Suchergebnisse

This article investigates the role and influence of urban planning in ameliorating or intensifying deeply ingrained ethnic conflict. It is based on more than 70 interviews with urban professionals in Belfast (Northern Ireland) and Johannesburg (South Africa). Policy makers in Belfast have sought intergroup stability through neutral policies that protect the territorial status quo. Equity planning in post-apartheid Johannesburg seeks spatial reconstruction of a disfigured metropolis. In both cities, policy dilemmas challenge officials who are seeking to stabilize or reconstruct strife-torn cities. Hardening of Protestant-Catholic territorial identities in Belfast, which are deemed essential to urban peace, might constitute a barrier to long-term intergroup reconciliation. In Johannesburg, policy responses to crisis conditions and reliance on private economic forces may solidify rather than transcend apartheid geography. In ethnically polarized cities, a reconceptualized urban planning that is able to improve interethnic coexistence has a vital and difficult role to play in advancing and reinforcing formal peace agreements.

The paper focuses on the intersection between South African urban reconstruction and the development of social justice debates in urban geography. Drawing on a case study located in the Cape Metropolitan Region of South Africa, this investigation illustrates how decision-makers have implemented a planning strategy referred to as integrated development planning (IDP) to aid post- apartheid urban reconstruction. In so doing, the paper shows how this mechanism draws upon the spatial imagination as a method of (re)directing the development of this city. Moreover, the case study demonstrates how an imagined urban space, expressed in the planning system of the IDP, functions as a device by which shared understandings of social justice are enabled. Finally, the paper reflects on how these findings might (re)direct the theoretical development of the social justice concept in geographical and urban planning debates.

The 2010 earthquake-tsunami in Chile did not just destroy cities and towns. It also revealed how the neoliberal decentralisation of the Chilean state initiated during the Pinochet dictatorship had radically diminished and fragmented territorial planning capacities, representing a major obstacle to the planning and management of the reconstruction process. In the face of this situation, exceptional reconstruction agencies were created, which engaged in the elaboration of master plans, suspending in practice – at least temporarily – existing planning authorities and instruments. These new institutional arrangements were also subject to a number of critiques, sparking moral controversies among different public actors about the contribution of these exceptional governmental agencies to the common good. Drawing on the Chilean example, this article proposes expanding the concept of the state of exception to include cases in which what is reconfigured is not the relationship between the State and the population, but the relationship between the state and its territory, so that exceptional powers can be applied upon a 'bare land' rather than a 'bare life'. To the extent that this different state of exception does not reduce citizens to bodies to be protected and administered, it requires a moral rather than a technical justification.

The earthquake followed by a tsunami that hit Chile in February 2010 not only left a wave of destruction and a number of deaths of over 500 people, too started a number of relief and recovery initiatives led by different institutions, from the government to universities, private companies to NGOs. However, the roles of these actors, their interactions and the effects of these on post-disaster reconstruction have not been to date actually evaluated. There is still not enough information to judge whether all those well-intentioned efforts were or were not the best way to mobilize resources for help and recovery. The purpose of this report is precisely to collect and analyze projects, programs and policies related to the reconstruction and redevelopment in the cities of Curicó, Talca, Constitución, Pelluhue and Dichato in order to develop an independent and comprehensive assessment of the reactions for disaster relief and reconstruction in 2010.