Abstract
The city of Mthatha is known as the apartheid city. Despite attempts at reforming it, it remains one of the most intractable physical and social legacies of the segregationist policies and practices inherited by the post-apartheid government. The critical need for its transformation is emphasised by clear and well-known characteristics such as disintegration, poverty, crime, and dilapidation. This study makes proposals for the effective redevelopment of Mthatha to contribute to the question of how to address the planning legacies of colonialism and apartheid in general. This is motivated by the view that throughout its history, Mthatha was subjected to top-down paradigms of planning cities, which are still linked to a segregationist model of planning and do not necessarily address the contextual problems faced. This is done in alignment with the hypothesis posited by Dewar and Uytenbogaardt (1991), which essentially states that “the client of planning is ultimately people”. This proposal serves to identify the tools which will enable the effective resolution of the problem, which in this case was represented by the city of Mthatha. In so doing, the study argues that colonial and apartheid planning has lasting legacies even in the former Bantustan cities and towns, although they are faced with different dynamics from the metropolitan cities. The findings can be combined into the following broad aspects that a policy for the redevelopment of Mthatha must address; fragmentation, separation, mono-functional planning, centralisation of resources and amenities, lack of public transport network, and public participation. In the context of South Africa, the method followed was to analyse the broader problem to determine the characteristic problems associated with the apartheid city. These characteristics were then used to analyse the city of Mthatha to develop a framework of objectives for a developmental initiative. An appropriate planning strategy was proposed, followed by recommendations for its application. Finally, the proposals were analysed to elicit the tools that can be transferred to other development initiatives. The literature study, undertaken in pursuit of this methodology, revealed that the problem is a deep-seated one. Therefore, resolving the problem requires an all-inclusive approach. This means that the redevelopment process should consider Mthatha within its wider socio-economic and physical contexts, and should focus on developing a single integrated positively made and clear spatial system and not simply the provision or upgrading of dilapidated infrastructure.
M.Tech. (Architectural Technology)