Browsing by Author "Masa, Elena Mancebo"

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    Enabling complexity thinking in urban regeneration in Cape Town
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Masa, Elena Mancebo; Preiser, Rika; Ewing, Kathryn; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. School of Public Leadership.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY : Apartheid policies of racial segregation have left a daunting legacy in South Africa – a fragmented urban form with unequal access to jobs, amenities and public services. Since the advent of democracy, planning systems have not been pro-poor or inclusive; instead, they have often imposed an instrumental and technical rationality inherited from the old colonial system, with little consideration to the survival strategies and power contests of the urban poor. Mainstream consensus-based theories, such as communicative and deliberative planning, with their focus on participation, mutual learning and shared vision, also fail to recognise the reality of contestation over power and resources that characterise cities in the Global South. As a result, citizen participation in the context of state-society collaboration is often absent or unsuccessful. For this reason, urban scholars from the Global South are calling for the need to build a more practical and usable theory that is rooted in the realities of their cities. This thesis attempts to provide one such empirical account by profiling the implementation of the City of Cape Town-led Mayoral Urban Regeneration Programme (MURP) in Bonteheuwel, Cape Town, over the 2017 – 2019 period. The specific objectives of the research are 1) to demonstrate how Bonteheuwel can be understood as a complex adaptive system; 2) to apply the ‘conflicting rationalities’ lens to the study of planning interventions in the Global South, such as the MURP in Bonteheuwel; and, 3)to explore the characteristics of a complexity-based governance approach to urbanregeneration in the Global South. I have used case study design to guide the research for this thesis because, its focus on agents and structures in a particular context, makes it ideal to explore the reality of planning practice in a city in the Global South. A combination of secondary information, participant observation and a total of 14 interviews were used as sources of data. The research found that applying the lens of complexity to the description of planning settings, such as Bonteheuwel, offers new opportunities to understand the diverse logics, multiple trajectories and possible futures that exist. By recognising the characteristics of complex-adaptive systems (CAS), which are prevalent in our societies, planners are better equipped to begin to engage in processes of governance and transformation. The case has also surfaced, how state logics of govern and improve assume an instrumental rationality that has little touch with the reality on the ground: a web of messy micropolitics, power and space contestations that are often encouraged by the state’s history of unfulfilled promises and under delivery. The research, therefore, endorses the validity and relevance of the conflicting rationalities concept and illustrates the existence of normative and power struggles within state and society. Based on complexity theory, adaptive management emerges as a new ontology and epistemology to govern the realities of chaos, non-linearity and unpredictability of complex adaptive systems, such as Bonteheuwel. The learnings brought about by the case study point, however, to additional gaps in the literature, which should be prioritised to advance planning theory and practice in cities in the Global South.