SPATIAL PLANNING

Spatial Planning and Land-Use Planning

Spatial Planning and Land-Use Planning

Introduction

The paper proposes a category of authorities able to take the different types of decision falling into the realm of spatial planning and land use management: land use regulators. The most prevalent land use regulators will be municipalities. Each province will have a provincial land use tribunal and appeal tribunal that will be land use regulators in specified situations. Nationally the Minister will be a land use regulator of last resort, only acting in cases where there has been neglect or flouting of the national principles and norms.

In order to achieve more integrated and coordinated spending of public funds it is proposed that the Minister, in consultation, with cabinet, is able to prescribe national spatial planning frameworks around particular programmes or regions(Pütz 2004). This will not be a national plan as such but will rather be a policy framework for sustainable and equitable spatial planning around national priorities.

Where a proposed development is not permissible in terms of the prevailing land use management scheme, then permission is required from the appropriate land use regulator. The White Paper proposes one set of such procedures for the whole country, thereby eliminating the current situation where different procedures apply in different provinces, and even within a province in different apartheid race zones. This will facilitate national capacity building within land use regulators as well as performance management of the system. It will also introduce welcome efficiency savings into the national land development industry. The White Paper also proposes the alignment of the procedures for land development approval with those presently required in terms of the Environment Conservation Act for environmental impact assessments (`EIAs').

The paper deals with sustainable land use planning to examine the role of goals, knowledge and power for governance processes. Land use planning is a policy field in which a variety of (state and non-state) actors is involved and various mechanisms of coordination (hierarchy, cooperation, competition) are effective. In order to analyse power asymmetries in detail, the example of a land use conflict in the metropolitan region of Munich is used (Allen, 2006). The first part introduces concepts to empirically analyse governance structures and processes as well as power relations in spatial planning.

Actor-constellation and mode of interaction are two essential categories of analysis based on the actor-centred institutionalism of Mayntz and Scharpf (1995) as well as on Kooiman's (2003) governance theory. To conceptualise governance in the context of spatial planning and from a regional studies perspective, region/scale is suggested as a third category of analysis. This is based on a relational understanding of space that regards cities and regions as socially constructed phenomena and parts of a multi-scale political system(Cullingworth, Nadin, 2006).

Moreover, this third category refers to the debate about politics of scale and the re-scaling of politics, which addresses the question of the appropriate scale of governance for sustainable development. The interdependencies between these three categories of analysis can be characterised by power ...