thus, the study offers a deeper knowledge and understanding of policy considerations, and of how custodianship of policies can become a major stronghold, if not a greater power contender, in the urban development spectrum. Furthermore, existing ideas of ‘community empowerment' language in policy documents are interrogated. In the process of understanding the workings of this, I look in detail at management styles and at the kind of leadership necessary for implementing upgrading programmes. Based on the findings, I put forward the importance of ambivalence in any upgrading project. Thus, in the context of urban development as a dynamic ‘collective', I consider the inability of planners to hold ambivalence to be a significant hindrance to their ability to envision, or to re-imagine, informal settlements. I argue that this in turn implicates the way planners think and manage the collective needs, together with the dynamism of informal settlements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/38496 |
| Date | 08 September 2023 |
| Creators | Hill, Danielle Grace |
| Contributors | Pieterse, Edgar |
| Publisher | Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, Doctoral, PhD |
| Format | application/pdf |
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