The Promise of Planning

Global Aspirations and South African Experience Since 2008

Philip Harrison, Alison Todes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780367611651
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040045008
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Promise of Planning explores the experience of planning internationally since the global financial crisis, focusing on South Africa. The book is a response to a decade-plus in which state-led planning has re-emerged as a putative means for achieving developmental goals (as indicated in global initiatives such as the New Urban Agenda) and where planning in South Africa has consolidated in terms of its legal and policy basis. However, the return of planning is happening in an inauspicious context, with economic fragilities, technological shifts, political populism, institutional complexities, and more, threatening to upturn the "new promise of planning." The book provides a careful analytical account of planning in South Africa and how and why its promises have been difficult to achieve. Building on the authors' previous book, Planning and Transformation, the book sheds light on planning as an increasingly complex and diverse governmental practice within a perpetually changing world. It can be used as a resource for planners who must make good on the new promise of planning while navigating the risks and threats of the contemporary world, as well as students and faculty interested in international planning debates and the South African case.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List illustrations
• List of acronyms
• Preface: A Tribute to Vanessa Watson
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The forces at work internationally and the new promise of planning
• 3 The South African context
• 4 Planning on the national and provincial scales
• 5 Municipal planning in South Africa
• 6 Planning and organised civil society
• 7 Planning and the transformation of the national space economy
• 8 Planning and spatial transformation
• 9 Planning and social transformations
• 10 Towards the just transition? Planning and the natural environment
• 11 Transformation through crisis? Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic
• 12 The planning profession in South Africa
• 13 Planning education and research in South African planning
• 14 Conclusion
• References
• Index