Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Reply to John Saul

Cronin, Jeremy

doi:10.14452/mr-054-07-2002-11_3

Cited by 5 publications

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“…As such, the emerging vision was always likely to reflect the party's appreciation of the evolving discursive, economic and political balance of forces in the city — rather than be a genuine, open‐ended experiment in deliberative participatory planning. On the other hand, the visioning outcome and eventual long‐term development plan for the city betray the contradictory strands that still run through ANC thinking (Cronin, 2002). That is, alongside growth‐oriented imperatives in line with ‘world city’ aspirations, the long‐term development strategy for the city would have to translate the ANC's ongoing, if at times muted, concern with pro‐poor imperatives and the need to overcome the legacies of apartheid.…”

Section: The Party As City Actormentioning

confidence: 99%

Building a Vision for the Post‐Apartheid City: What Role for Participation in Johannesburg's City Development Strategy?

Lipietz

2008

Int J Urban Regional Res

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In line with a broader 'participatory turn', the collective elaboration of city development strategies (CDSs) has become a leitmotiv in urban development planning, promising to deliver on both democracy-deepening and pro-poor concerns. Yet, this promise reposes on somewhat shaky grounds: much depends on the broader political opportunity structures within which CDSs are attempted. Using Johannesburg's recent experiment with city-wide strategic planning as a case study, this article explores the complex interplay between participatory processes and the broader political machinery of governance. In the messy terrain of late 1990s transition politics, Johannesburg's CDS can be read rather more as an instrument of the ruling ANC party's consolidation of power over the city, than as a 'genuine' attempt at collective strategic planning. However, this usurpation of participatory ideals did not entail the demise of equitable or even pro-poor concerns: more formal processes of participation, such as electoral representation and bureaucratic power, ensured the continued meshing of developmental concerns alongside growth imperatives at the heart of the CDS. The ambiguous relationship between newly entrenched routine participatory processes and the most recent - and arguably more equitable - review of the CDS, meanwhile, raises further questions about the actual function of participatory processes in urban governance. Copyright (c) 2008 The Author.

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Section: The Party As City Actormentioning

confidence: 99%

Building a Vision for the Post‐Apartheid City: What Role for Participation in Johannesburg's City Development Strategy?

Lipietz

2008

Int J Urban Regional Res

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Africa: The Next Liberation Struggle?

Saul¹

2003

Review of African Political Economy

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This article brings into focus the immediate challenges facing progressives in Africa as they now seek to forge social and political initiatives that can hope to attain power and implement policies able to confront and ultimately to bend the apparent logic of global capitalism – thereby permitting more humane outcomes on the continent. Taking as a starting-point the moment of heightened reflection on such issues that occurred in Dar es Salaam in the 1960s and early 1970s, the article up-dates the insights of that period with reference to the even grimmer circumstances in which Africa currently finds itself. Suggesting that mere ‘reform’ (NEPAD, ‘liberal democratisation’) offers little real promise of meaningful and substantial change of the continent's desperate situation, the article seeks to canvas the range of resistances in Africa that indicate the emergence of a more radical project of transformation. While acknowledging that it is easy to be pessimistic regarding such possibilities, the article identifies sufficient movement on the continent to suggest that Africa, in terms of the emergence of a ‘post-nationalist, post-neo-liberal’ revolutionary politics, now stands at a moment analogous with 1945. At that time few could have anticipated the speed with which African nationalist movements would win independence for their territories from colonial rule. The article concludes with the argument that, despite its current eclipse, the language and vision of socialism will have to become part and parcel of this continuing revival of Africa's revolutionary endeavours and of its ‘next liberation struggle’.

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The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance

Lazarus¹

2004

South Atlantic Quarterly

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Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Reply to John Saul

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Building a Vision for the Post‐Apartheid City: What Role for Participation in Johannesburg's City Development Strategy?

Building a Vision for the Post‐Apartheid City: What Role for Participation in Johannesburg's City Development Strategy?

Africa: The Next Liberation Struggle?

The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance

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