T Essop: 2006 Planning Africa Conference

22 March 2006

On behalf of the Western Cape Provincial Government, I would like to welcome
you to Cape Town and the Western Cape Province. It is indeed a great honour for
me to address you in the opening plenary of the 2006 Planning Africa
Conference.

Introduction

This year's conference comes at a time when South Africa is taking stock of
the first 11 years of democracy as we gear up towards meeting our growth and
development objectives by 2014.

Anyone reflecting on our cities will continue to see and would most likely
lament the steadfastness of the divisive, inequitable and fragmenting apartheid
landscape - landscapes characterised by low density urban development, wide
road reserves and expansive open spaces that serve as buffer zones between
communities.

These landscapes are reinforced by the market driven spatial development
typologies of gated suburban enclaves and golf estates that continue to
encroach on the urban edge.

There is no doubt that this urban sprawl not only traps and dislocates the
poor into poverty pockets but critically endangers our unique environmental
systems, agricultural areas and biodiversity habitats.

This is of particular importance to the environmental quality and economic
viability of the Western Cape:

* We are home to two of the world renowned biodiversity hotspots the Cape
Floral Kingdom and the Succulent Karoo.
* Our agricultural economy contributes 11 percent to job creation and six
percent to total Good Governance Programme (GGP).

In a context of climate change and a 14.3 percent per annum population
growth rate in the province, the environmental stress and quality of life
factors weigh heavily upon us in terms of environmental management and
developmental planning activities:

* 90 percent of our river systems are critically endangered or endangered
due partially to urban development practices
* Increasing demand on our scarce water supply is coupled with the threat to
natural resource based livelihoods due to expected sea level rising
* Approximately 45 000 informal household in the metro alone have no access to
electricity while our current electricity infrastructure is critically
overloaded
* Our country produces over 50 percent of Africa's emissions due to our
extensive use of coal. While in the province vehicle emissions contribute 65
percent to air emissions in the province (1997 Brown Haze Study)
* The Western Cape gini co-efficient, the gap between rich and poor is one of
the highest in South Africa

These are just some of the challenges facing us.

The development of proactive governance mechanisms and policies have a
critical role to play in creating sustainable living environments that respond
to and affirm the lived reality of a diverse of inhabitants yet which speak to
environmental integrity.

As equally fundamental is the role of the planning profession in unlocking
development potential and facilitating processes of spatial transformation that
are cognisant of the lived reality of our citizens.

It is therefore a good thing that the planning profession is in a continuing
evolution of planning discourse and practice.

This is well suited to the continuous process of reflection and refinement
of current and emerging ideas, discourse and policies that frame planning
practice in the rapidly urbanising and unique African environment.

Planning Africa 2002

The 2002 Planning Africa conference was a melting pot of existing and
emerging ideas.

Key discussions included the role of the planning profession and the need
for a paradigm shift.

I believe that this conference was a seminal moment for the South African
planning profession in that it enabled it to recognise that not only did we
share the African condition and experience as a nation but it was okay for the
professional response to be rooted in African and indeed post colonial
discourse an important first step towards realising the paradigm shift.

One of the key outcomes of the conference was the establishment of the
African Planning Association (APA) the following year.

Hopefully this organisation will be instrumental in shaping future practice
through facilitating engagement, sharing best practice and connecting
practitioners from throughout the continent.

The conference identified spatial and development planning as both:
* A tool for responding to complex issues which intersected in the spatial
realm
* A means to co-ordinate development initiatives responding to the challenge of
building an African renaissance.

The complexities to which planning must respond and find creative solutions
in African urban environments haven't necessarily changed.

These include issues of context, environmental stress, the urban rural
relationship, good governance and of course the eradication of both poverty and
inequality.

In terms of context, we are African our cities are African and our
developmental trajectories are inextricably connected to the dynamics and
processes of our fellow African countries.

Factors and processes beyond municipal, provincial, national and indeed
regional boundaries have a direct bearing on the way our cities are shaped
through formal and informal processes.

Yet 11 years from democracy and four years after the inaugural planning
Africa conference, planning discourse and practice particularly in this
province still largely reflects the apartheid legacy of 'intolerance of the
other.'

Naturally this raises a number of questions:

* Where is the postmodernist and postcolonial discourse that speaks to
multi-narratives, identity and contradiction?
* Why is there such a disjuncture between our developmental policies, planning
practice and the reality of our people?
* Where is the response to the constantly shifting planning landscape in which
everyday people turn nothing into something?
* Why is there an obsession with 'fitting' our development path into Western
norms and typologies of space and urban structure?
* Where are the responses that recognise the role of informality and the Second
Economy and even youth sub-culture in shaping our cities?

In Africa there is method to our perceived madness.

You would need to spend some time in the streets of Dar es Salaam or
Khayelitsha to appreciate the level of complexity and creativity of people
relegated to the so called 'second economy.'

Planners need to look harder and see the sense in turning nothing into
something.

What we often dismiss as chaos and disorder reveals our own inability to
connect with processes and networks happening beyond our own reality and
norms.

I am certainly not trying to romanticise the 'edge condition' of
marginalised communities, I am merely challenging the planning profession to
visualise the role they can play in enabling and validating people who have
developed their own means to connecting into our cities through their
survivalist activities.

Doing so would mean engaging in multiple areas of discourse that could
better illuminate the possible roles of spatial development in a process of
transformation.

A few could be:
* Identity and culture diversity of people and places
* Planning for vulnerable groups like women and the girl child
* Interrogate how planners truly express their notions of equity, justice and
dignity in practice
* Governance

In the absence of a diversity of inclusive and rational debate most
planning, design and development work in the Western Cape lacks real engagement
with our challenges of marginalisation, inequality, poverty and environmental
degradation.

This disconnectedness represents one of the key challenges the profession
has to confront.

The planning profession has to be responsive to new ideas and to our
developmental challenge to create a 'home for all' in the province.

The nature of the profession is one of high visibility due to the political
and contested nature of your core role allocation of scarce resources (water,
land, bulk infrastructure, etc.) Your success is judged through the impact you
have on quality of life for people.

The planning profession must be connected to what's going on:

* Connected with the experiences of citizens at a local level
* Engaged with other planners and built environment professionals working in
different fields with a different perspective
* Gaining knowledge of and contributing to our province's development
priorities like the Provincial Spatial Development Framework (PSDF)
* Clarity about their responsibilities and the implications associated with the
choices that they make

Abdoulique Simone has taken this further by challenging the profession
to:

“Pay attention to how diffuse and diverse urban actors are assembled and act
this is a practice of being attuned to faint signals, flashes of important
creativity in otherwise desperate manoeuvres, small eruptions in the social
fabric that provide new texture, small but important platforms from which to
access new views.”

A possible way to get 'connected' is to revisit the underlying philosophies
that underpin planning discourse and practice.

This means challenging the conventional thinking shaping contemporary
planning for instance interrogating the rhetoric of integration:

* Are we talking about 'integration as assimilation of the other' into our
frame of reference as expanded upon by Steve Biko in 'I write what I
like?’
* Or are we talking of the enablement and validation of the 'insurgent
citizenry' and connection with the edge condition?
* What value do diverse and divergent quarters and their relationships actually
add to the urban environment?
* And what facilitates the provisional and improvised transactions of our
informal economy across fragmented urban space?

Perhaps with all these questions there is scope to test an approach.

There's something about planning that inspires me so indulge me, I'm going
to look at three notions that could frame an approach:

* The notion of the 'common good',
* The idea of 'organic intellectualism',
* And the principles of 'earth democracy.'

Liberating the commons

The history of the commons is by and large a story of enclosure ring fencing
of public assets and opportunities in the interests of the market which is
perceived as an efficient tool for material progress.

I will also use the 'enclosure of the commons' as a metaphor for the
privatisation of the planning profession.

We all know that privatisation of an asset in order to achieve efficiency
gains can also impoverish those who lose access to it and enrich those who take
title of it.

Enclosure widens the inequality gap.

When the commons are enclosed, prices generally rise and people must gain
permission to use the resource.

The management and character of a resource also changes.

Where as the goal for market governed resources is to maximise financial
return, the goal of a resource managed as a common asset is to secure
sustainable long term benefits for everyone who belongs to the commons.

The point I am making through this analogy is that the power to make a
difference resides not only in government and markets but also in the people
and the institutions developed to protect 'the commons.'

The planning profession is one of those institutions.

This is my case for the role of planning as a tool to reclaiming 'public
wealth' through spatial development.

The concept of ‘the commons’ could underpin a new framework of planning
activism that focuses on the better management of environmental and spatial
resources or assets for the 'common good.'

So the question is whether the planning profession is institutionally
designed to serve everyone.

Organic Intellectualism

The notion of planning as a practice articulating the 'common good' can be
further expanded in Antonio Gramsci's notion of 'organic intellectualism'.

Planners would fall into Gramsci's wide concept of intellectuals as they
exercise an organising function in society.

Yet Gramsci also describes the role of organic intellectuals as people who:
“Express and define the ideas and the will of a group as it enters into
historical existence and comes to self-consciousness.”

What I am talking to you here is the role of intellectuals, like yourselves
in creating a counter hegemony to drive transformation. Transformation requires
alternative discourse to upset the consensus and redefine the common sense of
society.

Gramsci believed in the innate capacity of human beings to understand their
world and to change it. This goes back to my previous comment on the power of
the planning profession to reclaim and protect the common good as practitioners
that have that inherent capacity.

Developing this counter hegemony requires the intellectual to harness the
capabilities of the average person to think and develop solutions. This means
working with and in communities to develop solutions that are grounded in
everyday life: "The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist
in eloquence but in active participation in practical life, as constructor,
organiser or permanent persuader and not just a simple orator" (Gramsci, 1971
p10).

The challenge for the planning profession is therefore how to become the
organic intellectual in the context of the African continent?

Earth democracy

Finally I will briefly refer to the earth democracy principles of Vandana
Shiva. The concept of earth democracy privileges ecological and cultural
diversity in form and function.

This is what Shiva refers to as “feeling at home on the earth and with each
other” that is created through inclusive living economies. It is a counter
narrative to monocultures which, as by-products of exclusion and dominance
create environments of coercion and loss of freedom.

This is an alternative world view to greed, consumerism and competition as
objectives of human life. The earth democracy approach embodies principles that
enable people to transcend practices of polarisation, division and exclusion.
It speaks to logic of multi-functionality and inclusion as the basis of
diversity. Embedded in the approach is the inherent human and professional duty
to ensure well being of all species, including the environment.

Our human and professional responsibility is therefore one of trusteeship
instead of the dominant notion of mastery, control and ownership. Rights are
inextricably related to these responsibilities.

This counters the prevailing paradigm where the separation of rights and
responsibility is at the root of ecological degradation and gender or class
inequality, a situation in which the social and ecological costs are
externalised and borne by those who are excluded from decisions and
benefits.

Shiva's earth democracy speaks to the notion of liberating the commons by
breaking free of our psychological legacy of separation and exclusion to
instead allow new alternative perceptions to emerge based on our
interconnectedness.

Conclusion: making the connection

Here I have demonstrated the value of digging deeper and connecting with
other discourse to create a sound intellectual platform on which to base
planning practice and discourse.

I believe that the planning profession has a key role to play in this.

There a number of connections that still need to be made at a practical
level like better alignment of environmental management, heritage and planning
legislation we are currently finalising our Western Cape law reform process
dealing with just that.

What's more exciting for me, are the connections to be made that will link
and validate our unique African identities and processes with emerging ideas,
policy and practice.

This is what Abdoulique Simone and Vanessa Watson would refer to as: “The
connections of spatial planning and design discourse to meanings of space and
relational networks in the everyday life of people.”

These ideas will speak to our diverse and often dualistic context within
which planning must operate:

* A context layered by relationships between the second versus first
economy, poverty and marginalisation versus wealth.
* A context that so clearly reflects the insurgent citizenry of our people in
form and process.

As we gear ourselves up to a sustained six percent economic growth rate,
planning will have a clear role to play in unlocking development potential and
ensuring that the growth and prosperity is sustainable, shared and
appropriately allocated.

The organisation of the profession and training of future planners will need
to align and connect with the shifting planning landscape where planning is
more of a process and tool than a product.

We must and can revive the integrity of the commons as a public good by
extending the role of the planning profession as a more compelling tool, an
alternative narrative to the dominant narratives of the day and an opportunity
to embed the principles of sustainable development in our planning practices.
Liberating the commons would require developing the imagination needed to
conceptualise creative ideas and solutions to our development.

This might all sound very challenging it is meant to be. The challenges
facing the globe, our continent and our country are too immense for the
planning profession to be found wanting. We need to leave behind a new legacy.
The time is now.

So this has been my call to action to the profession.

Use this conference to commit your profession to go out there and liberate
the commons, become true African organic intellectuals and committing
yourselves to building our earth democracy.

Thank you so much!

Issued by: Department of Environment, Planning and Economic Development,
Western Cape Provincial Government
22 March 2006