An assessment of practitioners opinions on the principle of spacial resilience

[摘要] Colonial and apartheid planning left a legacy of rigid, control-oriented, top-downspatial planning and land use management and fragmented and inequitablesettlements. Despite many policies and the interim Development Facilitation Act of1995, it was only in 2013 that a new Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act(SPLUMA) was enacted creating a single national framework of for spatial planning andland use management in South Africa. This statute heralds a move from a rule-basedapproach to a normative, principle based approach to spatial planning and land usemanagement.SP LUMA lays down five development principles which form the foundation of the newnational spatial planning, land development and land use management system. SpatialResilience - a new South African construct - is one of the five development principles.Spatial resilience does not enjoy a theoretical foundation of its own; rather it isintimately associated with the theory of resilience and both the broad concept ofresilience and the narrower concept of urban resilience.With increased uncertainty and unpredictability of what the future holds, the conceptof resilience, and resilience thinking, is a potential tool to deal with constant change,uncertainty and unpredictability providing a way of thinking about managing socioecologicalsystems such as urban systems. Urban settlements, towns and cities arecomplex socio-ecological constructs, thus demanding an evolutionary or socioecologicalapproach to resilience in building their adaptive capacity and resilience.Spatial resilience within the broader context of SPLUMA should thus be seen as animportant contributor to achieving urban resilience and broader societal re silience. Itis a way of thinking about how the spatial planning and land use management systemcan deal with change by adapting, innovating and transformin g, where needed, intomore desirable configuration s.This study employed a cross-sectional survey methodology, to assess the opinions ofprofessionals and practitioners within the spatial planning and land use managementand development planning sector in the Western Cape on their understanding ofspatial resilience and its implementation. Of the one hundred and twenty-three (123)questionnaires emailed to potential respondents based on purposive sampling, fifty(50) responses were returned. The questionnaire was a self-completing surveyquestionnaire with twenty-one (21) questions of which just on half were open-endedand the remainder were structured yes or no questions.The findings indicate that while there is no clear consensus amongst respondents onwhat the concept or principle of spatial resilience is or what it entails, there isagreement that spatial resilience is generally not well understood in South Africansociety as a whole and particularly within the broader spatial and developmentplanning sector, that South African settlements on the overall, even though there arepockets of excellence, are not resilient. Furthermore, there are concerns with regardto the knowledge, skill, expertise and will of both the politicians and professionalplanners to implement a spatial resilience approach and the will of all three spheres ofgovernment to the implementation of a spatial resilience approach. The studyconcludes by making a variety of recommendations to address the various conclusions.

[发布机构] University of the Free State