Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities - Agence ...

PART TWO
An Uncertain Determination
to Plan the Urban Landscape
It is important to understand how the government of South Africa plans its territory
and the difficulties it encounters in doing so. Planning is often viewed as a potentially
very powerful tool to develop urban areas. Indeed, anticipating and regulating urban
development seems to be one of the government’s important prerogatives with crucial
consequences. Planning and managing human settlements (whether residential,
economic, industrial, etc.) should provide a way of influencing the urban landscape and
city development. Planning is an essential tool to manage urban sprawl, develop fair
cities, spread out the various types of activities, consider travel on the scale of the
agglomeration, and take into account environmental constraints. The aim is to foster
a crosscutting approach and avoid approaches that are guided by short-term visions
or generated by actors’ interests, which diverge in the case of territories.
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However, planning the urban landscape presents a very large number of
difficulties and is a particularly tricky aspect of public policy in developing countries,
as it is in emerging and developed countries. It requires one to consider several territorial
scales and several urban functions, and above all to have a government that is
sufficiently powerful and has considerable and clearly identified responsibilities.
© AFD 2009 Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities