Backgrounds
South African cities manifest the social and economic contradictions of many other fast urbanising Global South cities. The country, with more than 60% of urban population is already one of the most urbanised ones of Africa, with four urban agglomerations larger than three million inhabitants (UN-HABITAT, 2014). Due to its rapid urbanisation and a projected urban population deemed to increase to more than 70% in 2030 and finally to reach 80% in 2050, the national government has recognised the importance to guide its future urban growth process in a more sustainable way (COGTA, 2016). Most of the challenges of South Africa, such as socio-spatial fragmentation, urban sprawl and slum formation, are exacerbated by one of the highest level of social inequality in the world (UN-HABITAT, 2014). This might be explained by two interrelated facts: the adoption of a comprehensive urban policy has been procrastinated for long time in South Africa; and the public discourse has been ineffectively focused on a narrow interpretation of rurality, failing to jointly addressing urban and rural problems (Everatt & Ebrahim, 2020). Such problems are the legacy of a recent past of spatial segregation and well known for long-time (Anyumba, 2001), therefore they need to be urgently addressed.
With regard to local government, these assessments have indicated that the current development planning policies, legislation, processes, and practices are ineffective in meeting the expected outcomes of a developmental local government. Development planning and Integrated Development Plans in particular, have not adequately contributed to achieving the delivery of more compact, productive, sustainable, and inclusive cities that are better governed as envisaged in the National Development Plan.
Such failure suggests that some steps are in need to be taken to ensure a more effective urban governance, across different institutional levels, and, at the same time, within cities, by empowering and engaging communities and experimenting forms of participatory practices considerate of the social and cultural diversity of cities (COGTA, 2016). As a matter of fact, a wide range of indigenous ethnic groups, languages, religions, and cultures coexist together in South Africa, often fuelled by migratory processes, and ‘this brings about conflict; contestation; need for mediation; cooperation; new modes of identity construction (including gender); community formation; and societal norms (UN-HABITAT, 2014: 249). The conflictive cultural aspects of African cities are increasingly confronted with bottom-up attempts, particularly initiated by the civil society, to mobilise cultural resources for new creative entrepreneurial activities and for the regeneration of marginalised and informal areas (see the Study Area 1 on Sub-Saharian Africa in UNESCO, 2016). Nevertheless, legal and policy frameworks related to cultural management and protection, at the regional level, remain scarce (UNESCO, 2016: 37). In the presentation on ‘Culture, Urban Planning, and Regeneration of Small Towns and Intermediate Cities’, Sihlongonyane (2018)1 expresses his concern for culture-deaf planning approaches arguing that integrated strategies for urban and rural revitalisation based on culture are almost non-existent in South Africa.
While it is essential to assume a critical stance in respect to mainstream culture or creative-led development urban strategies, as often materialised in Global North cities with a narrow focus on cultural commodification, gentrification, and exclusion (Zukin, 1995), it is equally important to acknowledge that more place-based and culturally sensitive approaches, as advocated by UNESCO (2016), might lead to more sustainable and inclusive outcome. Therefore the hypothesis to identify new forms of inclusive and bottom-up culture-based approaches in South Africa has guided the assemblage of the chapters in this book.
Innovative rural and urban revitalisation practices and new forms of sustainable rural–urban synergies are indeed emerging in the context of South Africa, as this book will bear evidence. These practices and policies, contrary to what used to happen until a recent past, have started to acknowledge local cultures and indigenous knowledge as constituent of their development trajectories. It is not a marginal aspect for a relatively young democracy, where indigeneity was for long denied, and post-apartheid reconciliation, although built on the premises of protection of all cultures, served understandably the primary purpose to heal the nation, with the risk of underestimating the needs of local communities (Wilson, 2001). This aspect is still found, for example, in the long-standing question of land redistribution, which is undeniably crucial for rural livelihood and poverty eradication and, at the same time, being unresolved, carries specific ethnic connotations and cultural tensions (Cousins & Walker, 2015). Things, however, have started to change gradually.
Cultural policies have been for long poorly institutionalised in South African cities and regions, even if some attempts were done in the past ‘with or without government assistance’ (Sirayi & Anyumba, 2006). Forms of culture-led regeneration and urban heritage conservation have emerged in mega-cities like Johannesburg, eThekwini, and Cape Town (Sirayi, 2008), although not guided by national cultural policies or cultural plans. This has helped to tackle deprivation in some inner-city areas, although often contributing to gentrification, or even generating fierce conflicts, especially when heritage is perceived as a vestige of colonial domination (UNESCO, 2016: 36). Its uneasy integration in urban policies finds some similarities with what happened since the 1990s in the West, when a new season of urban regeneration and cultural planning practices started to arise (Bianchini & Parkinson, 1993).
However, in South Africa, they often more evidently assumed the form of unequal spatial restructuring, in light of the deep social and spatial divide of the country (Bremner, 2000). Later on, some evidence of more sustainable urban regeneration practices has, at least in part, reverted this trend. Creativity-oriented urban development (Gregory, 2016; Sitas, 2020), pro-poor urban renewal and tourism-based forms of development (Massey, 2020), alongside the rediscovery of indigenous knowledge systems in urban and rural regions (Sirayi, 2019), has opened up new avenues of research towards a more socially inclusive regeneration, and beyond the sole urban realm. Interestingly, this has consequently spilled over rural cultural policies (Connor & Nawa, 2017), sustained by sound diagnosis, at the national level, of the particular urbanisation pattern of the country, where rural villages and towns still play an important role in the socio-economic dynamics of the country and are functionally integrated with larger agglomerations (COGTA, 2016).
The emergence of rural–urban linkages (or interdependencies) in the national policy discourse of South Africa, and its association with cultural sustainability (although not yet really implemented as reported in our commentary in Chapter 2), places the country among the few examples of middle-income countries where this has started to be experimented. It is an interesting aspect to address long-lasting issues of spatial equity and a fairer redistribution of resources across the country. In the context of South Africa, the shift towards more complex territorial formations, beyond the rural-bias of certain local political discourses (Everatt & Ebrahim, 2020) or the standardised urban solutions often in use within international practices (Verdini and Sirayi, present book), is in itself a move towards a better understanding of local specificities and cultural regional differences. It found policy correlations with what China is experiencing to sustain rural revitalisation, although at a different pace and with larger central public investments since 2018 (UNESCO, 2019). It finds also common ground with recent scholarly attempts to interpret urban–rural interactions in the Asian context as a way to challenge mainstream Western-biased conceptualisations of the urbanisation process (Verdini, Wang, & Zhang, 2016). For this reason, in the context of this book, even if the focus will be on both urban and rural areas, we will privilege the term ‘rural–urban’, prioritising the rural, from a terminological point of view.
Culture, rural–urban revitalisation, and post-coloniality
Culture in international policy discourse is increasingly deemed essential to achieve sustainable development. A cultural approach to cities, particularly advocated by UNESCO, has informed the drafting of the ‘New Urban Agenda’ (UNESCO, 2016), the document that should shape global urbanisation for two decades (2016–2036) and, very recently, the Abu Dhabi ‘World Urban Forum’ has emphasised the role of cultural diversity in cities, due to potential innovative role of traditional knowledge systems in generating wealth (UN-HABITAT, 2020). Small rural settlements and rural–urban linkages, in such discourse, have gained attention. The main intention is to overcome the predominant discourse of the urban–rural divide, by focusing on the cultural and creative assets of territorial development and by exploring their dependence on partnerships and synergies between cities, towns and villages (Verdini, 2016). This is based on the pivotal contribution of Amin and Thrift in ‘Cities: reimagining the urban’ (2002), which is increasingly applicable to a variety of international contexts, particularly in light of technological innovation, and which states that:
‘The city is everywhere and in everything. If the urbanised world now is a chain of metropolitan areas connected by places/corridors of communication … then what is not urban? Is it the town, the village, the countryside? Maybe, but only to a limited degree. The footprints of city are all over these places, in the form of city commuters, tourists, teleworking, the media, and the urbanisation of lifestyles. The traditional divide between the city and the countryside has been perforated’
(Cited in UNESCO, 2016, 213)
Cultural approaches in urban development and planning have gradually emerged as a response to generic, and often unsuccessful, policies, conceived and implemented largely irrespective of the contextual conditions of places. It is a trait of many modernisation policies adopted since the 1950s everywhere and it has characterised decades of development aids in the Global South. This has been widely contested, particularly in critical development theory (Munck, 2010). It is however within a certain field of post-colonial critical studies, that culture and development have found reconciliation. Culture has been historically central to liberation struggles, particularly in Africa, and indigenous knowledge has been largely denied due to Western cultural domination (Young, 2016). Colonialism and capitalism, on the other hand, have historically operated a systematic epistemicide of alternative forms of local cultures and visions of the world, often imposing a one way thinking and modus operandi (De Sousa Santos, 2016). It is intuitive that this has consequently suggested exploring the diversities of cultural expression of places and cities, as a form of resistance to exogenous forces, which has found fertile terrain in subaltern studies (Chaturvedi, 2000).
There is no clear consensus in this discussion, featuring many voices, although we found intriguing what suggested by Roy (2011) that the proliferation of a diverse post-colonial urbanism should not ‘imply a simple journey out of the bounds of Euro-America to the colonial space/non place’ (2011:309). It should be instead taken as an opportunity to explore the position of post-colonial urbanism, beyond the logic of subalternity, in the quest for new analytical framework and ultimately a new ‘southern urbanism’ paradigm (Shindler, 2017). This is certainly an ambitious and fascinating exercise. It has merit to recognise a multiplicity of practices of shaping and constituting cities and territories. Yet, when it comes to redefining the boundary of urban theory and what is urban, we concur with a certain risk of over emphasis of particularism in post-colonialism. This could prevent to understand certain common aspects of the nature of the urban which can be found in cities across the world, and which can be quite important in policy-relevant research and for cross-fertilisation of practices (Scott & Storper, 2015), which is surely one of the ambition of this book.
Focusing on the rural–urban dynamics to understand the functioning of cities and regions in South Africa, might be seen as an easy shortcut in our approach to post-coloniality. However, this can help addressing categories widely in use among international organisation such as UN-HABITAT, widely referenced in strategic national policy documents such as the ‘Integrated Urban Development Framework’ (COGTA, 2016). Last but not least, this focus has still the potential to shed light into the distinctiveness of Southern urbanism, for instance in relationship to notions of discontinuity, informality, marginality, and dispersion (Parnell & Pieterse, 2015; Shin...
