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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
Challenging perspectives on
African Cities
The concern of Professor Vanessa Watson, as a city-planning
theorist, has for some time been to unsettle assumptions
about current and future African cities, rooted almost
entirely in Eurocentric beliefs about the nature and process
of ‘good’ city planning.
P
lanning, as an activity of the state (but increasingly also of communities
and business), often appears to involve a purely technical set of decisions
around the correct location of land-uses, movement routes and so on. Yet, as
planning theorists argue, planning is also deeply political, involving usually
contested decisions about the allocation of public resources across urban
space and legal constraints which can fundamentally affect the lives of urban
dwellers. Understanding the socio-technical interface generated by planning
processes, how this is shaped by power and politics, and how it can be steered
to promote goals such as social justice and sustainability has therefore been a
focus of planning theory worldwide.
However, in both colonial and post-colonial times, African cities have been on the
receiving end of planning theories and policies generated in the ‘global North’ and
universalised to the rest of the globe based on assumptions that urban society and
space everywhere is little different from that in Europe or the United States and, if it
is, then the task of planning is to shift cities in this direction. Visions of ‘the good city’
usually cite Amsterdam, Stockholm or Portland, taking for granted strong and resourced
governments, organised civil society, manageable growth and little informality. Professor
Watson’s research has challenged the underlying assumptions of this body of theory and
has emphasised the importance of building planning theory from an understanding of
context. Given that in years to come an increasing majority of the world’s urban population
will live in global South cities, and that in Africa the urban population is likely to increase
threefold by 2050, she has stressed the urgent need for planning theory with a global
South perspective, which takes as its starting point a very different set of assumptions
and research methodologies from those currently informing planning thought. Much
of her own research has been involved in exploring (with her PhD students) what these
different starting points might be (both philosophical and practical) and how planning can
re-conceptualise the urban socio-technical interface in global South and African contexts.
Visions of ‘the good city’ usually cite Amsterdam,
Stockholm or Portland, taking for granted strong
and resourced governments, organised civil society,
manageable growth and little informality.
Professor Vanessa Watson