Untangling 'Integration' in Urban Development Policy ... - CiteSeerX

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a more in-depth account of the environmental debates in urban development. ... puzzle through an exploration of urban management and governance.
Untangling ‘Integration’ in Urban Development Policy Debates Edgar Pieterse Published in: Urban Forum, Vol. 15(1) 2004 Urban integration is seemingly on the lips of all involved with urban development in South Africa. One can be forgiven for thinking it is the magic bullet that will resolve the many intractable problems that mark South Africa’s cities. Urban integration is the core idea that underpins the unfolding Urban Renewal Strategy of the government. The notion emerges strongly in the recently published Draft White Paper on Urbanisation. It is also at the heart of the Urban Development Framework (UDF) that was launched in 1997 as the government’s policy approach to urban development and reconstruction. Urban integration is indeed ubiquitous in the current policy landscapes of South Africa. Yet, its meaning and its application remains shrouded in confusion, with a tendency for hubris. The purpose of the paper is to tease out the multiple and shifting meanings of ‘integration’ in urban development policy thinking. I propose to do this by exploring three contiguous debates that shed light on a different dimension of the elusive strategy/ideal. The three debates arise from urban planning studies, environmental critiques of urban development, and the more recent focus on urban management. In particular, my interest is to understand the associations and meanings of integration in urban development policies in the current period when the mainstream policy consensus is seemingly settled on the desirability of ‘sustainable urban development’—a notion that re-appears time and again in the various policy statements of the South African government and generally regarded as the outcome of urban integration strategies. The frequent reference to sustainable urban development suggests a strong link between international policy discourses of the World Bank, United Nations and bilateral agencies, and those of the South African government. In light of this, it makes sense to explore the tenets of these discourses. Although it is not always easy to delineate the various overlapping policy streams, a focus on disciplinary literatures allow for such delineation, thus, the focus on urban planning, environmental management and urban management. However, as the argument will demonstrate, a significant measure of cross-pollination does occur between these disciplinary areas. These are signalled as the narrative unfolds. In order to demonstrate the linkages between South African urban policy conceptions and the international literature, I link each thematic exploration to the UDF policy of the South African government. Due to space constraints I merely highlight the continuities of discourses in the UDF without exploring them in detail. I have done this to some extent in a companion paper (Pieterse, 2003). The first section of the paper delves into planning debates about urban integration. Here I trace the movement away from blueprint master planning to more provisional and strategic approaches to urban planning. Of particular relevance for urban integration are the questions of planning scales in the city, participation of citizens with different degrees of access to power, and environmental imperatives of efficiency. The second section provides a more in-depth account of the environmental debates in urban development. Since this is the most well developed body of knowledge on urban integration, I spend some time differentiating between the various facets of the literature with particular emphasis on the lessons that arise from both the ‘green’ and ‘brown’ strands of the field. The core points that emerge here are the centrality of politics and questions of unequal power in the city. The final section of the paper deals with the institutional aspects of the urban development puzzle through an exploration of urban management and governance. This discussion highlights the organisational preconditions that arise from the planning, environmental and governance debates in any move towards greater integration—a dimension that is often under-theorised or altogether forgotten. 1

The discussion that follows does not resolve the puzzle about what urban integration may mean in theoretical and practical terms. It merely serves to clarify the various strands of thinking and debate in urban development that are often knotted together in glib assertions for more urban integration that will ineluctably lead to sustainable urban development. Uncritical and under-specified policies can lead to unintended consequences and bad outcomes. The disjuncture between policy intentions and outcomes in our first wave of housing development is a stark reminder of this (Harrison, et al., 2003; Khan and Thring, 2003). If nothing else, I hope to inject more circumspection and conceptual precision into what will, and must be, an ongoing and highly contested debate for some time to come. PLANNING DEBATES AND CONCEPTIONS OF URBAN INTEGRATION Transition from Master Planning to Strategic Planning Planning remains the key tool to move towards a more integrated, balanced and sustainable city, even though there has been mounting disaffection from the totalising vision of traditional master planning (Friedmann, 2000).1 In other words, today planning is considered to be effective when it realises its limitations in terms of powerful market forces, vested interests in planning institutions, and the autonomous initiatives of the poor which makes rigid approaches simply unenforceable (Bashkar, 1996; Hall and Pfieffer, 2000). Reflexive planning of this sort values flexibility over rigidity. Further, it is now recognised that if planning is to be effective it must be accepted (and driven) and legitimated by those it seeks to regulate. Incisive criticisms against the top-down planning have effectively undermined the prospects of large-scale, blueprint planning. Such criticisms highlight the importance of participation and of ‘planning as process’ (Friedmann, 1992; Rakodi, 1993). These two ideas—flexibility and participatory processes—have had a profound influence in the South African debates about the role planning can play in creating integrated cities. It is appropriate to substantiate these two ideas more fully. The ‘state of the art’ in current planning thinking is aptly summarised by Hall and Pfieffer: The overall strategy is to develop flexible planning strategies at different spatial scales, from the strategic to the local. The strategic plan for a metropolitan area would set out broad principles of development and would, above all, make clear where infrastructure investments were expected in the short-to-medium term. Within it local design briefs would develop a simultaneous control of environmental standards and planning standards, set out transparently the proposals for infrastructure provision and upgrading, and develop policy solutions to control and land speculation (Hall and Pfeiffer, 2000: 308, emphasis added). In addition, Hall and Pfeiffer (2000) make a case for gradual decentralisation of the city and densification of existing settlements with the ultimate aim of re-concentrating planning and development on a more local scale. Localism in this context stems from broader debates related to the notion of the ‘compact city’, which stems in turn from the environmental critique of unhindered urban expansion (Jenks and Burgess, 2000). The basic idea is the establishment of community life on a scale that allows for localised employment opportunities and services and close proximity to green areas for recreation and urban agriculture. Lastly, such local communities need to be developed to allow for maximum possible mixture of land uses, with medium densities and adequate public spaces for associational life to flourish. It is effectively a localised integration of various facets of comprehensive, human-scale urban living. Fainstein (2000) explains that this approach is characteristic of the ‘new urbanism’ planning tradition. It is important to unpack this debate and agenda, because it is profoundly influential in South Africa, both in the academic planning community and on formal government policies such as the UDF. 2

In the UDF it is argued that “…spatial integration through sound urban planning, land transport and environmental management, is critical to enhance the generative capacity and ease of access to socio-economic opportunities in our urban areas. [This involves, inter alia,] less rigid zoning, more flexible planning mechanisms, promoting mixed land-use (colocating residential, commercial and industrial areas) which will complement local economic development” (Department of Housing, 1997: 12). There is broad support in the policy community in South Africa for the ideas of corridors, compaction, mixed-use land use and local scale planning to create cities that facilitate access to urban opportunities at a pedestrian scale (Dewar, 1998; 2000; Todes, 2000). The planning literature generally links the achievement of more functionally integrated and compact urban forms with the imperative of greater citizen and beneficiary participation. The reason for this is that the movement away from fragmented and dispersed patterns of living and movement implies a shift in behavioural attitudes and political values. Participation imperatives go back at least three decades in the planning literature. The expansive critique of top-down planning since the 1970s provides pointers in the direction of more appropriate and pro-poor (people) planning approaches. First, it allows a recognition and understanding on the part of planners of the complex livelihood systems that the poor rely on to secure access to real and imagined opportunities for decent shelter, associated infrastructure and services, waged employment (in either the formal or informal sector) and relevant information (Rakodi, 1993). Second, it provides an understanding of how traditional planning instruments such as master plans or structure plans and rigid zoning can in fact undermine the livelihood strategies of such groups, with a view to amending these tools to serve a more sympathetic and enabling function (Ibid.). Third, this critique promotes the design of participatory processes that are attuned to the heterogeneity of community life and subjectivities, and especially power differentials between various actors in such communities, particularly that of women (Beall, 1997). Fourth, there is a trend towards commitment to continuously expanding the relative power of marginal groups in urban politics through a deliberate strategy to strengthen the associations and social movements of the poor (Abers, 2000; Friedmann, 1992). Fifth, the critique advocates the need for a form of professional suicide to create the conditions for a dialogical planning process that values the ‘expertise’ of the planner as much as the local knowledge of community participants (Turner, 1997; Chambers, 1997). Sixth, direct linkage into broader political decision-making forums is encouraged to ensure that local participatory planning processes are not marginalized from the mainstream sources of funds that drive city-wide infrastructure planning and investment (Beall, 2000). These are clearly difficult conditions to fulfil in most third world cities, but it does provide some of the elements of an interpretative framework to assess when planning processes do in fact hold the potential to become transformative and facilitate meaningful empowerment of excluded groups (Abers, 2000; Friedmann, 2000). Also, a commitment to participatory planning invariably leads to fundamental re-thinking of all the other dimensions of urban development, e.g. governance, financial management and service delivery. Read together, the two themes above suggest that appropriate planning in a post-master planning age can promote urban integration more effectively by recognising different kinds of integration at different scales in the city whilst ensuring that planning proposals and solutions are responsive to the complex and integrated needs of beneficiary communities. In the case of the former, it is suggested that planning can realise integration more effectively at smaller scales where communities form and interact. The role of planning is to foster dense, highly integrated and multiplex communities. At the same time, planning can also articulate the overall integration of such localised, integrated communities, at a city/metropolitan scale, but only through attention to strategic elements that link the city (see Healey, 2000). However, in both cases, unless the planning process itself is prefigurative of what it seeks to establish and, therefore, fully participatory, it will end up 3

being irrelevant and impotent. Jorge Borja and Manuel Castells (1997) have explicitly explored the feasibility of such an approach. It is worthwhile to briefly review their core argument. Combining Strategic Planning and Participatory Imperatives Borja and Castells (1997) outline an approach that combines strategic planning and participatory concerns in a pluralistic democratic framework, accepting that most largescale infrastructure developments require private (business and civil society organisations) partners. The easiest way of capturing their conceptual model is by invoking the idea of the ‘city as a network’, embodying a number of nodes of various scales of importance. According to Borja and Castells, the purpose of urban planning is to identify the most strategic ways of linking up the nodes in a manner that simultaneously enhances each node and the entire system as a whole. However, the form of the networked system and its territorial coverage is crucial from an economic development and social equity perspective. In this model, a project qualifies as strategic if it complies with all three of the following criteria: 1. the intervention relates to a scenario with future and economic, social and cultural objectives; 2. the initiative has coherence with other projects and dynamics undertaken in other parts of the urban territory; 3. the work has metastatic effects on its hinterland, that is, effects which generate initiatives which boost its linkage potential (Borja and Castells, 1997: 153). At the core of this model is an assumption that there is a vibrant democratic, accountable and transparent local state that can facilitate a social process of defining a future vision for the territory. It is this vision that becomes the integrating and cohering force for all urban activity and ensures that scarce resources, leveraged investment of the private sector and voluntary contributions from civil society are joined together to achieve complementary or similar objectives. It presupposes an intelligent state that is able to initiate and sustain a participatory strategic planning process that can crystallise a vision for the city that reflects diverse interests and uses it to mobilise resources to initiate selective strategic projects to progressively realise the vision. The authors concede that such an approach runs the risk of insufficient social participation and consensus and needs deliberate action to avoid such problems by involving ideally “all the public and private agents” (Borja and Castells, 1997: 155).2 They also recognise that generally speaking, local authorities are “in a relatively weak position with respect to public [other tiers] and private economic groups”, lack adequate jurisdictional authority to control large urban initiatives that are cross-cutting, and have to function in a metropolitan region that is fragmented in institutional terms (Ibid.: 174). This approach is compelling even though it is questionable from a political economy perspective. For one, it assumes a very high level of competency from both political and administrative leaders in municipal government. The approach also assumes a private sector culture/disposition that identifies its interests beyond a narrow focus on the profit imperative and is sufficiently committed to realise the broader public interest. This may be a valid assumption in city-regions where the private sector has long and deep domestic roots, stands to benefit from local efficiency and can self-identify with the ‘culture’ of the city (Amin, 1999; Amin and Graham, 1997). However, such an assumption is tenuous in most third world cities where the main investment considerations are cheap labour, opportunities to exploit rent-seeking politicians and low taxation. There is a further assumption that a ‘political pact’ on broader economic, social and political goals is possible in the first place. Again, in highly fragmented and/or informalised cities this is a questionable assumption (Caldeira, 1996; Simone, 2001). Lastly, it is also unclear how 4

such processes can be made truly participatory, i.e. being effective in articulating macrolevel strategic processes about the future vision for the city whilst at the same time incorporating local-level processes related to neighbourhood concerns, especially since middle-class communities are much more adept at exploiting opportunities to influence city-level political processes (Fainstein, 2000). On this note of caution it is opportune to turn to possible implications of these debates for the South African context. Implications for Planning Debates in South Africa The emerging planning system in South Africa at a national and city scale is obviously influenced by current thinking in both development planning (in the South) and spatial planning (in the North and South). Provision is made in South Africa for national, provincial and city-wide strategic development plans. At the city level, municipalities are compelled by law to devise integrated development plans (IDPs) (RSA, 2000a). The IDP is essentially a planning methodology that links a statement of purpose, with plans, programmes, institutional design and practices, monitoring mechanisms and financial flows (Pieterse, 2002). This strategic approach seeks to operationalise a commitment to participatory planning at both neighbourhood and city-wide scale. Further, in most metropolitan areas there are processes afoot to finalise spatial plans that seek to promote urban integration through interventions such as compaction, densification, transport corridors and commercial nodes (Cross, 2001; Harrison and Todes, 2001). However, in line with neoliberal approaches to urban development, property rights are secured in the Constitution. This makes it incredibly difficult for municipalities to intervene in land markets to realise these strategic objectives and planning interventions (Dewar, 1998; Todes, 2000). Current thinking that recognises a range of planning instruments to be deployed flexibly in relation to specific objectives and local contexts is appropriate. However, there are real dangers that such an approach can be emptied of transformative political intent and be little more than rhetorical devises. This is why planning tools and processes must also be located in a broader discussion about democratising urban development processes and finding ways of empowering, especially of low-income groups, in relation to the state and private sector interests operating in and on the city level (Tajbakhsh, 2001). There is a related correlation between institutional preparedness and capability and the type of planning tools that can be used effectively (Hildebrand and Grindle, 1997; Batley, 1993), especially if one asserts the political empowerment imperative. Much of the conventional wisdom about the continued relevance of strategic priorities for cities, linked to a politically negotiated medium-and-long term vision for the city, is sensible. In a context of scarce resources and recalcitrant markets it is important to be upfront about the infrastructure needs of the city and the political calculations that inform the relative investment levels allocated to different, competing priorities. Similarly, in contexts exhibiting low densities, poor public transport systems and peripheral urban expansion (such as in South Africa), it is sensible to use planning instruments that reverse such trends and steer them in alternative directions. This depends on a strong vision for alternative spatial configurations and sufficient political will to tackle the vested interests that benefit from such spatial forms (Mabin, 1995). Unfortunately, planning approaches and process proposals often fail to take into account that such political challenges can only be understood through careful analysis of the national and local balance of forces and of dominant discourses about economic growth and competitiveness that are very influential in shaping investment decisions and professional practice (Fainstein and Campell, 1996). ENVIRONMENTAL DEBATES IN URBAN DEVELOPMENT The emergence of an environmental critique gained momentum in the late 1980s and culminated with the Earth Summit in 1992 and has had profound impact on urban 5

development debates. Indeed, close on ten years later there is not a single mainstream urban development agency that does not espouse the virtues of sustainable urban development (UNDP, 1991; World Bank, 2000). Does this mean there is a convergence of understanding about how to act on the city? The immediate answer is ‘no’, largely because the meaning of sustainable urban development is notoriously elusive and there has been little substantial institutional commitment to the approach, manifested in “little support for integrated urban programmes” (Atkinson, 2000: iv). The two dominant themes associated with the environmental critique of urban development concern the ‘brown agenda’ (Hardoy, et al., 1992), and the planning focus on urban compaction (Jenks and Burgess, 2000). It is instructive to briefly elaborate these perspectives and especially their implications for further elucidating integration in urban development processes. I start with the compact city approach, because it emerged coherently in the North during the late 1970s/early 1980s.3 Sustainability through Compaction Mike Jenks (2000) points out that the compact city debate has been a discussion in the wake of ecological critiques about the durability of the fossil-based system of economic development since the early 1970s. In the urban context, it focussed on the ‘carrying capacity’ of cities in relation to the natural resources they consume and the volume of waste that they produce (McCarney, 1995). For example, Herbert Girardet (1999) points out that cities comprise two per cent of the earth’s land surface area, but consume 75 per cent of its resources and produce about as much of the waste. Another strand in this early literature focussed on the ‘greying’ of the city as the built environment expands relentlessly to consume agricultural hinterlands and green-fields within the city (Ravetz, 2000). During the 1980s a substantial green social movement matured in Northern countries around the sustainability agenda. This was reflected in the emergence of Green political parties, campaigns against polluting industries, research on zero-emission technologies and clean energy, consumer movements promoting recycling, calls for chemical content disclosure in consumables and the rise in demand for organic produce (Becker, et al., 2000). In an urban context, the long-term objective of this movement was captured by the demand to move towards recycling through what has been called ‘circular metabolism’ in cities, as opposed to the more resource hungry linear metabolism. The latter was, and continues to be, the norm (Girardet, 1996).4 The central issue for this movement is whether these ideals can be realised through a liberal capitalist system that fails to link economic growth and environmental damage (Ravetz, 2000). In other words, is it possible to introduce effective political instruments that will tax and penalise negative environmental externalities to such an extent that firms switch to technologies that will ensure that economic production and growth does not damage the environment? This effectively would be creating an alternative economic system (Sachs, 2000).5 In reality, there are ‘strong’ versions of sustainable development and ‘weak’ forms, which would invest different levels of confidence in market-based solutions that involve mild regulatory systems (Rees, 1995). These environmental arguments had a profound impact on the discipline of urban planning, manifest in the rise of debates about achieving a ‘sustainable urban form’ (Jenks, 2000). Here the term sustainability is used to encapsulate an expansive range of topics, including: “the size, scope, density, and compactness of cities; processes for intensification and decentralisation; land-use, mixed uses, lay-out and building-type (particularly housing); and green and open spaces” (Ravetz, 2000: 3). Contemporary compact city approaches are defined by Burgess (2000: 9-10), as measures: “to increase built area and residential population densities; to intensify urban economic, social and cultural activities and to manipulate urban size, form and structure and settlement systems in pursuit of the environmental, social and global sustainability benefits derived from the concentration of urban functions.” The compact city prism refracts a new, heroic, purpose for planning (Fainstein, 2000). 6

Since the formalisation of compact city approaches in the 1980s, planners and architects have been experimenting with a wide array of modelling techniques and innovative spatial conceptualisations to combine much higher levels of efficiency in terms of energy-use, transportation, built environment, land-use and facilitating a more profound social and aesthetic experience through the innovative possibilities of these new spaces and their underlying technologies (Hall and Pfeiffer, 2000; Portney, 2003). Planning can play a role by structuring different patterns of communication, engagement, transaction, movement, and connectedness to the natural environment through quality design and spatial manipulation. However, as Burgess (2000) explains, within this broad approach there are various unresolved debates about how exactly to achieve compaction. Specifically, where to start, at what scale and through what spatial model? Much more recently, these debates have turned their gaze to third world cities and the relevance of compaction in those contexts. Burgess (2000) argues convincingly that transplanting the compact city approach into third world cities is a fraught and complex exercise, because ultimately, it touches on the nature of urban and social development models which have to be context-specific. He points out that “lower levels of economic development, smaller urban budgets, shortages of environmental infrastructure, shelter and basic services and high levels of urban poverty have resulted in a different pattern of urban development and environmental degradation, which looks equally unsustainable” (Burgess, 2000: 12). Accordingly, compact city policies in Developing Countries must deal with poverty and social inequality head on, even though the theoretical approach as applied in the North is ill-suited to do so. This is relevant for my purposes because ‘compaction’ features very prominently in the UDF as the underlying planning philosophy to achieve urban integration. For instance, the UDF asserts that: the spatial and social integration of our multi-centred cities through a process of densification, aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of the public transportation, is already on the urban agenda of South Africa. […] In order to be sustainable, higher density living environments must be affordable to the target group and, through innovative design, be habitable in the longer term. They should therefore be designed to reflect the qualities of variety, convenience, sociability, privacy and provide for the need to have access to natural areas (Department of Housing, 1997: 13-14). The political implications of pursuing compaction policies with regard to densification, infrastructure optimisation, improved (public) transportation and land-use, is far-reaching in most Developing Countries, because of the culture and structure of social and political systems. South Africa is no exception given the history of spatial segregation and apartheid planning. According to David Dewar (2000: 217): “The current sprawling, fragmented and separated urban form of South African towns and cities is entirely unsustainable. Greater compaction is essential. There is an increasing national awareness of the need for this and of how it might be achieved technically, but there are a number of entrenched policies and practices which need to be changed if rapid improvement is to happen. The critical variable is political will.” Invariably, it requires far-reaching interventionist policies that will undermine deeply entrenched public and private interests that benefit from the sprawled city.6 In addition, compaction policies require greater (local) state regulation and probably higher rates of taxation to fund initiatives that will induce different spatial patterning. It is unlikely to emerge from political voluntarism (Ravetz, 2000). Delineating different conceptual approaches to the question of power is a crucial step in navigating the expansive urban environmental literature.

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Competing Views on the Environment and Urban Development In the following discussion I tease out two contrasting perspectives on the environment and urban development. Environmental agendas came on to the urban development agenda during the 1980s as a spill-over of Northern debates about ‘green’ environmentalism, on the one hand. On the other hand, evidence showed that urban poverty was intensifying in many third world cities with grave environmental health consequences for the poor (Harpham, et al., 1988). Green environmentalism refers to a focus on issues such as: “the contribution of urban-based production, consumption and waste generation to ecosystem disruptions, resource depletion and climate change. Most have impacts that are more dispersed and delayed, and often threaten long-term ecological sustainability” (McGranahan and Satterthwaite, 2000: 73). By the early 1990s, every urban development agency was, either directly or tangentially, addressing urban environmental issues, but with a definite bias towards ‘brown’ environmental concerns (UNDP, 1991; WHO, 1999[1996]; World Bank, 1991). Brown environmentalism is essentially concerned with environmental health questions and especially the precarious position of the urban poor. The brown agenda includes a focus on “unsanitary living conditions, hazardous pollutants in the urban air and waterways, and accumulations of solid waste” (McGranahan and Satterthwaite, 2000: 73). Dealing with the brown agenda from an urban development perspective involves the formulation of effective policies and strategies to address fundamental household services such as safe water, effective sewerage systems and efficient waste management (UNCHS, 1996). The argument follows that this can only be achieved under conditions where effective urban settlement management systems have been put in place. This includes local government institutional capacity to ensure appropriate prioritisation of these basic services and enforcing an appropriate regulatory system (Ibid.). In other words, the central challenge for addressing brown environmental issues is environmental management. This is typically the more narrow and technocratic interpretation of the issue. A second, more critical and politically conscious response suggests that the central challenge is actually political control over decision-making power in the city. Both of these perspectives cast different lights on the underlying question of urban integration. I will now unpack the former argument, which is most clearly reflected in the thinking of the World Bank. Environmental management approach Approaching urban environmental problems as fundamentally a managerial problem fits neatly with the World Bank’s theoretical starting points. In defining the brown agenda as fundamentally managerial in nature it follows that the policy solutions lie in strengthening the role of local government through greater devolution of power, ensuring that service delivery strategies are in place to meet the needs of all segments in the urban market, and strengthening the regulatory capacity of local government. These policy imperatives are consistent with existing World Bank policy on urban development and do not challenge the logic of prior approaches. This comes through most clearly if we analyze the recent policy approach in Cities in Transition (World Bank, 2000). In Cities in Transition, the approach of the World Bank to urban sustainability is superficial, which hints at expediency.7 Through ill-considered couplings of ideas and concepts the World Bank invokes their commitment to urban sustainability without any attempt to at least signal the potential contradictions between underlying logics of distinctive social, cultural, political and economic processes. Firstly, the Bank tends to expand the idea of sustainability to one whereby it essentially becomes a synonym for ‘viability’ or ‘durability’ by associating it with municipal finance, economic growth, institutional competence and programme effectiveness. The World Bank argues that cities must become sustainable in four respects: ‘First and foremost, they must be livable—ensuring a decent quality of life and equitable opportunity for all residents. To achieve that goal, they must also be 8

competitive, well governed and managed, and financially sustainable, or bankable’ (World Bank, 2000: 46, emphasis in original). This approach is tied to a general tendency across various policy debates to stick by the neoliberal commitment to free enterprise and free trade (in order to attain free markets), which is deemed the only viable route to generating the requisite wealth, which can be redistributed and reinvested for poverty alleviation. Secondly, the attempt at a more developmental association through the concept ‘liveable cities’ is poorly defined. In World Bank parlance, liveability refers to “reducing urban poverty and inequality, creating a healthful [sic] urban environment, enhancing personal security (minimizing the risk of crime, violence, traffic accidents, and natural disasters), establishing an inclusive system of legal protection and political representation, and making cultural and recreational amenities available to all. Satisfying this agenda for the poor would enhance the well-being of all urban residents” (World Bank, 2000: 47). The means to realize this goal is through the other dimensions of sustainability such as municipal finance, economic growth and institutional capacity. At a minimum one would expect some clarification as to how increased competitiveness and the good governance agenda necessarily lead to reduced urban poverty and inequality, especially since the macro economic trends at global and national level suggests that ‘competitiveness measures’ tend to have the reverse effect. Competitiveness measures tend to increase both poverty and inequality, leading to a decline in general quality of life for low-income groups (Rodrick, 1999). Further, it remains inconclusive as to whether a managerial state necessarily privileges the interests of the poor over and above those of the private sector (Douglass, 1998). On the contrary, evidence suggests it more likely to be the opposite (Stephens, 2000). The weaknesses in the conceptualisation of the World Bank are partially addressed by McGranahan and Satterthwaite (2000), who also argue for effective institutions to address both brown and green environmental issues.8 However, they assert as a prerequisite that these local institutions need to be politically committed to reduce urban inequalities and enabling collective and democratic responses by government and the public to environmental concerns. In other words, there is an assumption that in the absence of democratic political institutions and collective action, environmental management strategies can be ineffectual. Hardoy and his colleagues (1992) argued this in the early 1990s when they asserted the importance of establishing competent, representative local government. Their basic argument was that most environmental problems are essentially political problems: “they arise not from some particular shortage of an environmental resource such as land or fresh water but from economic or political factors which deny poorer groups both access to it and the ability to demand changes. […] A failure of governance underlies most environmental problems” (Hardoy, et al., 1992: 23, emphasis added). The problem with this argument is that it is often presented as an invocation of what ought to happen without exploring in sufficient detail what may hinder emergence of participatory and representative local government. As a result, it comes close to slipping into the apolitical and voluntarist conceptualisation of the World Bank. This issue is addressed more explicitly by Carolyn Stephens (2000) through her argument to foreground inequality in policy debates about environmental sustainability. Political empowerment approach The central puzzle in the work of Carolyn Stephens is how to address deepening health inequality in a context where, at least rhetorically, almost all the key actors in urban development recognise that it is morally unacceptable. The reason it is a puzzle is because the solutions to health inequality are well established. It is known that simple interventions such as “adequate portable water, clean and ample food, adequate shelter, including waste and disposal facilities, and safe, remunerable work” presage a healthy and long life (Stephens, 2000: 104). In addition, she argues that it is also well established, through trial and error, which policies are best in different circumstances to achieve these outcomes. Further, it is widely recognised that the modalities of policy development and 9

implementation need to comply with two criteria, i.e. be intersectoral and participatory in nature (Ibid.). Yet, health inequalities continue, seemingly unabated, and in some regions of the world, continue to widen. Why is it that available solutions to abhorrent social conditions cannot find willing implementers? According to Stephens (2000) it is due to the absence of participation by the poor in decision-making processes that matter in terms of resource allocation and effective control. However, what is novel is that she believes this to be futile unless it is coupled with a commitment from powerful groups to perform an ethical shift to “devolve power over decision-making to those with the right to decide—those most affected by the problems” (Stephens, 2000: 109). Carolyn Stephens further intimates that as long as these conditions do not exist, it is misguided to simply refine policy tools and data collection on urban environmental problems. At the same, there is recognition that such far-reaching political opportunities do not simply present themselves ahistorically, but emerge out of social engagement. Recent policy innovations, such as Local Agenda 219 and the Healthy Cities initiative, present real opportunities for the poor and other marginalized groups to influence urban policies at the point of conception and problem definition. This approach concurs with understandings of a more critical strand of environmental management in urban areas, as put forward by Adrian Atkinson and colleagues (1999). This branch of the urban environmental m a n a g e me n t literature tends to encapsulate debates about the nature—transformative/reformist tendencies—of Local Agenda 21 processes and the challenges associated with redefining governance and planning processes to become more inclusive and participatory to ensure multiple stakeholder involvement (Atkinson and Dávila, 1999). This may include participatory processes in environmental management initiatives at the neighbourhood scale and city-wide strategic visioning and planning processes, as discussed above. The field also considers inter-governmental roles and division of responsibilities in the formulation and sustaining of managerial systems, especially in the context of increasing devolution, decentralisation and democratisation, which opens up greater opportunities for stakeholder involvement in local decision-making (Dávila and Atkinson, 1999). Lastly, it focuses on the difficult issue of political leadership and the construction of political commitment, seen as central by Hardoy and colleagues in their earlier analysis (Hardoy, et al., 1992). The crucial insight that emerges from Stephens (2000), Atkinson (2000) and Barraclough (2001) is that ‘sustainable urban development’ remains a profoundly broad and malleable discourse, despite various attempts to circumscribe it more precisely. Mainstream international development agencies have been adept at partially incorporating sustainability precepts and redefining them through a neoliberal theoretical framework (Atkinson 2000; Barraclough, 2001). Atkinson captures the continued conceptual and political problem effectively: In the case of sustainable urban development, the term ‘brown agenda’ was coined to emphasize the need to deal not only with the global and rural environment (the ‘green agenda’), but also to improve the environmental conditions in which the urban population—and particularly the urban poor—were living. This resulted in a common assumption that good urban environmental management—perhaps coupled with measures to improve equity and the quality of governance—will automatically culminate in sustainable development. This is not, however, the case (Atkinson, 2000: 5). What do these contestations about environmental policy and urban development reveal about integration?

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Urban Sustainability and Integration These contrasting approaches to, and understandings of, urban sustainability hint at the difficulties associated with operationalising this concept in urban development processes. The urban sustainability debate has made an important contribution to deepening our understanding of what effective integration may entail. A critical perspective on ‘urban sustainability’ emphasises, first, the continued importance of a strong (local) state with adequate devolved powers to perform revenue collection and regulatory control. Second, it requires the recognition of the relevance of all dimensions of municipal government—service delivery, enablement, regulation, and political empowerment—for the progressive realisation of urban sustainability, which suggests fundamentally different approaches to municipal planning, management and urban governance more generally. Third, this approach provides a preferred discursive framework within which to debate and contest the city’s approach to mediating the contradictions between pursuing economic growth, reducing poverty and inequality, and ensuring environmental protection and renewal, to the extent that such contradictions are recognised as unresolved (Brand, 2000). The framework proposed here can be used to structure the democratic dialogue in cities to envision desirable and achievable futures, as discussed above. Fourth, it links conceptually and practically the fundamental inter-dependency between the wealthy and the poor in the city. This creates space for a renewed political discourse on urban inequality and redistribution, if the political commitment exists to deploy it in such a manner. In a similar way, it provides a framework for municipal planning and managerial organisation that can link household dynamics and neighbourhood life-spaces to the broader urban system, including its spatial dynamics (Douglas, 1998).10 The critiques in planning and the environmental turn in urban development debates emphasise the importance of holistic conceptual models that recognise the interdependencies between various actors and systems in the city. An environmental lens on the city reveals the linkages between various urban services and infrastructures as these function alongside, and connected to, one another, in communities. It provides a compelling rationale for improved coordination, adopting a set of priorities that prioritises fulfilment of basic needs, and linking these imperatives to institutional reform. An environmental lens also captures enduring vested interests and the intractability of causal factors that produce both green and brown environmental problems. In this sense, the environmental imperatives bring one back to questions about power, political control and democratisation. This hints at a constitutive connection between sustainable urban development and political agency. These insights hold profound implications for institutional relations at the urban scale. The discussion now turns to the institutional debates in the urban development literature; the third disciplinary corpus related to integrated urban development. URBAN MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVES ON INSTITUTIONS AND INTEGRATION Debates towards a Definition of Urban Management A longstanding advocate of urban management is G. Shabbir Cheema, associated with UNDP. It is helpful to record his understanding of this approach at the outset: Urban management is a holistic concept. It is aimed at strengthening the capacity of governmental and nongovernmental organisations to identify policy and program alternatives and to implement them with optimal results. The challenge of urban management is thus to respond effectively to the problems and issues of individual cities in order to enable them to perform their functions.11 […] The components of the urban institutional capacity in a country are horizontal and vertical coordination among the concerned agencies, delineation of responsibilities and 11

functions among agencies, technical and human-relations skills and the agencies to perform their assigned tasks, and decentralisation of planning and management authority of urban local governments (1993: 7 & 13, emphasis added) This analysis and prescriptive agenda is rooted in an assessment about the lack of achievement of objectives in the urban programmes of development agencies, especially by the World Bank (Stren, 1993). It captures a recognition in these agencies that their preoccupation with sectoral (and occasionally multi-sectoral) projects during the 1970s and 1980s resulted in a narrow, micro-orientation at the expense of impacting on cities in their entirety. With the recognition of managerial issues, the main cause of failure was ascribed to the lack of effective institutional systems and skilled personnel at a city-wide scale to ensure that urban projects were sustained beyond the time-frame of external intervention and support. According to Cheema (1993: 7), there was a lack of analysis of, and support to deal with, issues such as “improving financial structure and management; providing shelter, basic urban services, and infrastructure; improving urban management systems; strengthening the role of the urban informal sector; and strengthening institutional capacities, including the role of municipal governments.” These concerns coincided with broader political and social changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as the democratisation wave across the Developing World and Eastern Europe, the decline of Soviet socialism and its sphere of influence, and the rise of localism as a symbiotic response to environmental concerns and globalisation trends. The impact on development thinking was a valorisation of participatory development and the role of democratic local government, which in turn required devolution and decentralisation of national powers and authority (Manor, 1999). In the mainstream development policy community there was a comfortable converge of disparate objectives. One the one hand, the aim was to radically improve project outcomes and make them contingent on establishing effective financial, administrative and political institutional systems. On the other hand, the aim was to embrace the more political objectives of extending democracy, increasing civil society participation in development processes, and expanding notions of development to incorporate social justice, equity, environmental and political empowerment (Friedmann, 1992). However, this approach is fraught with problems in the absence of a more precise conceptualisation of urban management. As Richard Stren (1993: 137) asks, “is urban management an objective, a process, or a structure?” More recently, Ronald McGill has set himself the task of bringing greater clarity to the concept. After a comprehensive survey of the history of the concept, urban management, he teases out three key dimensions that shed light on the building blocks of a definition for the concept and approach. First, McGill (1998) argues that it is crucial to explicate who or what should be the driving force of urban management. Second, recognising that the inherent complexity of urban areas militates against comprehensive management, a corresponding approach to institutional complexity must be (re)defined. Third, the potential contradiction between strategic imperatives at a city-wide scale and operational vitality at project level—which McGill defines as the de-linking of planning from implementation—must be resolved satisfactorily. Addressing and linking these three dimensions is imperative, and leads to an understanding of urban management as a holistic approach. “It is the nature and characteristics of intervention in the urban development process that is the central concern of urban management”, according to McGill (1998: 465, emphasis added). In other words, in response to Stren’s question, he comes down on the side of urban management as a process and not a predefined institutional structure or simply an ideal. This is not a satisfactory conceptual definition, but it does circumscribe more precisely the ambit of issues that can be collected under this policy theme. However, McGill’s argument is not substantiated enough to dispel the criticism of Edmundo Werna (1995) that there is a 12

political agenda lurking behind the definitional obfuscation in relation to urban management. According to Werna the political agenda is a deliberate depoliticisation of urban development processes through a focus on technocratic managerial issues at the expense of larger political economy considerations that cause urban problems in the first place. In other words, an urban management approach to urban development can easily descend into an inward looking discussion about municipal capacity and push questions about political accountability and citizen empowerment into the background. Edmundo Werna’s critique is only valid up to a point as it is possible to deal with ‘the nature of and characteristics of intervention in urban development’ in a manner that does foreground political economy and concerns about the ‘nature and characteristics’ of urban management and how it deals with power inequalities and social justice imperatives. A more fruitful direction is to locate urban management as a sub-component of the broader theoretical and policy discussion on urban governance (Stren, et al., 1995; Harpham and Boateng, 1997). Two aspects have been emphasised in the governance literature: “the performance aspect of governance (which embraces the public sector management, legal framework, economic liberalism and competence to form policies to deliver services) and the representational aspects of governance (transparency, accountability, social justice and democracy)” (Harpham and Boateng, 1997, emphasis in the original). It seems as if the World Bank, rhetorically at least, attempts to embrace both aspects: Improving the livability and competitiveness of cities places big demands on urban governance and management. Good governance implies inclusion and representation of all groups in the urban society—and accountability, integrity, and transparency of government actions—in defining and pursuing shared goals. Capable urban management means the capacity to fulfil public responsibilities, with knowledge, skills, resources, and procedures that draw appropriately on partnerships. Where local governments have been given new functions and powers—and the public has been granted opportunities for participation and oversight—many have become more professional, have tapped the skills of the private sector in new ways, and have encouraged innovative approaches to service delivery (World Bank, 2000a: 49). This is a significant formulation and suggests a decided shift to a more politicised approach than was the case in the early 1990s (cf. UNDP, 1991; World Bank, 1993).12 It furthermore suggests that the parameters of ideological contestation between liberal conservative and radical perspectives on urban development have moved away from issues of political principle and values (although not entirely, as both Barraclough (2001) and Sandbrook (2000) correctly point out), to the frontlines and trenches of the management of the city where real politics unfold in all their messy and indeterminate glory. Also, I would argue, it has shifted away from concepts per se, such as ‘pro-poor’, ‘equity’, ‘a strong state’, and so forth, towards studying the institutional location of these concepts, which are embedded in broader discursive systems of language and power (Arce and Long, 2000). The approach adopted here suggests that the concept of urban governance is defined as follows: Urban governance is fundamentally about the nature, quality and purpose of the relationships linking various institutional spheres involved—local state, civil society and the private sector—in urban areas. These relationships span formally structured/regulated dimensions and informal ones (Pieterse, 2000). The benefit of linking urban management to the broader governance discussion is that it allows us to recast the urban management debate in relation to a range of policy trends in the city, which are after all the result of political processes and relationships. Examples of these include devolutions and decentralisation action (Manor, 1999); national and local democratisation (McGill, 1998); participatory development debates and its impact on 13

government systems and behaviour (Abers, 2000); urban planning debates as explored earlier, especially strategic planning as the key instrument to knit together disparate institutional initiatives in the city, and those forces from outside that impact on the city (Amin and Graham, 1997; Stren and Polèse, 2000). If one accepts the over-arching importance of governance for urban management, defined in relational terms, we can return to an engagement with the urban management perspective and complete the survey of different interpretations of integration in urban development. With the benefit of the added value of governance as a concept, the ideas of Ronald McGill are more useful to crystallise how ‘urban management’ enhances our understanding of integration in urban development. According to McGill (1998), urban management as the study of intervening in the development of towns and cities is a process that should: ü embrace all the players in the city building process (not just the dispenser of resources); ü harness the driving force(s) of urban development (not attempt to govern artificially); ü be horizontally integrated across the various organisational silos of local government (to overcome town planning’s Achilles’ heal of being divorced from budgeted implementation); and ü be capable of responding to opportunities that present themselves (the implied release of the innate capacity of the community or informal sector through non-governmental organisation participation). In so doing, the urban management perspective begins to reveal the organisational characteristics requisite for promoting urban holism and integration. Preconditions for success in achieving this agenda are (i) a thorough understanding of the urban context and (ii) ensuring that the institutions that conduct urban management interventions are organisationally robust and financially sound (McGill, 1998). The second part of this agenda, has been explored in greater depth through the literature on capacity building and strengthening for improved governance (see Grindle, 1997; Tendler, 1997).13 Difficulties associated with realizing the organisational characteristics that advance urban integration would be around the role of planning approaches that seek to be holistic and integrated, but lapse back into the same tendencies that caused master planning or structure planning to fail. A second problem is related to the question of incentives. Why would disparate actors, who have to some degree good reasons for operating in a fragmented way, cede their parcels of power to be accountable to higher-order objectives that may expose their failures, or at a minimum reduce their level of authority, influence and control? Thirdly, how do you effectively link the necessity of local level participatory planning and management with management functions at various scales above in ways that do not become (new) hierarchies of control? Fourthly, since the practice of integration and coordination is a learning process that ostensibly improves over time, how do you balance the efficacy of fragmentation with the arguably more risky goals of greater integration and coordination? It is hard to answer these questions in the abstract, but it seems possible to establish some provisional guidelines. These are not immediately forthcoming in McGill’s work, although he does suggest three practical ideas for realising integration: (i) formulating an integrated plan at a modest scale, which presumably deals with the first concern above, to some extent; (ii) adopting integrated area management, which presumably allows for a manageable scale of institutional coordination and collaboration which is less threatening and more likely to produce tangible benefits for all parties concerned; and (iii) instituting an integrated financial system, which deals in part with the incentive problem. The deeper problem with the literature promoting urban management (Cheema, 1993; McGill, 1998; UNDP, 1991) is that it does not explore the range of difficulties associated with realising integrated urban management in practice with a combined analytical 14

framework that links political economy and institutional change considerations. For example, the policy guidelines set out by both the World Bank (1991) and the UNDP (1991), do not address the dilemmas of simultaneously pursuing multiple, possibly contradictory, aims such as privatising urban service provision, alleviating poverty through better access to basic services, improving the urban environment, creating more access for business interests to shape investment decisions, whilst ensuring greater access for social movements to advance their interests, and so forth. There is furthermore no discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of working towards policy objectives that in themselves are ambiguous and shot through with unresolvable tensions. This is particularly problematic since recent experience in following the mainstream financial and administrative reform measures pushed by international development agencies, such as the outsourcing or privatisation of bulk services, demonstrate the predilection of the private sector and political elites to exploit these opportunities for short-term, profiteering aims (Ruppert, 2000). In the process, political autonomy is eroded and the social conditions deteriorate even further, which makes it even harder for these municipal authorities to exercise strategic, persuasive influence over actors in the city, as envisaged by Borja and Castells and Ronald McGill. In most third world cities, the private sector eagerly embraces opportunities to get (monopoly) control of essential bulk services such as water management or transport provision. However, unless the political sphere is sufficiently democratised and progressive civil society interest groups are equipped enough, this is not an effective measure for extending services to the low-income groups. Also, regulatory instruments cannot be divorced from political systems and cultures. In contexts of shallow democracy, weak civil society organisations and high levels of patronage politics, such an agenda is in fact a recipe for crude, destructive deregulation and/or privatisation that exacerbates inequality (Atkinson, 2000; Fernandes and Varley, 1998). Instead, the priority should be achieving citizen empowerment, strong political systems that are transparent and accountable, effective government control and democratic processes to negotiate over time the various options for service delivery. Relevance for South African Debates The UDF devotes a section to clarifying the roles of various institutional actors and the imperative of institutional transformation to realise the objectives of the policy. The themes in this section are very similar to the debates that I have just explored, as illustrated here: In transforming the inherited apartheid municipal machinery two major tasks have to be embarked upon: a total restructuring and reorientation of the system so as to embed the democratic, developmental, representative and integrative values of the new South Africa; and a significant strengthening of the functional capacity of the new system. [Once the new local government legislative dispensation is finalised, the stage is] set for a more coordinated and coherent approach to urban development at the local level. To successfully implement the policy guidelines of the Urban Development Framework, municipalities will have to become more development oriented, and less concerned with control. This requires a reorientation of staff towards a more facilitative and implementation-orientated approach. A range of public/private sector partnership options could be explored (Department of Housing 1997: 39). Echoing the international policy literature, the UDF proceeds to espouse the virtues of public-private partnerships and the importance of a vibrant urban-based civil society that can contribute to the success of urban development. In this regard it is instructive to capture the current views of the government through a more recent policy statement on

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partnerships, which is in many ways the central plank of the ‘delivery’ side of the new urban agenda: The Municipal Service Partnership (MSP) Policy aims to provide a clear framework within which to leverage and marshal the resources of public institutions, CBOs, NGOs, and the private sector towards meeting the country’s overall development objectives. […] The MSP Policy also endorses universal access to basic services, the progressive improvement in service standards, and openness and transparency in the processes used for selecting service providers. Underlying this is the core principle that services should be affordable and delivered efficiently. […] If they are well structured and properly implemented, MSP arrangements can lead to significant improvements in the efficiency of service delivery. Greater efficiency means that significantly more services can be delivered while remaining within the council’s overall budget limits (RSA, 2000b: 9 and 11). Clearly, in considering these two policy statements, a lot of faith is being invested in similar arguments about how institutional strengthening and reorganisation will produce, or significantly contribute to, integrated and coordinated urban development.14 However, as the previous discussion demonstrates, this is easier said than done and requires a very careful circumscription of the unequal power dynamics that enliven the various institutional relations across the city-space between actors in the city, and those who impact on the city. Such an awareness prioritises the importance of appreciating the fundamental political nature of the challenges of urban management. Unless questions about democratic control, accountability and transparency are foregrounded, there is a danger of such institutional restructuring processes—ostensibly designed to achieve improved urban management—deepening power inequalities in the city. Consequently, a critical site of analysis is the nature of the reforms that are embarked upon, in relation to the political control exercised over the process, and the likely outcomes in terms of whose interests will be best served. As Richard Batley (1997: 343) reminds us: “It is through local political rather than technical command processes that urban integration across sectors is to be achieved. Municipal government, not local administration, is therefore the base (at the core of local governance) from which political institutions may play a coordinating role, managing networks across public and private agencies and across spheres of government.” In this section I have shown that the urban governance and management literature elucidates, in part, the crucial institutional dimension of achieving integrated urban development. The governance debate underscores the importance of explicit democratic principles and values to ensure open, accountable, responsive and purpose-driven government that will exercise effective power to drive, coordinate, cohere and regulate disparate urban actors in relation to a politically defined strategic direction for the city. The urban management literature clarifies that such a political agenda is unattainable without deliberate institutional reform that attempts to configure institutional rules, interactions and practices with the requisite focus and complexity to match that of the city’s unique rhythm. IN CONCLUSION My core argument is that integrated approaches to urban development stem from the current hegemony of ideas about sustainable urban development, which are embraced by both neoliberal advocates and radical proponents of urban transformation. However, as with previous dominant approaches to urban development, sustainable urban development is proving elastic in terms of the possible understandings and applications of the concept. In a number of respects, it is qualitatively different to earlier approaches, but it is certainly not a new idea free of the legacies of policies and politics that came before. Differences in interpretation of sustainable urban development and its anchoring notion—integration—are essentially political in nature and stem from the various 16

theoretical and philosophical standpoints that underpin them. Differences in approach can be delineated on the basis of: ü understandings about the short-term and long-term outcomes of sustainable urban development; ü primary and secondary social agents of change; ü the ingredients of urban change processes in terms of institutional and regulatory frameworks; and ü understandings about the inter-relationship between local, national and international dimensions of a holistic change strategies. The nature and complexity of these differences imply that a viable urban development policy needs to be explicit about these elements and tailored to address specific local contexts, i.e. the specific balance of forces between various interests within and between households, civil society, the private sector and the state; the particular nature of insertion into regional and global systems; the nature of the national political system and how this frames, drives and undermines local political institutions and processes; the unique topographical and natural systems that place very particular regulatory demands on local institutions; and so forth (Long 2000). This multiplicity of endogenous factors makes it impossible to formulate a universal urban development theory of specifics, but rather a theory that seeks to evoke schematic programmes (in the Deleuzian sense) that allow local (and non-local local) actors to construct meaningful discourses and interventions to define the urban in its past, present and future tenses. In this vein, it is fitting to invoke with the provocative suggestion of John Rachman (1999: 108-9): Today we face two problems, related to one another in complex ways, often difficult to separate from one another: how to get away from certain utopian or transgressive images of thought—or the ‘future’ of thought—and envisage other modes of critical intervention and critical analysis; and how to develop a new conception or image of cities, their shapes, their distinctive problems, the ways in which they figure in our being and being-together, the manner in which they acquire their identities within and among us—an image that would still allow for the play of critical invention and intervention. The various policy trajectories—urban planning, environmental management and urban management—explored in this paper bleed into and from the ubiquitous idea of urban integration. The analyses offered here suggests that we will not reach a point where urban integration is a self-evident good or practice. On the contrary, urban integration is merely another site of struggle for hegemonic dominance over how scarce resources in our cities are deployed. Hopefully, by being more informed about the genealogies of the various policy narratives that feed into the idea, we can recast urban integration as a leitmotif for greater social justice in our emergent cities.

Acknowledgements: This paper is informed by research underway as part of completing a PhD on urban integration and urban development policy in South Africa post 1994 at the London School of Economics. The research is part funded by a Chevening Scholarship grant, an Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust grant, a Commonwealth Fellowship grant and a grant from the Social Policy Department at the London School of Economics. I want to thank Jo Beall and Mirjam van Donk for feedback on draft versions of this paper. I am solely answerable for the content.

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Changing Ideas and Practices in Governance. Cheltenham & Northampton: Edward Elgar. Nunan, F. and Satterthwaite, D. (1999). ‘The Urban Environment.’ Urban Governance, Partnership and Poverty Theme Paper, No. 6, London: Department of International Development. Parnell, S., Pieterse, E., Swilling, M. and Wooldridge, D. (eds) (2002) Democratising Local Government. The South African Experiment. Cape Town: UCT Press. Pieterse, E. (2000). Participatory Urban Governance. Practical Approaches, Regional Trends and UMP Experiences. Vol. 25. Nairobi: Urban Management Programme. Pieterse, E. (2002). ‘Developmental Local Government: Opportunities, Constraints & Prospects’, in S. Parnell, E. Pieterse, M. Swilling and D. Wooldridge (eds) Democratising Local Government. The South African Experiment. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Pieterse, E. (2003). ‘Unravelling the Different Meanings of Integration: the case of the Urban Development Framework of the South African Government’, in P. Harrison, M. Huchzermeyer and M. Mayekiso (eds) Confronting Fragmentation: Housing and Urban Development in a Democratising Society. Cape Town: UCT Press. Portney, K. (2003). Taking Sustainability Seriously. Economic Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rachman, J. (1998). Constructions. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: MIT Press. Rakodi, C. (1993). ‘Planning for whom?’, in N. Devas and C. Rakodi (eds) Managing Fast Growing Cities. New Approaches to Urban Planning in the Developing World. New York: Longman. Ravetz, J. (2000). City-Region 2020: Integrated Planning for a Sustainable Environment. London: Earthscan. Rees, W. (1995). ‘Achieving Sustainability: Reform or Transformation?’, Journal of Planning Literature, 9(4): 343-361. RSA (Republic of South Africa) (2000a). ‘Local Government: Municipal Systems Act. No 32’, Cape Town: Government printers. RSA (Republic of South Africa) (2000b). ‘The White Paper on Municipal Service Partnerships (MSPs)’ No. 21126. Vol. 418, Cape Town: Government Printers. Rodrik, D. (1999). The New Global Economy and Developing Countries: Making Openess Work. Washington DC: Overseas Development Council. Ruppert, E. (2000). ‘Who governs the global city?’, in E. F. Isin (ed) Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City. London & New York: Routledge. Sachs, I. (2000). ‘Social Sustainability and the Whole Development: Exploring the Dimensions of Sustainable Development’, in E. Becker and T. Jahn (eds) Sustainability and the Social Sciences. A cross-disciplinary approach to integrating environmental considerations into theoretical reorientation. Paris/Frankfurt/London: Unesco/ISOE/Zed. Sandbrook, R. (2000). ‘Globalization and the limits of neoliberal development doctrine’, Third World Quarterly, 21(6): 1071-1080. Sandercock, L. (1998). ‘The Death of Modernist Planning: Radical Praxis for a Postmodern Age’, in M. Douglas and J. Friedmann (eds) Cities for Citizens. Planning and the Rise of Civil Society in a Global Age. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Satterthwaite, D. (1999). ‘The Links between Poverty and the Environment in Urban Areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America.’ New York: United National Development Programme. Simone, A. (2001). ‘Straddling the Divides: Remaking Associational Lifen in the Informal African City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(1): 102-117. Stephens, C. (2000). ‘Inequalities in Urban Environments, Health and Power: Reflections on Theory and Practice’, in C. Pugh (ed) Sustainable Cities in the Developing Countries: Theory 21

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Endnotes: 1

I do not have space to detail the demise of master and structure planning in general. Batley (1993), Devas (1993), Rakodi (1993) and Sandercock (1998) provide insightful overviews of changing conditions and associated intellectual shifts. 2

Significantly, they further concede that, “precisely because it involves a flexible structure, a relatively open process and a global agreement which has the force of a ‘political contract’ but not a legally binding one, it call for very strong management will. But it also lends itself to ‘woolly thought’ and pseudo-legitimisation for a number of measures and projects only connected on paper” (Borja and Castells, 1997: 155). 3

I consider the ‘compact city’ discussion in considerable detail because of its significant influence in urban planning and development debates in South Africa since the 1980s (e.g. Dewar and

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Uyterbogaardt, 1991) and have undoubtedly been influential in the drafting of the UDF and sectoral policy papers such as transport and regional development. 4

According to Giradet (1996: 23): in a city with a circular metabolism every output can also be used as an input into the production system, thereby affecting a far smaller area. Sewage systems cease being disposal systems for the noxious mixture of household and factory liquid wastes. Toxic liquid wastes are kept separate from “valuable” household sewage and washing powders, cleaners and bleaches are fully biodegradable. Sewage works are designed to function as fertilizer factories rather than as disposal systems for unwanted, often poisonous, discharges. Liquid chemical wastes from factories are treated separately or no longer used, encouraging companies to invest in recycling technology and factory rubbish is regarded as an asset rather than an encumbrance and recycling is integral to the functioning of cities rather than an optional “add on” feature.’ Circular metabolism will also be propelled by a combination of energy efficiency and clean energy technology.

5

It is crucial to points out that Sachs only envisages this condition to emerge if four criteria for sustainability are addressed simultaneously, precisely because development is a multidimensional process and outcome. The four criteria include, achieving: (i) social sustainability and its corollary, cultural sustainability; (ii) ecological sustainability (conservation of the capital of nature) supplemented by the environmental and territorial sustainabilities, the former relative to the resilience of the natural ecosystem used as ‘sinks’, the latter evaluating the spatial distribution of human activities and the rural-urban configurations; (iii) economic sustainability taken in its broad meaning of efficiency of economic systems (institutions, policies and rules of functioning) to ensure continuous social equitable, quantitative and qualitative progress; and (iv) political sustainability providing a satisfying overall framework for national [, local] and international governance (Sachs, 2000: 31). This is intended as a ideal-type framework to underpin political debates about real-life processes of trade-offs and building-up towards strong sustainability. 6

As Biermann (2000) points out, unless cost is a central part of the discussion about densification, it is a cul-de-sac policy, which may explain in part the huge discrepancy between formal policy intent to integrate the city through densification and in-fill development and the continuing reality of sprawling new developments on the edges of South African cities (cf. Dewar, 1998; Mabin, 2000). It also leads into a much broader discussion in the housing debates on state intervention in housing and land markets to achieve more desirable outcomes (Gilbert, 1992; Burgess, et al., 1997). 7

Gilbert (1992) discusses the World Bank approach to the link between economic growth and the environment. He explains that the Bank recognizes environmental issues as a crucial dimension of development and even recognizes the role of state to regulate. However, its general outlook is underpinned by the assertion that the higher the stage of economic development, the more benign the level of pollution in some instances, for example through technological advances. This is extended with an argument that a growing middle-class also creates sufficient pressure for governments to step in and effectively control if not reduce, pollution (Ibid.). These arguments obviously do not go very far in terms of the fundamental critique about the detrimental impact of consumption capitalism as epitomized in the West, with both high levels of economic development and majority middle-classes (Henderson, 1999). 8

Reconciling green and brown agendas rests on distinguishes between ‘environmental degradation’ and ‘environmental hazards’. The former refers to: (i) high use or waste of non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels and mineral resources; (ii) high use or waste of finite renewable resources at a faster pace than their regeneration process, e.g. fresh water, forests and soil; (iii) overproduction of biodegradable wastes, which overtax the capacities of renewable natural sinks; and (iv) high levels of production of non-biodegradable wastes and emissions, which exceed the capacities of natural sinks to absorb or dilute them without adverse effects (Satterthwaite, 1999). Environmental hazards can be classified by the nature of the problem that they represent, i.e. the locus or context (e.g. from household to global), the sector, the biology of the disease causing agent or the medium through which the infection occurs, or the kind of pollutant and its origin (Nunan and Satterthwaite, 1999).

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Significantly, environmental degradation is associated with resource use and waste generation caused by the system and processes of economic production and consumption. High income, high consumption, life-styles contribute disproportionately to environmental degradation/ depletion. Through the lens of this conceptual model, the poor have minimal impact on the urban environment, but are more likely to be the victims of detrimental environmental conditions. At a global scale, Developing Countries’ are also much lower on the hierarchy of polluters, compared to high-income countries (Hardoy and Satterthwaite, 1993). 9

The explicit focus on the role of local government at The Earth Summit, was captured in Chapter 28, of Agenda 21. According to Chapter, Local Agenda 21 should involve a process whereby local authorities reach a consensus with stakeholder groups in the community to initiate a sustainable development planning and management process, and that local initiatives should network with one another to exchange experiences (cf. Atkinson, 2000). 10

An aspect that I have not covered is the interesting intersection between feminist and environmental perspectives. This rich cross-fertilisation highlights that women constitute the majority of the poor and are also more implicated in ameliorating the detrimental environmental conditions because of the gender division of poor urban households, and by extension become important agents of change (McCarney 1995). 11

The author continues to identify the most common urban challenges as: “improving financial structure and management; providing shelter, basic urban services, and infrastructure; improving urban management systems; strengthening the role of the urban informal sector; and strengthening institutional capacities, including the role of municipal governments” (Cheema 1993: 7). 12

Even though this recent formulation is more explicitly rooted in a politicised account it remains deeply problematic. It assumes that ‘shared goals’ are definable which hints at underlying assumptions about harmonious political processes. Secondly, it comes very close to suggesting that ‘capable urban management’ actually means the adoption of partnerships in municipal service delivery. Read against the broader ideological orientation of the policy, which uncritically embraces market efficiencies, this is a highly problematic approach. For a critical discussion of World Bank and UNDP perspectives on governance, see Burgess, et al. (1997) and Swilling (1997). 13

Grindle (1997) suggests that capacity building encompasses a variety of strategies that have to do with increasing the efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness of government performance. This translates into a focus on understanding, and fostering human resource development, organisational strengthening (management systems to improve performance of specific tasks and microstructures), and institutional reform (institutions and systems and macrostructures). There is an ongoing tension in the capacity building literature on where interventions should focus; either on the supply-side within government or rather the demand side, by building a demanding, informed and vocal civil society and citizenry. Rabecca Abers’s (2000) study of participatory budgeting systems in Brazil suggests that both dimensions are crucial, and ideally, ways should be found of linking such interventions. 14

These local government reform initiatives are in line with a broader public sector reform strategy of the South African government, which is outlined in the White Paper on Public Sector Transformation, issued in 1995. This policy is based on new public management (NPM) conceptions of public sector restructuring (Macintosh, 1993; Minogue, et al., 1998), and its marks are deeply inscribed in all urban and local government policies. NPM approaches typically promote: adoption of strategic planning techniques to develop rational frameworks to inform budgeting, resource allocation, definition of targets and divisions of labour between managers and agencies; various forms of incentives and sanctions to improve performance; reduction of procedural rules in the public sector to create more discretionary room for senior and middle-level managers; adoption and utilisation of various types of contracts to delimitate lines of responsibility and accountability; privatisation of public services in order to improve quality and coverage; pursuing public-private partnerships if full scale privatisation is not viable; whenever possible, opening up provider roles to competition between agencies or even departments within the public sector; reducing the public sector wage bill through ‘down-sizing’ and ‘right-sizing’; and eliminating all forms of subsidisation by charging full costs for services (Turner and Hulme, 1997; Tendler, 1997; Minogue, et al., 1998). The persuasive power of this approach is that it promises financial savings through greater efficiency and less political risk because many state responsibilities are shifted to other actors that can potentially be

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blamed for the lack of delivery. NPM interpretative frameworks also provide simple answers for complex issues and clear procedural steps to solve specific problems and so create a false sense of achievement. Often, in terms of narrow financial performance targets certain successes are achieved but this is typically divorced from indicators that deal with outputs and outcomes.

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