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

The Hindrances to the
Effectiveness of
Planning Methods
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This study is primarily interested in public policies in terms of equity and urban
landscapes allowing all people to have acceptable modes of life. From this angle, the
goal of urban planning for the government seems to be to reflect on the desired
development of cities and, depending on the policy chosen, to influence it. To influence
city development, the government can first define a strategy that is then used as a
guideline for decisions by all actors. Then, it can establish land regulations so as to apply
the urban development policy, both by elaborating a land strategy and reserving land
for public policies and by guiding and managing private investment. An improper
shortcut would be to say that, for the moment, South Africa’s public authorities use
planning to identify property and spatially direct public policies, but are not really
developing a land management strategy. They have great difficulty directing private
investment. Zoning documents are still obsolete and do not at all support a territorial
strategy. Numerous obstacles currently prevent planning from fulfilling these objectives.
It should be noted here that planning is a tool that is very often idealized and whose
execution difficulties are shared by the entire country.
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5.1. Strategy Elaboration Is Tricky
The lack of a national strategic framework addressing city development is
obviously a handicap for the emergence of coordinated local actions aiming to plan urban
landscapes. This explains the diversity of measures taken by the provinces and
municipalities. However, as we have seen, it became mandatory for municipalities to
establish development strategies (IDPs) near the end of the 1990s. The cities must,
thereby, plan which investments to make and where; this allows for better coordination
and more specific targeting of projects on struggling areas (Harrison et al., 2008).
© AFD 2009 Integrating Poor Populations in South African Cities