Prof Karina Landman, Head of the Department of Town and Regional Planning in the University of Pretoria’s Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, delivered her inaugural address on 6 November 2023. The topic of her presentation was “Evolutionary urbanism: Breaking the cycle of “mechanistic” change”.

Prof Landman’s work focuses on spatial transformation, including research on gated communities, and safer and more sustainable neighbourhoods. Her work on public space revolves around inclusivity, regeneration and decolonisation, while her research on sustainable development focuses on urban resilience, and regenerative development and design.

According to Prof Landman, cities and urban spaces are changing rapidly, both worldwide and in South Africa. “New challenges force planners to deal with these changes in ways that will consider the future wellbeing of the planet and its people.” African cities are urbanising at a rapid rate, while poverty and inequality create significant challenges for service delivery and housing provision. Urban areas are characterised by fragmentation, segregation, low-density sprawl and a disconnect from nature. In response, post-apartheid planning and development legislation and policies have repeatedly called for spatial transformation to address many of these challenges.

She reconsidered these challenges by focusing on spatial mitigation, adaptation and regeneration in the country since 1994. She highlighted prominent areas, processes and products that influenced the urban landscape during different periods and at various levels – regions, precincts and public spaces. In the process, she reconsidered the meaning of these changes for sustainable development, and the implications for urban planning in South Africa.

Prof Landman noted that all the country’s leading planning and development policies emphasise the need for accessibility and integration. However, the levels of crime and violence in the country threaten the ideals of spatial integration. Despite the best intentions, South African cities are characterised by isolated interventions that represent mechanistic change. This gave rise to the tendency to deal with symptoms in isolation, such as the establishment of low-income, low-density housing, and gated communities – often located on the urban periphery with little connection to the surrounding environment. However, as a form of spatial mitigation, these interventions have many unintended consequences, such as the abovementioned spatial fragmentation, separation, low-density sprawl and exclusion. Ironically, these are the very characteristics that the post-apartheid city aimed to eliminate.

Considering the changing socio-economic landscape and growing urbanisation in South Africa, she recognised the need to reevaluate the types of housing and common spaces that are being established in our cities, and to work with change in a different way.

Increasing urbanisation has huge implications for urban planning, infrastructure development and service delivery. Government’s National Development Plan, launched in 2012, acknowledged the importance of integrated economic, social and spatial development, while realising our dependency on the natural environment. This led to an emphasis of the need for resilience thinking to support sustainable development. This philosophy is concerned with the adaptive capacity of cities as socio-ecological systems.

Researchers have addressed the challenges associated with separated and low-density housing by examining critical success factors for medium-density, mixed housing developments that are linked to sustainable settlements in an enabling environment. She explained that one cannot consider housing in isolation from the broader settlement and supporting facilities and amenities. When considering residential development and transformation, it is therefore critical to understand the dynamic relationships that exist between the practical and symbolic nature of residential dynamics in the physical and the social space. This is especially important where there is a growing need for integrated housing development that can accommodate increased diversity and density.

She explained that the transformation of the South African urban landscape takes place through a process that involves space, need, idea, order, form and function, meaning and response, informed by the specific socio-spatial context. The adaptive capacity or resilience of cities and urban spaces has many dimensions.  The spatial resilience of cities and public spaces is informed by four directives at a micro-level: diversity, proximity, intensity and connectivity. These directives have been used to compare the spatial resilience of public spaces in the City of Tshwane through both qualitative and quantitative methods, utilising GIS. However, resilience is not only influenced by the form and function of various parts of the city, but by its adaptive capacity over time. This can be understood through the four phases of the adaptive cycle: growth, consolidation, release and reorganisation. Applying the adaptive cycle in settlements could provide planners with a mechanism to understand transformation at various scales, including at street level.

However, the health and wellbeing of our cities and the people living in them does not only depend on the adaptive capacity of settlement systems, but also on their regenerative potential. She therefore highlighted the need to move beyond a simplistic interpretation of spatial transformation, and to break the cycle of mechanistic change. True transformation requires the recognition of all knowledge systems and modes of production, through the creation of settlement systems that are capable of producing and supporting mutual benefits between all living systems.

In conclusion, she proposed the notion of evolutionary urbanism, which encompasses radical evolution and planning to allow nature and humans to thrive by harnessing the power of resilience and spatial regeneration.