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Urban Planning in the Global South
Richard de Satgé • Vanessa Watson
Urban Planning in the

Global South
Conflicting Rationalities in Contested Urban Space
Richard de Satgé Vanessa Watson
Phuhlisani NPC School of Architecture, Planning
Cape Town, South Africa and Geomatics
University of Cape Town
Cape Town, South Africa
ISBN 978-3-319-69495-5 ISBN 978-3-319-69496-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69496-2
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Acknowledgements
We would like to extend profound thanks and appreciation to Saskia

Greyling for her excellent project managing and editing of this book.
Vanessa Watson would also like to thank the National Research Foundation
of South Africa for the resources which made it possible to support Saskia.
We thank the Cape Archives for permission to reproduce historical
plans of Langa. We thank the Chief Directorate for National Geo-Spatial
Information in the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform
for assistance in digitising historical aerial photographs and the National
Printer for permission to print the same.
We would also like to thank Christina Brian of Palgrave for her editorial
assistance.
Mteto Mzongwana, Mike Zuma and Ayanda Mfazwe are acknowl-
edged for their valuable assistance with the case research in Langa.
Ultimately thanks go to all those who shared their stories—people in Joe
Slovo and Langa, government officials and those in civil society who spoke
with candour and insight.
Contemporary photographs of Langa were taken by Richard de Satgé.
Urban Planning in the Global South—Conflicting Rationalities in
Contested Urban Space
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Conflicting Rationalities and Southern Planning Theory 11
3 African Cities: Planning Ambitions and Planning Realities 35
4 Struggles for Shelter and Survival in Post-apartheid

South African Cities: The Case of Langa 63
5 Voices from and Within the State 95
6 Conflicting Rationalities in the N2 Gateway Project:

Voices from Langa 137
7 Implications for Southern Planning Theory and Practice 187
8 Conclusion 221
vii
viii Contents
Appendix 245
Exchange Rates 249
Index 251
Acronyms
AEC Anti-Eviction Campaign

ANC African National Congress
CCT City of Cape Town
COHRE Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions
CORC Community Organisation Resource Centre
DA Democratic Alliance
DAG Development Action Group
FEDUP Federation of the Urban Poor
FNB First National Bank
HDA Housing Development Agency
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
ISN Informal Settlements Network
LED Local Economic Development
LRC Legal Resources Centre
MEC Member of the Executive Council, (Provincial sphere of
government)
MINMEC Ministers and Members of Executive Councils
MK Umkhonto we Sizwe
NGO Non-Government Organisation
NPC National Planning Commission
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PAC Pan Africanist Congress
PCAS Policy Co-ordination and Advisory Services
ix
x ACRONYMS
PGWC Provincial Government of the Western Cape

PMG Parliamentary Monitoring Group
RDP Reconstruction and Development Plan
SDI Shack Dwellers International
SHF Social Housing Foundation
TRA Temporary Relocation Area
Author Biographies
Richard de Satgé is Director of Research at Phuhlisani, a non-profit

company. He has 40 years’ of experience in working in NGOs across
Southern Africa as an educator and researcher with a focus on land, liveli-
hoods, poverty and informality. He holds a PhD from the Univerity of
Cape Town.
Vanessa Watson is a professor and fellow, and on the executive of the
African Centre for Cities, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Her research over the last 35 years has focused on urban planning in the
global South and the effects of inappropriate planning practices and theo-
ries, especially in Africa.
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 1923: Plan for “Langa Native Township” (Source: Cape
Archives file reference M3/4005) 74
Fig. 4.2 From plan to establishment: Langa in 1935 (Source: National
Geo-Spatial Information digitised aerial photograph 100 005
09507)76
Fig. 4.3 1953: Expansion eastwards (Source: National Geo-Spatial
Information digitised aerial photograph 335 006 6051) 79
Fig. 4.4 Langa in 1973 at the height of the enforced apartheid spatial
order (Source: National Geo-Spatial Information digitised
aerial photograph 498 30 001 02827) 83
Fig. 4.5 Langa in 1992. Blurring of the settlement outline through the
early flowering of informality and the southern expansion of
Langa through the construction of freestanding homes in the
Settlers Way development (Source: National Geo-Spatial
Information digitised aerial photograph 498 305 004 00423) 84
Fig. 5.1 Above: Phase 3C of the N2 Gateway is currently under
construction. Below: The mural depicts Joe Slovo ANC
and SACP liberation struggle veteran and the first Minister
of Housing in democratic South Africa 107
Fig. 6.1 Langa Spinster Quarters—hostel accommodation for single
women constructed in 1925 139
Fig. 6.2 Langa Single Quarters—the first men’s hostels
constructed in 1925 139
Fig. 6.3 Four-storey flats known as the Old Flats constructed
from 1944 140
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 6.4 Hostels known as the New Flats constructed in the 1970s.
Some of the blocks have since been renovated and upgraded
to family units. However, hostel upgrading processes are often
associated with de-densification and displacement. In some
instances, upgrading initiatives have been resisted, often by
younger men 140
Fig. 6.5 Spoornet hostel constructed for railway workers in 1970 and
owned by parastatal Transnet. The hostel has remained
unrenovated141
Fig. 6.6 Single-storey hostels known as the Zones were constructed
from the 1970s. They cover a wide area of Langa. Open space
between the hostel blocks has been filled in by a dense mosaic
of informal dwellings 142
Fig. 6.7 Suburban housing in Langa constructed as part of the Settlers
development in the mid-1980s 147
Fig. 6.8 Sections of Joe Slovo informal settlement have been
constructed in close proximity to suburban housing in Langa
leading to tension between Langa borners and informal
settlement dwellers 149
Fig. 6.9 Joe Slovo informal settlement grew rapidly from the early
1990s. The N2 Gateway aimed to eradicate informality.
The design and implementation of the megaproject
triggered multilateral contestation 154
Fig. 6.10 Companies leased land from the City to construct and
manage ‘grey hostels’ for their workers. They subsequently
abandoned these hostels in the 1980s. Many remain
unrenovated and poorly serviced 171
Fig. 6.11 Intersite temporary relocation area (TRA) was constructed
in 2005 to provide shelter for fire victims. It has also been
used as rollover accommodation for people displaced
by phased construction of the N2 Gateway 172
Fig. 6.12 Phase 1 of the N2 Gateway was designed as rental social
housing. However, flats were allocated with no social
housing institution in place. Problems with building
finishes and lack of maintenance triggered a rent boycott and
resulted in opportunistic sub-letting of flats to capture rents 176
Fig. 6.13 Phase 3a of the N2 Gateway (right) and upgraded hostels
(left) on Winnie Mandela Street 178
Fig. 6.14 Phase 3a of the N2 Gateway 179
List of Tables
Table 5.1 The three spheres of government 102

Table 6.1 Housing types 146
Table 7.1 Relationship of non-state actors to the state 194
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Introduction
How different does planning theory and practice need to be when it hap-
pens in different parts of the world? To what extent does planning require
a deep understanding of the context in which it proposes to intervene and
how should this understanding shape what planners do? These questions
challenge some long-held assumptions in planning where both theory and
practice have tended to smooth over this kind of sensitivity in favour of
concepts and practices which are place-blind and held to be valid any-
where in the world. The purpose of this book is to foreground the impor-
tance of recognising place and location in planning if it is to achieve the
kinds of ambitions (social justice and equity, and sustainability) which it
usually sets itself and avoid the unintended consequences which so often
ensue.
Southern Planning Theory

Posing these questions about the relevance of place is currently at the cen-
tre of some heated debates in planning as well as in a range of cognate
disciplines. In planning, as well as in the fields of urban studies, sociology,
anthropology, climate change and more, there has been a recent ‘southern
turn’ in which scholars have challenged the validity of knowledge pro-
duced in global North regions (the advanced capitalist economies of the
© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. de Satgé, V. Watson, Urban Planning in the Global South,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69496-2_1
2 R. DE SATGÉ AND V. WATSON
world) and assumed to hold true everywhere else. In planning there is a

long tradition of theorising about the nature of cities and regions and the
kinds of interventions which are appropriate and possible, based on
assumed characteristics of global North regions: relatively strong civil soci-
eties, well-resourced and capacitated institutions of governance, devel-
oped formal economies and lower levels of poverty and unemployment.
While it is true that these characteristics are changing and express diversity
even within the global North, southern theorists argue that those parts of
the world termed the global South are firstly, sufficiently different from
global North regions as to require entirely new theoretical concepts and
secondly, are still shaped by their histories of colonialism which set them
apart from the global North and locate them in a particular and ongoing
relationship to the global North (and its processes of knowledge produc-
tion). Those who write about the global South recognise the possibility of
different characteristics in the places they study: rapid urbanisation
(although no longer in Latin America), weak and fractured civil society,
poorly resourced and capacitated institutions of governance, largely infor-
mal urban economies and high levels of unemployment, poverty and
inequality. They recognise the huge and ever-changing differences in these
characteristics across the continents usually included in the global South.
Southern theorists are at the same time keen to emphasise that their use of
the term ‘southern’ does not necessarily refer to a geographical South, but
more to a perspective or orientation from different parts of the world (see
Bhan et al. 2018). The problem of setting up theoretical binaries between
global North and global South knowledge is well recognised. Chapter 2 of
the book sets out this debate in more detail.
This book aligns itself with the southern turn in planning scholarship.
The authors have long worked in South Africa and on the African conti-
nent in the fields of planning and development. They have long been aware
of how concepts, models and approaches come from elsewhere in the
world, usually the global North, but more recently from those parts of the
global South which are rapidly modernising and developing. These
approaches (sometimes termed ‘best practices’) tend to ‘land’ in this part
of the global South with little preliminary investigation of their potential
‘fit’, little consultation with those who feel their impact and frequently
with highly negative outcomes. The African continent has a long history of
such landings as part of processes of colonisation, and in planning, these
laws, concepts, models and even university curricula have persisted to the
present time. In South Africa, the apartheid government used planning
INTRODUCTION 3
‘best practice’ models from the global North (Garden Cities, neighbourhood
unit and Radburn layouts, satellite towns), to justify pernicious strategies
of racial segregation in cities and the forced removal of families of colour
from established and integrated neighbourhoods to barren and far-flung
new suburbs. The devastating effects of this on families still linger. But
while apartheid has now gone, state planning interventions continue to
draw on inappropriate planning ideas and models which continue to exac-
erbate inequalities and marginalisation of the poorest, and usually black,
households.
This book explores in depth one such example of recent planning in the
township of Langa, the oldest African neighbourhood in Cape Town and
designed in 1923, along British Garden City lines. This intervention
sought to provide housing to ‘eradicate’ informality, but resulted in a host
of unforeseen consequences. Planning and planners (and associated pro-
fessionals) can be involved in a wide range of urban management and
change actions, but housing-related interventions are often a key determi-
nant of how cities and towns function overall. This is certainly true of
South African cities and the Langa intervention is a potent example of
what Robins (2002, 513) describes as the enduring fantasy of South
African planners and policy makers to transform and standardise the every-
day urban spaces of the poor.
Conflicting Rationalities
While the authors of this book have been well aware of the frequent clashes
between state visions and plans and the everyday lives of urban residents in
southern contexts such as this, theorising these processes is more difficult.
Such theorising has to position itself in relation to other existing planning
theories and must be prepared to both show the weaknesses of these theo-
ries and suggest alternative ways of thinking. In 2003, one of the authors
gained access to a detailed report of a Commission of Enquiry set up by
the Cape Town municipality to investigate a state informal upgrade plan
which was rejected by the intended community and gave rise to extensive
protests. The clash between the modernising ambitions of the state and
the very different world views of the shack dwellers, which themselves
were fragmented and conflictual, came through clearly in the verbatim
record of evidence to the Commission. In a subsequent article, Watson
(2003) coined the term ‘conflicting rationalities’ to capture this diver-
gence between state and community positions. The article also suggested
that the persistence of such deep and irreconcilable differences challenged

planning theory of the time which, drawing on Habermassian communi-
cative action theory, argued that the right approach to dialogue between
planners and communities could achieve consensus and positive planning
outcomes. The article proposed that instead, planners needed to under-
stand how to accept and work with deep difference and ongoing conflict.
In the years since 2003 the concept of conflicting rationalities has
gained some traction, and consensus-based planning theory anyway has
been challenged by newer lines of thought. However, a concept such as
conflicting rationalities, based on a single case study and informed by only
secondary sources of information (the Commission of Enquiry Report), is
difficult to defend and runs the risk of over-simplifying state-society inter-
action. This book takes the idea a step further and presents an in-depth
case study which tests the concept of conflicting rationalities, conducted as
doctoral research by the author, de Satgé. Drawing on a lifetime of work
on rural and urban land, migration and livelihoods in southern Africa,
including Joe Slovo informal settlement in Langa, he was able to deeply
interrogate the nature of interaction between and within the various levels
and elements of the state and the residents of the Langa site around a
megaproject planning intervention. In this book we do not suggest that
planners and associated professionals consciously adopted particular plan-
ning theories to inform how they engaged with communities. As inter-
views with officials working on this project show, they were certainly aware
that such engagement should be taking place, but the prospect was simply
too daunting and threatening to embark on. It was also overtly discour-
aged by officials at higher levels of government on the grounds that a
democratic government ‘knows what the people want’.
Researching Conflicting Rationalities

in Langa: The Method
The method used in this research was therefore based on a single case
study classified as ‘paradigmatic’ given its potential to “highlight more
general characteristics of the society in question…with metaphorical and
prototypical value” (Flyvbjerg 2006, 397). The research can be regarded
as ‘retroductive’ in that it progresses from a theoretical framework or
hypothesised concept (conflicting rationalities in this instance) to an
empirical case and then speaks back to the original theoretical idea or con-
cept (see Duminy et al. 2014). The case itself (Langa) comprises a small
INTRODUCTION 5
enclave within metropolitan Cape Town with a population of approxi-

mately 52,000 people compressed into an area of 3.09 km2 in a city of
some 3.7 million people. It should not be understood in isolation from its
broader context within the city, the country and the wider continent.
Chapter 3 on planning in Sub-Saharan Africa and Chap. 4 on South Africa
and Cape Town locate the case both historically and socio-economically.
Methodologically, the study drew on research methods which embrace
the ‘visual turn’, utilising satellite images and photographic compilations
as narrative triggers for storytelling by residents, officials and civil society
actors. Harper traces the history of visual methods and the various ways in
which photographs can be used in the research process asserting that “a
photograph, a literal rendering of an element of the subject’s world, calls
forth associations, definitions or ideas that would otherwise go unno-
ticed” (Harper 1988, 65). These stories attach themselves to the inherent
ambiguity that is contained within a photograph and has the potential to
provide “a unique means of expression” and which may “suggest another
way of telling” (Berger and Mohr 1982, 92).
The research strategy involved two clusters of interviews, both utilising
image-led narrative elicitation. Cluster one was based on a mix of random
and purposive sampling within Langa. Cluster two sought to purposively
sample and interview strategic actors in the state and its intermediaries
with direct involvement in the case: Joe Slovo informal settlement, Langa
and the planned and executed N2 Gateway megaproject.
In-depth interviews were conducted in English and Xhosa, surfacing
important lacunae in meanings and interpretation, and highlighting the
many distortions which can arise through linguistic intermediation.1
Following the interviews, primary and secondary data sources were identi-
fied and analysed in order to test and triangulate the trends and issues
surfaced by interview data, and examine divergences where these occurred.
Understanding the Langa Megaproject

In 2004, South African public housing policy underwent a major revision.
A new vision for housing was subsequently unveiled as Breaking New
Ground: A Comprehensive Plan for Housing Delivery. The plan sought to
reverse the first wave of post-apartheid state-subsidised housing which had
been delivered through ‘greenfields’ development on the urban peripher-
ies and had been criticised for reinforcing apartheid spatial patterns.
Breaking New Ground (BNG) sought to identify well-located urban land
on which to provide affordable and higher density rental housing stock for
the poor, while simultaneously enabling in situ upgrades of informal set-
tlements, and addressing urban spatial marginalisation of the poor.
However, BNG contained a contradiction. While the plan announced “a
new informal settlement upgrading instrument”, its stated purpose was
“to support the focused eradication of informal settlements” (Department
of Housing 2004, 6, emphasis added).
In 2005, the N2 Gateway—a high-profile housing megaproject—was
launched in Cape Town to pilot BNG and address the housing needs of 11
informal settlements together with those of an estimated 6650 households
living in backyard shacks in the vicinity. Cape Town’s oldest and well-
located township, Langa, was selected as the launch site for the N2
Gateway. The project focus in Langa was on the informal settlement of Joe
Slovo which had sprung up in the early 1990s along the N2 Highway—a
major arterial connecting the centre of Cape Town to its airport. Initially,
Joe Slovo had accommodated outflows from overcrowded hostels origi-
nally designed for single migrant workers but now increasingly home to
families, as well as to people moving out of cramped backyard shacks built
adjacent to older formal houses in Langa. The freestanding informal set-
tlement was the most visible expression of a broader upwelling of infor-
mality which had started to fill in and blur the spatial grid across most
Cape Town township precincts. These local outflows were swelled by
rapid in-migration of work seekers from former rural ‘homeland’ areas in
the Eastern Cape. The settlement grew rapidly and developed a reputation
as the locus of increasingly frequent and devastating shack fires, linked to
its youthful demographic and the predominance of young single men.
The N2 Gateway megaproject set out to ‘eradicate’ Joe Slovo and
replace it with a mix of affordable rental and ownership housing units.
However, the project was shadowed by intense controversy from the out-
set and provoked multifaceted and long-running conflicts. The intrusion
of the N2 Gateway into the complex social mosaic of Langa served to
escalate rival claims on space, place, identity and belonging between Langa
‘borners’,2 backyarders, hostel dwellers and informal settlers. In its early
years, the project provoked militant resistance, protest and civil disobedi-
ence, triggering state moves to evict residents of the informal settlement
and opposing court actions that resulted in a Constitutional Court judge-
ment which reshaped the future of the project.
The conceptual framework for this research draws on Foucauldian con-
ceptions of power, the state apparatus of governmentality and biopolitics
INTRODUCTION 7
drawn together in what Li has conceptualised as ‘the will to govern and

improve’ and its encounter with ‘the will to survive and thrive’ (Li 2007,
5) of groupings of the poor expressed through complex micropolitics,
claims on space and place and dynamic and adaptive strategies of struggle.
This perspective was used to explore possible conflicting rationalities that
this engendered and illuminates the switch points and reversals in the
flows of power which result.
Voices from and Within the State,

Voices from and Within Langa
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 of the book present the findings and interpretation of
the research in the Langa case. Chapter 5 draws on the narratives of offi-
cials in various branches of the state, together with affiliated technical and
managerial actors with diverse histories of engagement within Langa and
the N2 Gateway. It also explores the work of state intermediaries or ‘trust-
ees’ (Non-Government Organisations [NGOs] and other non-state
actors) in the project. These narratives cast light on the complex and con-
tradictory workings of the state, and the rationalities and practices associ-
ated with its ‘will to govern and improve’. It reveals the fallacy of regarding
the state as a single entity and instead highlights the plurality of wills to
govern, the diverse agendas of improvement and the intrastate contesta-
tions that undermine the possibilities of coherence and synergy. Chapter 6
engages with diverse voices of social actors in the contested space of Langa
township. These narratives reveal a dynamic and granular mix of conflict-
ing claims on space, place and belonging within the township. They show
how state attempts to impose a neat megaproject logic and instrumental
rationality within Langa completely failed to read the social fissures
between different groups of Langa residents. Actors in the state seemed
unable or unwilling to recognise claims and counter-claims on space, place
and belonging with deep histories in the township, or ways in which these
space claims contributed to the ability of poor households to ‘survive and
thrive’ in the city.
Chapter 7 draws together understandings of the state and of the Langa
groups, and the complex interactions between them, to challenge notions of
simple binaries of state and society and also to indicate the nature and depth
of conflict within and between them throughout a planning process which
(officially) intended to improve living conditions of poor households. The
concept of conflicting rationalities thus has value but requires elaboration
and exploration in context. One important implication for planning is the

need to understand contexts in depth as a precursor to effective intervention
and avoidance of harm. It implies the ability to assemble and catalogue the
rationalities imbricated in the wills to ‘govern and improve’, to record the
ways in which these encounter wills to ‘survive and thrive’, and the capacity
to understand social and institutional complexity and intricate networks,
relations and oscillations of power. In other words, ‘place’ matters for plan-
ning and development projects. This is true for planning in any part of the
world but especially true for those global South regions less exposed to
analysis and research, or which have been subjected to research through
conceptual categories imported from very different parts of the world.
A second important implication has been surfaced by the thick mosaic
of associated social encounters and the complex conflicts and alignments
which shaped the N2 Gateway intervention. These complexities stand in
stark contrast to thin and instrumental assumptions of ‘public participa-
tion’ or ‘community driven collaborative planning’ which permeate the
discourses of the developmental state as well as planning theory which has
emerged from contexts where both civil society and the state may be more
robust and where such collaborative processes may be possible. This
enables reflection on what kind of engagement processes might result in
better outcomes with the proviso that this is dependent on context and
that can be amplified by processes of further learning from cases in south-
ern contexts (e.g. see Watson 2014).
Chapter 8 is the conclusion to the book. It asks why planning mega-
projects of the kind attempted in Langa so often fail and hints at some
directions that might have made a difference. It then, following the trajec-
tory of retroductive case study research, uses the case to generate a set of
theoretical propositions. In this regard, the findings of the Langa case are
not regarded as immediately applicable in other similar cases; rather, the
case generates ideas which are to be tested in other cases as a step in the
process of building a southern theorising project in planning.
Notes
1. Appendix 1 to the book lists interview subjects.
2. Langa ‘borners’ are those who were born and grew up in the city and had
been granted urban residence rights in the pre-democratic era. They are
associated with a particular ‘kasi’ or township set of values and attitudes
which differentiate them from ‘unsophisticated rural migrants’.
INTRODUCTION 9
References
Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. 1982. Another Way of Telling. London: Writers and
Readers Publishing Co-operative.
Bhan, Gautam, Smita Srinivas, and Vanessa Watson, eds. 2018. The Routledge
Companion to Planning in the Global South. Abingdon/New York: Routledge.
Department of Housing. 2004. “Breaking New Ground” —Comprehensive Plan
for Housing Delivery. Pretoria: Department of Housing. http://www.nwpg.
gov.za/DDLG&TA/acts/Breaking%20New%20Grounds.pdf.
Duminy, James, Jorgen Andreasen, Fred Lerise, Nancy Odendaal, and Vanessa
Watson, eds. 2014. Planning and the Case Study Method in Africa: The Planner
in Dirty Shoes, 48–77. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Flyvbjerg, Bent. 2006. Five Misunderstandings About Case Study Research.
Qualitative Inquiry 12: 219–245.
Harper, Douglas. 1988. Visual Sociology: Expanding Sociological Vision. The
American Sociologist 19: 54–70.
Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and
the Practice of Politics. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Robins, Steven. 2002. Planning ‘Suburban Bliss’ in Joe Slovo Park, Cape Town.
Africa 72 (04): 511–548.
Watson, Vanessa. 2003. Conflicting Rationalities: Implications for Planning
Theory and Ethics. Planning Theory and Practice 4 (4): 395–408.
———. 2014. Co-production and Collaboration in Planning—the Difference.
Planning Theory and Practice 15 (1): 62–76.
CHAPTER 2
Conflicting Rationalities and Southern

Planning Theory
Introduction
Over the last couple of decades, a ‘southern turn’1 has become evident in
a number of areas of scholarship. There have been heated debates in the
fields of urban studies and urban planning over the extent to which it is
possible to accept universal analytical and normative concepts of cities that
are applicable everywhere in the world. Theorists taking a southern per-
spective have argued that ‘place matters’ (whether in global North or
South), and that the degree of abstraction assumed in concepts claiming
to be applicable everywhere sweeps away the possibility of a thorough
understanding of cities and regions, and directly constrains potentially
meaningful and effective planning intervention. More than this, however,
recognising that place matters is an epistemological shift: it questions how
theorists claim to view and know all places, the methods that might be
used to do this, who is involved in knowing (single academics, poor com-
munities) and the nature of theory or idea which informs or emerges from
such processes. Given the recent emergence of the southern turn, there is
still little agreement amongst southern scholars themselves over what this
‘turn’ might mean: if it speaks just to particular geographical parts of the
globe, if it is primarily a theoretical perspective or if it aims to mainly draw
attention to a global political economy of knowledge-making and
knowledge- dissemination. Planners in particular are interested in how
these ideas can be grounded in real places and in addressing complex and
© The Author(s) 2018 11

R. de Satgé, V. Watson, Urban Planning in the Global South,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69496-2_2
immediate planning issues. If a central role of planning theory is to shape

practice, does the southern turn offer new understandings of cities and
communities in these parts of the world and new ways to act as planners
and agents of change?
This chapter provides a theoretical framing for the rest of the book. It
first considers the southern turn, how it has inspired a range of arenas of
scholarship, giving rise to important new debates and positions, and how
it has found its way into planning discourse. The constant theme in these
writings, that place matters for both understanding and action, provides
justification for the following chapters which explain the distinctive nature
of planning in Africa (in Chap. 3) and in the Cape Town case study (in
Chaps. 5, 6 and 7). A key theoretical claim of this book is that the concept
of conflicting rationalities helps to shape an understanding of the kinds of
global South urban environments in which many planners and related
scholars and professionals work, and the second part of this chapter
addresses this conceptual proposition directly.
The Southern Turn in Global Scholarship

Postcolonial thought, acknowledging all of its heterogeneity, has had a
significant influence on emerging southern theorising. While it is unwise
to generalise across the range of disciplines now making reference to the
term ‘southern’, it is possible to see commonalities in their critique of
abstract and universalised theorising, which claims to be valid everywhere
and yet, when unpicked, draws from very specific and parochial situations
and contexts. In this sense, postcolonial positions critique both the impact
which such knowledge-making has in the world and the approach to
knowledge-making itself. Linking power and knowledge is critical here,
and for Dados and Connell (2012, 12) “…the phrase ‘Global South’
marks a shift from a central focus on development or cultural difference
towards an emphasis on geopolitical relations of power.” The near-global
hegemony of certain approaches to reasoning, and the strategies and tech-
niques which perpetuate them, is recognised as an ongoing process of
imperialism. The struggle for different views and different understandings
of the world is therefore also global and is enmeshed in a relational way
with dominant paradigms of knowledge. Those who use the word ‘south-
ern’ are rarely referring to the global South as a geographic location but
rather to a critical perspective which aims to both deconstruct and recon-
struct our understanding of the world everywhere.
CONFLICTING RATIONALITIES AND SOUTHERN PLANNING THEORY 13
It is perhaps not surprising that anthropology, a discipline which has

long eschewed grand totalising and abstract theorising, has made impor-
tant contributions to the idea of southern theory. Comaroff and Comaroff
(2012, 1) seek to counter the positioning of Western enlightenment
thought “…as the wellspring of universal learning…” while the global
South is seen as “…a place of parochial wisdom, of antiquarian traditions,
of exotic ways and means. Above all, of unprocessed data”. Instead, they
suggest that researching in the global South offers privileged insights into
the workings of the world at large, as it is in the global South that the
impacts of its relationship to the global North have been most starkly felt.
In sociology, Connell (2007, ix) questions the “…belief that social science
can have only one, universal body of concepts and methods, the one cre-
ated in the global North…”. Her more recent contribution (Connell 2014)
argues for recognition of a globally operating ‘political economy of knowl-
edge’ which shapes and controls the kind of knowledge produced in south-
ern regions and marginalises its contribution to dominant theoretical
production by labelling it as ‘mere’ data collection. Supporting a postcolo-
nial view of global knowledge-making, social scientist Mignolo (2007,
476) holds that modernity and coloniality are relational and inseparably
interlinked, and an understanding of modernity requires that its (ongoing)
global project is taken into account: “There is no modernity without colo-
niality”. However, Rosa (2014) has a more critical assessment of various
social science contributions to southern theory, and suggests that while
they certainly expose the weaknesses and fallacies of hegemonic social the-
ory, there is still a lack of clarity on what southern theory might offer in its
place and as such should be referred to as a project (in the making), rather
than an established alternative position.
Connell (2014) has pointed to a structural underpinning of hegemonic
global North theory in which metropolitan dominance is created and sus-
tained by factors such as a greater capacity for funding work or training and
retaining researchers, or the ability to afford expensive large-scale com-
puter models in fields such as climate change or economics. This is further
reinforced through northern dominance of the publishing industry along
with journal editors, reviewers and citation systems, all of which can work
to support hegemonic theory and writing styles. In the field of climate
change, author location has become a major source of contention. The
politics of international climate change debates on the International Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) and concerns of northern dominance gave rise
to a number of IPCC assessments which showed that the percentage of
authors, review editors and expert reviewers from the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development countries has remained at
between 80 and 82 per cent, little changed from the 1990s (Hulme 2010).
In understanding the causes of climate change, Hulme (2010, 559) sug-
gests that this dominance is responsible for the “…erasing of geographical
sensibility in the making, mobilization and consumption of knowledge…
downplaying cultural difference or ignoring spatial relationships of power”.
The field of urban studies is closely allied to that of planning and fre-
quently provides a source for understanding how cities function and
change. Here strong disagreements have emerged between theorists.
Derickson (2015) summarises these differences as Urbanisation 1
(Marxist/structuralist) referring to urban scholars attempting to build
general and universal urban theories, and Urbanisation 2 (post-structural
and postcolonial) referring to authors thinking urbanisation ‘from below’.
Scott and Storper (2014), from the first category, argue that a single, uni-
tary theory of cities can be relevant to all cities in the world, and while
there may be ‘endless empirical diversity’ in how these processes unfold,
this does not warrant ‘new conceptual categories’ through which to
understand cities. The idea that a single (universalised) theoretical frame
will do for everywhere has been strongly countered by urban studies
scholars, who argue that a postcolonial critique can reveal serious flaws in
this argument (Roy 2015). Scott and Storper’s (2014) approach places all
cities on an ‘isotropic plane’ at a snapshot moment in time; in other words,
decontextualises them. A postcolonial position very differently places his-
tory as a central shaper of difference, but also draws global North and
global South into a particular relationship with each other, which brings
attention to the how and why of difference. An approach to theorising
that interprets historical difference as empirical variation is, Roy (2015)
argues, symptomatic of a theory culture that reproduces Eurocentrism:
there is no possibility of challenging these established theoretical catego-
ries from beyond their (inevitably parochial) source of origin. Urban theo-
rists calling for ‘southern theory’, Roy (2015) adds, are not wanting to
add different varieties of cities from a particular geographical region;
rather, they are asking for a new relationality of theory.
This work of critical urban studies scholars has implications for policy
and planning theory. Robinson’s (2006) destabilisation of the earlier
‘global cities’ literature and its assumption that the world financial capitals
were in some way representative of cities everywhere, or should be used as
models for other cities to aspire to, may not have daunted those on the
African continent and elsewhere calling for world-class city plans, but has
raised questions about how to conceptualise what has sometimes been
called ‘best practice’ copying across different contexts. Roy and Ong
(2011) argue that the notion of ‘borrowed urbanisms’ is a more complex
one, using the term ‘worlding’ to examine how cities of the global South
have been ‘worlded’ in the discourses and imaginaries of metropolitan
studies. Here Roy (2011a, 308) uses the postcolonial not as an urban
condition, but rather as a critical deconstructive methodology to do global
metropolitan studies. This brings together both themes of subaltern
agency and global subjugation in postcolonial studies to show “…how an
urban situation can be at once heterogeneously particular and yet irreduc-
ibly global” (Ong and Collier 2008, in Roy 2011a, 309).
The Southern Turn in Planning Scholarship

In the field of planning, as with other disciplines, there is a strong domi-
nance of theory which is largely based on assumptions about socio-
economic and institutional contexts in global North regions and which is
then, implicitly or explicitly, regarded as being valid for the rest of the
world. Many of these planning theorists also draw on cognate, northern-
dominated, disciplines (urban studies, social science, economics) and on
philosophical positions (Habermas, Rawls) which are shaped by a faith in
Western liberal democracy as a desirable normative project. Abstract and
universalised theory is regarded as superior theory and rarely is the highly
parochial nature of these ideas recognised (see Yiftachel 2006a; Roy
2009a, 2011b; Watson 2009, 2013; Brownill and Parker 2010). As Porter
(2018) puts it: a postcolonial planning perspective will argue that planning
comes from a cultural perspective—it is not a view from nowhere. This
counters an underlying belief that the nature of cities and their societies,
economies, culture and governance can be perceived as so similar from
place to place that the need to geographically specify the source and rele-
vance of theory, or develop alternative theoretical positions for other
places, is not necessary. These differences are mere ‘empirical variation’, as
some urban studies scholars would have it.
It is of course necessary to recognise that planning in most parts of the
global South has long antecedents in colonial planning systems which
imposed planning laws and urban visions, and educational curricula,
believed to be superior, and there is no reason why planning as an arena of
knowledge production should be exempt from the perpetuation of intel-

lectual colonisation which has been noted in other disciplines. As with
other disciplines as well, the geographical distribution of knowledge-
making and knowledge-dissemination in planning is highly imbalanced in
favour of global North (and English-speaking) territories (Stiftel and
Mukhopadhyay 2007; Yiftachel 2006a) with publishing companies, jour-
nal editors, editorial board members and reviewers largely drawn from the
North. These structural factors entrench the dominance of northern plan-
ning theory. There may, however, be a shift occurring in this pattern, espe-
cially with the growing market for books and journals in East and South
East Asia.
What sets planning apart from other disciplines referred to above is the
need to both understand the contexts in which planning occurs and to act
on this understanding—to develop policies, plans and projects. The nor-
mative aspect of planning, based not only on analysis but also on values and
ethics which inform plans, hence impacts on planning action as well as on
planning theory. One often-claimed purpose of planning theory is to
inform practice, although there may rarely be a simple translation from
theory to practice. However, the outcome of planning action can and does
directly impact on the lives of people and on environments, for better or
worse. Cities in Africa (see Chap. 3), and the global South more generally,
are littered with failed imported planning efforts (British Garden Cities
and New Towns, or rigid and mono-functional zoning schemes and regu-
lations have produced landscaped suburbs and orderly development mainly
for the wealthy) based on erroneous assumptions about household survival
strategies, levels of car ownership and movement patterns, attitudes to
land, institutional capacities or socio-cultural decision-making processes.
At the same time, planners in practice in these regions have little to draw
on from northern planning theorists when it comes to taking action: how,
for example, to approach participatory processes in situations of deep and
irresolvable conflict; how to respond to rampant profit-motivated land
development where regulatory frameworks and master plans are outdated
and unworkable; how to propose forms of strategic planning and decision
making in institutional settings driven by political cultures of patronage
and paternalism and so on. Northern dominance of planning theory at
best is of little practical value and at worst has a directly negative impact on
cities and regions in those parts of the world where there is little ‘fit’
between concepts and models and ‘on-the-ground’ reality.
There is a growing trend to South-South ‘borrowing’ in planning prac-

tice (e.g. bus rapid transit systems from Bogotá) and even South-North
borrowing as well (e.g. municipal participatory budgeting from Brazil:
Sintomer et al. 2008). Problematically, however, this often falls into the old
trap of ‘best practice’ transfer which happens in isolation from an under-
standing of contextual preconditions for success. There is now a growing
literature on ‘policy transfer’ from one part of the world to another, with
recent theorists adopting the term ‘policy mobilities’. The latter makes an
important shift to “…[B]ring into consideration a range of agents, practices
and performances involved in the social production and transformative cir-
culation of forms of policy knowledge” (Bunnell 2015, 1988), echoing the
position of Roy and Ong (2011) on global ‘inter-referencing’.
The number of planning scholars interested in southern theorising
remains small, but some new themes have begun to emerge, often drawing
on the work of other disciplines with a more established interest in this part
of the world. Anthropologist James Holston’s (2008) work in Brazil and his
concept of ‘insurgent citizenship’ has been a source of inspiration for plan-
ning theorists exploring citizen resistance to planning and to the state
(Miraftab 2009; Meth 2010). Roy (2009b) and Yiftachel (2006b, 2009)
have taken the concept of informality, usually used to describe the illegal
activities of shack dwellers and traders, and turned it on its head to describe
activities of the state and planning, drawing on insights from southern con-
texts. Yiftachel (2009) has also addressed the scant attention given to ethnic-
ity as an element of urban materiality. He argues that ‘ethnocracy’ produces
‘gray’ spaces which only partially incorporate the ethnically marginalised and
which lie between the legal and the illegal of formal planning systems.
Bhan (2016) uses the basti (informal settlement) and their evictions in
Delhi as a lens through which to explore the dynamics of contemporary
urbanism across the global South, to see urbanism ‘from the South’ and
use the specificities of a place and time to ask questions about all cities.
The idea of speaking from ‘place’, and especially places often regarded as
‘peripheral’, rather than through the context-less, abstract universalisms of
many northern theorists, characterises Bhan’s work as well as those he
aligns with: Roy, Robinson, Yiftachel, Simone, the Comaroffs and others.
For Bhan the concept of periphery is an important one. He uses the term
to mean “…peripheral in multiple senses: peripheries of the world eco-
nomic and political system both historically and today; peripheries within
cities themselves; peripheries of geographies of authoritative knowledge”
(Bhan 2016, 15).
Bhan (2016) explores how the familiar planning concept of acting ‘in
the public interest’ has been appropriated by the courts in Delhi to justify
evictions, some of them from long-established settlements, in the name of
urban governance, development and order. This, he argues, suggests an
altered urban politics where familiar (planning and governance) referents,
through new sets of technologies and rationalities, are redefined to enable
evictions. It is these questions about planning, governance, citizenship,
exclusion and the persistence of poverty, as well as the apparent emerging
relationship between law and urbanism, which can be asked of urbanisms
more widely than Delhi and across cities of the global South.
The idea of speaking ‘from place’ is emphasised as well in recent work
by Yiftachel (2016). Drawing on a deep understanding of a single city—
Jerusalem—he argues that cities like this can be used, not as universal
models, but as a window to see the relational nature of urban forces, the
rise of new categories and concepts, and the transformations which they
bring about over time. He emphasises the multiple structural, and often
conflicting, urban logics which shape cities, and the nature of their interac-
tion in a particular (identified) place, producing and shaping ‘real’ urban
spaces. Understanding these logics and power relations through the plan-
ning and development of the city, as he suggests, offers a very different
approach to planning theory.
Porter’s work (2010, 2018) on southern thinking in planning draws
directly on postcolonial theory, as well as on settler-colonial studies and
on critical indigenous theories. While considering the complexities of
planning in the particularly pernicious form of settler- colonialism in
Australia, Porter (2010) raises issues that have broader relevance for south-
ern planning perspectives. She works from some of the foundational
concepts of postcolonial theory (and scholars such as Spivak and Chakrabarty),
an important one being that Western categories of thought obscure colonial
regulations of domination and subjugation as these categories are ‘seen’
from the West and disguise its own cultural position of power such that the
categories come to be regarded as ‘normal’. Thus categories such as state,
civil society, property ownership and many more codes and norms rele-
vant to planning discourse are assumed to be universal, but can have
severe consequences for those unable or unwilling to conform to the
expectations which they embody given the distributional and constraining
impacts which they have. Planning theories, such as those dealing with the
state and civil society (e.g. collaborative planning theory), which do not
recognise how social relations are refracted through colonial relations in

particular places have questionable value. Moreover, realising that plan-
ning ideas come ‘from elsewhere’ and arise from their own context allows
them to be recognised as ‘strange’ and opens them to critique and hence
reformulation. For example, can the concept of ‘illegality’, of those who
do not conform to planning and building laws, be reframed as a state-
driven process of illegalisation of what was previously normal and accept-
able, to refer to Yiftachel’s work on Bedouin villages.
Porter (2018) asks the important question: how do indigenous peoples
speak back in settler-colonial territories where the settler remains? This
must be asked in the context of Spivak’s (1988) question: can the subal-
tern speak, if they can only be heard in the language recognisable to the
very force against which they speak? Hence where indigenous peoples
make demands for recognition, land or self-determination, these claims are
either rejected or accommodated within the existing (and colonial) order,
in ways which do not undermine the sovereignty of the settler-state. The
use of law and rationalities of planning and governance to justify these
moves has echoes of Bhan’s (2016) work here. In planning, a different
spatial order is imposed on another society (as in Yiftachel’s work on the
erasure of Bedouin villages) reconfiguring activities, institutions and social
relations, and often exercising dispossession at the same time. Rethinking
planning from a postcolonial perspective also usefully draws attention not
only to the ‘local’ but also how such contexts are shaped by wider and
ongoing global relationships of domination of peripheries by centres (see
Mignolo 2007). Methodologically it requires combining local ethnographic
work with a broader political economy perspective.
As the above has indicated, there are rich emerging debates on south-
ern theorising across a range of disciplines that has revitalised theoretical
development in the urban and planning fields. Post-structural and postco-
lonial positions have frequently framed new southern thinking. Common
across all of these is a rejection of abstract universalised theories which
claim to be valid everywhere, while their highly parochial nature is not
difficult to reveal. Recognition of place and context is key to southern
thinking, while there is a strong rejection of the South as purely a
geographical concept. Southern thinking does raise issues which are new
and unsettled and some of these are aired in the next section.
Why a ‘Southern Theorising Project’?

The authors of this book broadly align themselves with the positions of
southern theorists reviewed in the section above, while recognising that
southern thinking in the field of planning is in its early stages of develop-
ment and is raising more questions than answers. For this reason, we pre-
fer to refer to a ‘southern theorising project’ in planning in which we are
developing a southern ‘perspective’, rather than suggesting that a clear
and defined southern planning theory yet exists. For this reason, it is nec-
essary to take on some of the objections to southern theorising that have
been quick to emerge.
The first is whether southern theory is not simply setting up a new and
dangerous binary between northern and southern theory, suggesting sep-
arate theories should hold in those parts of the world geographically
defined as South, if this were possible. Southern theorists reject this inter-
pretation. For Connell, southern theory does not mean a geographical
South. Rather the use of the term southern means “[to] emphasize rela-
tions – of authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership,
sponsorship, appropriation – between intellectuals and institutions in the
metropole and those in the world periphery” (Connell 2007, ix). She
argues that we should not be asking: how does southern theory add to
what we already know, but rather: “what does southern theory ask us to
do that we are not doing now, as knowledge workers?” (Connell 2014,
218). For Comaroff and Comaroff (2012), their interest is in the effect of
the South on theorising more generally, taking the position that southern
sensitivity generates critical perspectives through being ‘eccentric’.
Contradictions can be understood better from ‘outside’, they argue, hence
their interest is not in a geographical South but in ‘southness as eccentric-
ity’. For Bhan (2016), the South is also a conceptual rather than physical
location, a relational geography rather than a set of undeveloped countries
or the postcolonial world. This conception, he argues, allows theory to
travel, to start from place but then to offer insight into the urbanism of all
cities, to use concepts such as informality from the South to understand
northern cities, and thereby bridging essentialist North-South divides.
In this book as well, we reject the notion of new theoretical binaries.
Here the term ‘southern’ planning theory echoes the Nietzschean idea of
perspectivism: that all ideas come from a particular perspective or position
and there is no one truth or answer to planning problems that is applicable
in all contexts. The notion of perspectivism has been used in feminist theory
(in particular the work of Donna Haraway 1991), which challenged unspo-
ken masculine bias in social theory, the belief in objectivity in science and
‘the view from nowhere’. The notion of ‘seeing from the South’ (Watson
2009) suggests a way of speaking back to pseudo-universal and often north-
ern theory—both to point to its undeclared parochialism and to raise the
importance of southern difference. Seeing from the South gives us a differ-
ent perspective on northern ideas and realities, as well as shining new light
on southern cities which have been un-researched or mis-researched, pos-
sibly due to inappropriate theoretical questions and categories. Or perhaps
good research has been ignored because it does not fit with mainstream
ideas and debates.
A second and related question confronting southern theorists is that of
theoretical generalisation. Southern theorists all refer to the need to theo-
rise from place and context but does this suggest theories which can only
be applicable to single unique cases of cities or regions? All reject the
notion of a single theory which can cope with empirical variation but does
not demand new conceptual categories (Scott and Storper 2014 on cities),
but does this suggest that no generalisation is possible? Connell (2007,
224) has challenged the universalisation of western ideas in social science,
but insists that a form of generalisation, through the collective practice of
social scientists, has “…a crucial epistemological function”. “Theory”, she
argues, “is the way we speak beyond the single case. It involves imagina-
tion, the search for patterns, the critique of data. It is how we get the cri-
teria for comparisons and the terms of a diagnosis” (Connell 2007, 225).
But, she concludes, it is also about knowing the limits of such theory and
where it does not apply. This is a position midway between universalism
and particularism.
Following the arguments of both Connell (2007) in sociology and
Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) in anthropology, southern planning the-
ory can offer important perspectives on the wider workings of planning.
Connell (2007) insists that working at a world scale (using comparative
case study research across global North and South) avoids generalising
from the metropole and places the relationship between metropole and
periphery (still marked, she argues, by processes of colonisation) as a cen-
tral explanatory element. Comaroff and Comaroff (2012, 1–2), as well,
suggest that the global South offers privileged insights into the workings of
the world at large: while the project of modernity has always been a North-
South collaboration, it is in the global South that the impacts of this rela-
tionship have been most starkly felt. This is in line with current postcolonial
scholarship (see Porter 2018) which acknowledges the ongoing asymmet-

rical role of power and knowledge both between and within territories,
and which serves to support arguments that colonialism has not ‘gone
away’, but has certainly changed its form.
Southern theorists have argued strongly for case study research meth-
odologies, single or comparative, which offer the opportunities for deep
contextual analysis which in turn ‘speaks back’ to theory rather than to
other cases, and this is the method used in this book. More recently, there
has been a revival of interest in comparative case research in the urban
studies field. McFarlane (2010) refers to comparative urban research
across the global North-South divide as a methodology, a ‘mode of
thought’ and a strategy which informs how urban theory is constituted,
and how existing theory can be unsettled and destabilised. Robinson
(2011) also argues for comparative urban research across the globe which
acknowledges how cities are linked together through various global net-
works, and which works towards an international and postcolonial
approach to urban studies. Parochial theory which claims universal status
can be unsettled through multi-site and multi-directional circuits of com-
parative theory generation. In essence, both authors are suggesting a
realignment of the geopolitics of knowledge production by considering all
urban places as having the potential to contribute to the pool of potential
understanding and theory building.
Southern theorists have in mind a pluralisation of theory and practice
across the globe, rather than a new dominance or replacement. Different
meso-levels (or midlevels) of theorising on cities and planning, developed
inductively, can be clearly tied back to the contexts which gave rise to
them and where the assumptions underlying them are clearly articulated.
Such meso-levels of theorising will overlap and will not be static. As new
cores and peripheries arise, as new relationships develop or persist between
parts of the world, so concepts and ideas need to evolve and shift.
A third issue for southern theorising is what ‘conceptual lenses’ can be
used to develop new theory, given that most available perspectives (be
they Marxist, Foucauldian or Habermasian) arose in the global North.
This is the question raised by postcolonial scholars who ask ‘how can the
subaltern speak’ if the only language available is that of the position under
critique. Southern planning theory is also not about a rejection of
meta-theoretical perspectives such as post-structuralism, structuralism or
political economy as inapplicable outside of the global North, although
again such perspectives may be rooted in assumptions about society that
do not hold everywhere. For example, Connell (2007, 172) refers to

Partha Chatterjee’s contrast of different ‘modes of power’ in postcolonial
states (which opens up a new range of possibilities for ruling classes to
exercise their domination) with Foucault’s ‘capillary power’ which reso-
nates more closely with a European context. But various attempts, at least
in sociology, to create indigenous theory which can challenge the concep-
tual system of metropolitan sociology seem to have led nowhere, Connell
(2007) suggests. Certainly the ethno-philosophy movement involving
African scholars has tended to produce a culture-bound idea of knowl-
edge. More useful, following African philosopher Hountondji (1988, in
Epstein and Morrell 2012, 479), is a “…critical appropriation of the exist-
ing knowledge” which involves learning even from the most biased work
from the West. Chatterjee’s (2011) proposed understanding of power in
postcolonial societies using Foucauldian theoretical lenses in critical fash-
ion could be an example of this.
A fourth issue for southern theorising is that of not only new analysis
and theorising but also taking a normative position, essential for planning.
For planning and planners, this approach begs a critical question: ‘which
norms’ in a world where many values are not universal and where beliefs
in what might constitute a good or just city will inevitably vary from place
to place and between groups within any one place (Watson 2006). For
example, the fact of informality which characterises most southern cities,
and which comes about as people ‘step outside of the law’ in order to
provide themselves with shelter and income, is commonly viewed as sim-
ply ‘dis-orderliness’ and a ‘violation’ of rules and regulations by wealthier
urban residents and by city managers. Reconciling these antagonistic
norms will take more than collaborative planning. It also does not put to
rest the reality that developing planning strategies in any context are an
inherently political process in which, frequently, planning ideas become
attached to a political project involving domination of one group by
another (involving patronage and corruption as well). The case study in
this book focuses on exactly this issue.
The approach frequently used by planners to address the issue of ‘what
to do’ is to borrow ideas from other contexts, sometimes called the ‘best
practice’ approach. The clear critique has been that extracting planning
practices from one context and assuming they can be applied in very
different contexts is frequently unsuccessful and is illustrative of abstract and
pseudo-universal thinking. Healey (2012) rather suggests that any travelling
planning idea—as an appropriate generalisation—must be accompanied by
an ‘origin narrative’ which describes the nature of its context and its local
preconditions for success. Her hypothesis then is “…that transnational
learning works most productively through rich narratives – in-depth cases –
rather than through ‘best practice’ summaries or attempts at typologies
which systematize qualities of context and try to match them with qualities
of experiences” (Healey 2012, 196). In other words, we need to under-
stand the ‘contingent universals’ of any situation: what is specific to a place
and what can be shared learning across different localities and contexts. The
use of detailed narrative case studies as vehicles for the transfer of learning is
an idea that has long support in the field of planning (Flyvbjerg 2001;
Watson 2002).
Taking a somewhat different position, Flyvbjerg (2004) argues for a
‘phronetic’ approach (meaning ‘practical judgement’ informed by values),
using the case study method, to building the link between theory and
practice and to arrive at normative conclusions in planning. No research is
value-neutral, he argues, and a phronetic approach will “…clarify values,
interests, and power relations in planning as a basis for praxis” (Flyvbjerg
2004, 289). Values will inevitably differ with ‘place’ and an understanding
of power (in the Foucauldian sense) needs to be at the heart of any plan-
ning endeavour. This requires ‘getting close to reality’, ‘thick description’
and practice seen within its contextual relations.
In sum, a southern theorising project in planning can be viewed as
developing critical perspectives on existing theory and practice, rather
than attempting to establish theory (pseudo-universal theory) which
claims to apply to all parts of the world: it is a conceptual rather than a
physical location. At the same time, it is not a ‘view from nowhere’. A
southern theorising project acknowledges its development in a place, a
context, and draws on a deep understanding of this place. These locational
informants are surfaced and explained. Healey’s (2012) idea of ‘origin
narratives’, developed through detailed case research, is one way of con-
ceptualising this; Flyvbjerg’s (2004) phronetic analysis is another. At the
same time, it does not eschew generalisation beyond the single (or com-
parative) case. While recognising the limitations of where it may or may
not be relevant, meso-level theorising recognises the need for theoretical
dynamism and change, and directly engages with perspectives arising from
different contexts.
While rooted in the details of a ‘place’, this project does not ignore the
wider global forces which shape places, and for many southern theorists,
postcolonial theory has been an inspiration. This set of ideas usefully speaks
to southern theorists frequently working in regions experiencing colonial-

ity, but points to the inevitability of a southern project drawing, for the
moment, on existing epistemological lenses (representational, constructiv-
ist, deconstructivist, pragmatist, etc.), given the limitations of what Connell
(2007) describes as indigenous or ‘culture-bound’ epistemologies.
The case study explored in Chaps. 4, 5 and 6 of this book offers an
example of building planning ideas from context and place. The choice of
case is not arbitrary: it tests the proposition that in global South contexts,
societies are shaped by deep conflicts—between state (and very often the
market as well) and society. In the field of urban planning, state and mar-
ket frequently follow logics of urban development and change which differ
significantly from those of poorer communities (which are the dominant
demographic in most global South cities) who are attempting to survive
under very difficult circumstances. This is not to suggest that such divides
are only found in global South cities, but it is likely that differences are
particularly acute and conflictual in poorer regions of the world. Previous
work by one of the authors (Watson 2003, 2006) suggested that the con-
cept of ‘conflicting rationalities’ might be useful to capture these kinds of
divisions, and could offer an alternative perspective to ‘mainstream’ and
global North theorising on planning decision-making processes. However,
a concept of this kind can only take the form of a proposition and cannot
be put forward as a universal model, or generalised across territories with-
out investigation, as this would directly counter the arguments supporting
southern theorising. Concepts such as this one (and many others) need to
be thoroughly tested, critiqued and refined through in-depth research in
many different contexts, and even then can only claim the status of provi-
sional and meso-level theorising—always subject to (and asking for) fur-
ther challenge and change. This is the accepted approach of the case study
method.
The next section of this chapter elaborates the idea of ‘conflicting ratio-
nalities’ as a provisional concept arising as part of one southern theorising
project in planning. It is posed as an alternative to other process-focused
theories in planning which have taken a consensualist position by drawing
(in diverse ways) on Habermas’ (1990) communicative action theory.
These planning theories (termed communicative and collaborative
planning), shaped by their differing global North regions of origin

(Allmendinger 2002; Watson 2016), have been subject to critique by plan-
ning theorists drawing on different theories of power to understand the
nature and outcomes of state-society engagements in planning processes
(see Hillier 2003; Huxley 2000; Huxley and Yiftachel 2000; Pløger 2014;
Purcell 2009). This debate is ongoing in planning, and early consensualist
positions have been refined and developed, and even argued to be no lon-
ger possible in liberal democracies by post-political planning theorists (see
Metzger et al. 2014). But contributions from global South contexts are
relatively few. The case study presented in this book, located in Cape
Town, South Africa, presents both a theoretical exploration, in context, of
the concept of conflicting rationalities and a methodology for southern
theorising. Using a Foucauldian position on the workings of power, it
seeks to understand how conflict rather than consensus (or sometimes
conflict intertwined with consensus) is so often at the heart of state-society
engagements in planning, particularly in global South cities.
Conflicting Rationalities
At the simplest level, we use the concept of rationality here as a view, a
‘way of seeing’, a position or perspective, an argument, a way of making
sense of the world and a set of values, or perhaps a world view, of actors in
a particular setting. We link the concepts of power and rationality, as does
Foucault, and accept that power is used (by actors in a particular context)
to define what is counted as rationality and so what is counted as reality.
We agree with Flyvbjerg and Richardson (2002, 11) who follow a
Foucauldian interpretation of rationality which is “…contingent, shaped
by power relations, rather than context-free and objective”. These authors
argue that Foucault’s position on power is particularly appropriate in plan-
ning, where policy is shaped through power struggles between different
interests, where knowledge and truth are contested and determining what
counts as rational in planning is a field of conflict. Power is always present
and pervasive, but it is not necessarily negative—it can be both or either
destructive and productive, for example, to support the empowerment of
civil society (Flyvbjerg and Richardson 2002). Power and knowledge are
interrelated: power produces (what counts as) knowledge, and in plan-
ning, the framing of knowledge as ‘technical’ or ‘expert’ can be viewed as
an exercise of power. Above all, power-knowledge-rationality in planning
need to be understood in a particular context or place rather than through
the application of any kind of abstract and universal model or theory.
In the work of this case study of conflicting rationalities in Cape Town,
the relevance of identity as a factor shaping rationality and power emerged
as significant. Ethnicity, race, class, gender and language all proved to be
important dimensions of identity which intersected with rationality and

power. The work of Fincher and Jacobs (1998) is useful in conceptualising
identity and power. Bringing together cultural, political and economic
positions on difference, together with a perspective on place and location,
they propose a “located politics of difference” (Fincher and Jacobs 1998,
2). Identity, they argue, is not pre-given and fixed, but rather something
that is socially produced and multiply located. What this points to, they
argue, is the multiplicity of differences that may cohere around any one
person: “…social distinctions are constituted in specific contexts through
multiple and interpenetrating axes of difference… and at any one time we
may be fixed into or strategically mobilize different aspects of the array of
differences through which our embodied selves are known” (Fincher and
Jacobs 1998, 9). Which aspect dominates is not haphazard: often the attri-
bute to be emphasised is that which contributes most significantly to a
subject’s marginalisation or empowerment and this can and does vary sig-
nificantly with place, and time.
Language, as a key facet of identity, marks out the border between ter-
ritories of meaning—territories that are more accessible and immediate
when language is shared, but which are more distant, remote and difficult
to penetrate in the context of cross-language communication and research.
Liu (1999) observes how language and the colonial encounter have failed
to substantively redraw the contours of Western thinking. Cross-lingual
transfers of meaning are heavily taxed and filtered, requiring linguistic and
cultural transaction brokers who consciously or inadvertently regulate the
exchange between researcher and informant in a skewed “economy of
meaning-value and (often unequal forms of) transcultural exchange” (Liu
1999, 2). In multilingual research settings these meanings are transmitted
and distorted through the minutiae of social relations, race and gender
dynamics and the associated circuits and flows of power. Meaning can be
lost, suppressed or inserted in translation and this raises critical questions
about the ways in which language curtains the windows through which
actor rationalities are seen.
In South Africa, as in many other previously British colonies, English is
the dominant language of policy, planning and legal proceedings. Each of
these domains has its own specialised vocabulary and particular register.
Bureaucratic and technical rationality emerges through the texts and speech
acts which shape the discourses associated with the ‘will to govern and
improve’. Entry into these domains and interpretation of associated dis-
courses is restricted to those who have acquired fluency in this specialised
language. In one sense this can be considered as a marker of power, but it

may also be regarded as a potent marker of isolation of the overwhelming
majority of first-language English and Afrikaans policy makers. Many bureau-
crats, technicians and researchers are therefore unable to enter unguided
into the realms for which they are responsible or seek to understand. The
indigenous language of Xhosa is needed to navigate these areas indepen-
dently, and to interpret the micro-geographies of hostels and informal
settlements that primarily accommodate rural migrants and which are the
territories of the urban poor. In an enquiry which seeks to identify and map
the elusive interplay of rationalities, language is a critical filter which may
impact significantly on the credibility of research.
Flyvbjerg and Richardson (2002) make the important point that because
of Foucault’s focus on the particular and the local, we might overlook more
generalised influences such as institutions, constitutions and structural
issues. An investigation of conflicting rationalities in context can locate the
operations of the state along an axis which connects biopolitics, “…the
administration of life particularly as it appears at the level of populations”
(Dean 2010, 118), with the practices of governmentality and its apparatus.
Governmentality, for Foucault, involves analysis of who can govern and who
is governed, and the means through which this “conduct of conduct” is
achieved (Mills 2003, 47). Analysis of governmentality rests on Foucault’s
subtle rendering of the relational workings of power which challenge earlier
and rigidly structural perspectives focused exclusively on relations of domi-
nation and the oppressive role of the state, refuting the notion that power is
singularly possessed and exercised over the other by the state.
In thinking about governmentality, we also need to locate notions of state-
craft within the context of a neoliberal and increasingly globalised world in
which new boundaries have been drawn that are vastly more permeable. We
need to recognise that the conceptualisations of ‘the state’ and the operations
of government, both globally and in the South, form part of a much changed
post-Foucauldian reality which requires us to “modify, innovate and some-
times to reject his and our own earlier concepts, approaches, arguments and
analyses” (Dean 2010, 7). The workings of postcolonial states, in particular,
provide new perspectives and starting points for analysis. In some contexts,
these represent a ‘hollowing out’ of the (idealised) northern conceptualisation
of the operation of the state and its replacement by a ‘shadow state’ (Harriss-
White 2003) that Corbridge et al. characterise as “a vast assemblage of bro-
kers, advisors, political workers, crooks and contractors [which] surrounds the
‘official state’ and helps to ensure that it is run for the private benefit of some
of its employees” (2005, 4).
In any planning occurrence there is very likely to be conflict of various

kinds, and in the first part of this chapter we argued that conflicts are par-
ticularly evident in rapidly growing and poor cities of the global South.
The concept of conflicting rationalities referred to in this book suggests
that a central tension which plays itself out in such cities is between, on the
one hand, techno-managerial, modernising and marketised systems of
state planning, administration and service provision, in various forms of
alliance or collusion with other actors such as profit-driven land develop-
ers, and on the other hand, marginalised and impoverished urban popula-
tions surviving largely, but not only, under conditions of informality or
‘illegality’. This tension arises at the ‘interface’ between the different and
clashing logics (or rationalities) of various urban actors.
We use the term ‘interface’ in this book to refer to the times and places
where conflicts between differing and competing rationalities, and active
contestation, seemed to become most evident and acute. Tania Murray Li
(2007) refers to the notion of an ‘interface’ between those with the ‘will
to improve’, or destroy, and those who resist: it is political and shaped by
power which cannot be wished away. For Li (2007), the interface is the
point at which different rationalities come into clear juxtaposition, engage-
ment and contestation with each other, where further conflict is gener-
ated, or where contentious and political issues are ‘rendered technical’ by
the state, or where perhaps real gains can be secured by marginalised
groups. Li (2007, 11) uses Foucault’s term of ‘permanent provocation’ to
explain the interface, where there is ‘reciprocal appeal’: a ‘perpetual link-
ing’ and a ‘perpetual reversal’, or as Li has it—the critical relationship
between the practice of government and the practice of politics.
This concept of conflicting rationalities and their interaction at some
kind of ‘interface’ is, of course, highly simplistic and open to critique. Is
this not setting up an over-simple binary between state/market and com-
munities? What about conflicts within and between these categories? Do
actors not sometimes move between categories and across any kind of
‘interface’, perhaps mobilising different aspects of identity for strategic rea-
sons? Can the engagement of differing rationalities have positive as well as
negative outcomes, as Foucault’s concept of power suggests? Any concep-
tual construct or theory is no more than a proposition which needs to be
tested in context, refined or replaced. A southern theory-building project
will require such theorising from different contexts as well as an under-
standing of where ideas may or may not be useful.
Conclusion
This chapter locates the book within what we call a southern theorising
project in the field of planning theory. It explains the recent ‘southern
turn’ in a range of disciplines and especially those on which planning tends
to draw, such as urban studies. This flurry of work from southern perspec-
tives has generated a host of new research and methodological debates and
sometimes heated disagreements between theorists adopting a southern
perspective (although not always claiming this label) and theorists cri-
tiqued as ‘northern’, and guilty of inappropriate generalisation from one
small part of the world. While the number of planning theorists taking on
a southern perspective is far smaller than in, for example, urban studies,
contributions to the field are growing and there is useful cross-fertilisation
of ideas between disciplines.
Given the relatively recent emergence of this strand of thinking in plan-
ning, we consider it appropriate to refer to a ‘southern theorising project in
planning’, with significant developmental work still to be undertaken. What
is possible, however, is to start to identify some key theory-building issues
which will have to be tackled. One of these is how to respond to the call for
southern ideas to be located in a deep understanding of place and context,
in ways which open up research questions which can be posed more widely.
This chapter explains the intention of the book to test a conceptual
proposition in an in-depth single case study in Cape Town, South Africa.
The proposition is that state-society engagement in planning processes in
global South cities (and possibly more widely) is shaped more often by a
deep ‘conflict of rationalities’ between state and market, and impoverished
urban communities, than by some kind of ‘public interest’ which could
provide a starting point for participatory and consensus-seeking processes.
This chapter sets out the broad framework for this notion of conflicting
rationalities which then frames research in the chosen case study.
Notes
1. Our definition of the terms ‘Global South’ and ‘southern’ in this book is
borrowed from Dados and Connell (2012, 13): “Global South functions as
more than a metaphor for underdevelopment. It references an entire history
of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change
through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy and
access to resources are maintained; and opens new possibilities in politics
and social science”.
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ed. Edition Richard De Satgé

Urban Planning in the

ISBN 978-3-319-69495-5 ISBN 978-3-319-69496-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930021

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2 Conflicting Rationalities and Southern Planning Theory 11

3 African Cities: Planning Ambitions and Planning Realities 35

4 Struggles for Shelter and Survival in Post-­apartheid

5 Voices from and Within the State 95

6 Conflicting Rationalities in the N2 Gateway Project:

7 Implications for Southern Planning Theory and Practice 187

AEC Anti-Eviction Campaign

PGWC Provincial Government of the Western Cape

Richard de Satgé is Director of Research at Phuhlisani, a non-profit

Table 5.1 The three spheres of government 102

Southern Planning Theory

© The Author(s) 2018 1

world) and assumed to hold true everywhere else. In planning there is a

that the persistence of such deep and irreconcilable differences challenged

Researching Conflicting Rationalities

enclave within metropolitan Cape Town with a population of approxi-

Understanding the Langa Megaproject

drawn together in what Li has conceptualised as ‘the will to govern and

Voices from and Within the State,

and exploration in context. One important implication for planning is the

Conflicting Rationalities and Southern

© The Author(s) 2018 11

immediate planning issues. If a central role of planning theory is to shape

The Southern Turn in Global Scholarship

It is perhaps not surprising that anthropology, a discipline which has

The Southern Turn in Planning Scholarship

knowledge production should be exempt from the perpetuation of intel-

There is a growing trend to South-South ‘borrowing’ in planning prac-

recognise how social relations are refracted through colonial relations in

Why a ‘Southern Theorising Project’?

scholarship (see Porter 2018) which acknowledges the ongoing asymmet-

do not hold everywhere. For example, Connell (2007, 172) refers to

to southern theorists frequently working in regions experiencing colonial-

important dimensions of identity which intersected with rationality and

language. In one sense this can be considered as a marker of power, but it

In any planning occurrence there is very likely to be conflict of various

Habermas, Jurgen. 1990. The Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: MIT

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2 Conflicting Rationalities and Southern Planning Theory 11

3 African Cities: Planning Ambitions and Planning Realities 35

4 Struggles for Shelter and Survival in Post-apartheid

5 Voices from and Within the State 95

6 Conflicting Rationalities in the N2 Gateway Project:

7 Implications for Southern Planning Theory and Practice 187

Table 5.1 The three spheres of government 102