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Prof Alison Todes Inaugural Lecture

(Wits School of Architecture and Planning)

Tuesday 20 October  17h30 for 18h00

Dorothy Susskind Auditorium, John Moffat Building (Sherry will be served) - Open Invitation

Reframing Planning: New Agendas, Shifting Perspectives.

The importance of cities and the challenges they face are gaining increasing recognition internationally.  Rising levels of urbanisation, the impacts of climate change, the growth of slums, urban poverty, socio-spatial polarisation and urban sprawl, are amongst the many issues of concern.  Planning – once seen in international development circles as an irrelevant discipline obsessed with spatial ordering and control – is being ‘revisited’ and ‘reinvented’ to play new roles in managing the growth of cities in ways that promote their sustainability, inclusiveness and liveability.

This paper reflects on this shift, and on some of the contemporary directions in the ‘new’ approaches to planning, as well as on some of their silences.  It argues that these approaches need to be understood in terms of  contemporary urban and planning theories which are rethinking the nature of planning and its relationship to power and institutions, and which view cities as complex, dynamic places, embodying multiple interests and spatialities.  Without these perspectives, the ‘new’ agendas might be seen as another set of narrow ineffective remedies, a new form of utopian planning. The paper explores some of the contemporary themes of the new agendas and reflects on how they might be understood.