Replacing the dinosaur: Changing roles for planners in South Africa

Abstract

Planning theory and practice reflect the cultural and political context in which planning occurs. The purpose of this article is to examine the variety of planning contexts which have been described in the literature and to apply these to South Africa. For this pur­pose, five categories or perspectives were used, namely, technocratic, de­mocratic, reformist, radical and lib­eral. As reform in South Africa is set to continue and to gather momentum in the next few years, these categories provide a useful framework for the analysis of the possible nature of change, and for consideration of pos­sible roles which South African plan­ners can adopt in changing contexts. "Planning ... could be a truly innova­tive field in our epoch of crisis . . . The current process of social change forces planning itself to change, if we want our discipline to be a guide for action instead of becoming an outdated bureaucratic routine" (Castells 1982:3).