planning issues and the political economy of the local state

P L A N N I N G ISSUES A N D THE POLITICAL E C O N O M Y OF THE LOCAL STATE

An Historical Case Study of Durban

JEFF MCCARTHY

I N T R O D UCTION

The historical deve lopmen t of South Africa's urban areas has p rov ided the material out of which some of the most incisive interpretations of South African society have been fashioned (Van Onselen 1982; Bonner et al. 1989). For the most part, however , these studies have been located within the methodologica l traditions of the social historian, and there has been little emphas is u p o n the historical role of the state in the deve lopmen t of South African urban areas - especially that of the local state.

Indeed, the concept of the local state is one that remains underdeve loped , not only in South Africa, but elsewhere. British interest in the concept has been the most advanced to date, and appears to have deve loped out of concern over the political conflicts su r round ing the Greater London Council (GLC) dur ing the 1970s. Possibly as a consequence of this source of concern, British studies have tended to concentrate u p o n the a s sumed distinctiveness of the local state wi thin the context of debates on the broader nature of state power in relation to class conflict (Saunders 1981; Uuncan and Goodwin 1982).

By contrast, political scientists in Nor th America have tended to assume that political processes at the level of the local state are a mirror image of political processes at large. For example, the so-called pluralist p a r a d i g m which domina ted American political science for decades, and the critical debates which ensued, were largely deve loped out local s tudies of u rban p lanning issues in American cities (Dah11961; Crenson 1971; Ka tznelson 1981; Mollenkopf 1983; Logan and Molotch 1987).

The literature on the local state in Third World contexts is relatively sparse, but it has t ended to emphasise conflicts be tween the local state and urban social movemen t s as a general theme (Castells 1983; Rakodi 1986; Lawrence 1989). The South African literature on the local state has a similar emphasis, but in addi t ion there is a tendency to assume that the central

26 URBAN F O R U M 2.2.1991

state determines both local state practices and local state restructuring (Heymans and Totemeyer 1988).

The South African emphasis upon central determination of local political outcomes is anomalous in the international context, where there is greater emphasis in the literature on the dynamics of local political autonomy. One of two possibilities suggest themselves from this anomaly: the first is that politics and the state are indeed abnormally centralised in South Africa; and the second is that a lack of historical research on local politics and the local state in South Africa has obscured our understanding of their relatively autonomous dynamics and characteristics.

The present paper is based upon the assumption that the second of these two possibilities warrants further investigation. Specifically, it is hypothesised here that, through an historical survey of local urban planning and development issues, and through study of the restructuring of local state boundaries within a specific locality, it may be possible to probe more deeply into the notion of local political autonomy in South Africa. This hypothesis is predicated upon a number of propositions deriving from the international literature.

The first of these propositions is that political relationships of power can be interrogated through local studies of urban planning and development issues. This is derived both from long-standing traditions within American political science (for example, Dah11961) and from the more recent research emphases of French urban sociologists including Castells (1977; 1983) Lojkine (1981) and Preteceille (1981) and their American counterparts such as Logan and Molotch (1987).

The second proposition derives from the suggestions of political geographers such as Cox and Mair (1988) that the specificity of the local state derives from its very locality, or its geographically circumscribed and situated character. If this suggestion is correct, it should follow that during periods in which the local state changes its geographical configuration, its specificity may be revealed, for example, through the motivations that are advanced with respect to boundary redefinition.

The theoretical context for the present paper is therefore complex. On the one hand there is the uncomfortable anomaly of alleged central state determinism in South Africa; and on the other there is the range of theoretical issues concerning planning, urban development and the specificity of the local state that have been widely debated in an international context but which still require evaluation in South Africa. As a contribution to possible future theoretical debates on these topics in South Africa, the present paper documents aspects of the history of one city - Durban - in relation to such issues. The approach that has been adopted is deliberately descriptive, although theoretical issues are of course raised at relevant points. In the conclusion to the paper a number of questions are raised concerning the relevance of the Durban case in broader theoretical terms, and with regard to possible further empirical research on the local state.

PLANNING ISSUES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 27

URBAN ISSUES AND THE LOCAL STATE

The Early Years in Durban The summary of urban planning and development issues to follow is based largely upon a reading of the newspaper, the Natal Mercury (NM) for the periods in question, although this source has been supplemented by a range of other primary and secondary sources on Durban's planning and development history. Whilst the research materials at the author's disposal are hardly exhaustive, they are nevertheless sufficient to provide a guide to the broader trends of planning during the periods in question, that is from 1910 until 1980. Indeed, the methodology adopted here towards the analysis of news media reporting on urban planning and development issues is very similar to that adopted by McCarthy and Friedman (1987) in their analysis of national urban issues; although in this case the emphasis is upon a specific city, and more qualitative as opposed to quantitative analysis of the news information.

The Early Issues At the time of Union in South Africa (1910) there were several issues recited in the press associated with the local state and planning in Durban. Civic minded members of the local settler 61ite, for example, apparently busied themselves with questions such as the location of zoos,(NM 29 Jan. 1910) the establishment of parks, gardens and art galleries in the city centre, (NM 29 Jan., 21 Feb., 25 May 1910) restricting the 'hawker nuisance' on the beachfront, providing lighting for the beachfront promenade(NM 29 Jan. 1910) and the construction of new town halls (NM 14 Feb. 1910). The settler working-class residents of Umbilo, by comparison, expressed public objections to the pollution emanating from industries located in the nearby Congella and Maydon Wharf areas (NM 26 Jan. 1911) and the recently immigrant working-class and middle-class groups of Indian origin were being mobilised by Gandhi into resisting discriminatory constraints upon their rights to settlement and movement (NM 22 Jan. 1910; 7 Mar., 19 Sept. 1911; 23 Oct., 6 Nov. 1913). A relatively small, but growing indigenous African working class laboured on the docks or in industry or in settlers' kitchens, and they were accommodated in single-sex compounds or servants' quarters attached to settler homes. Occasionally 'disturbances' were reported from the compounds (NM 7 Jan. 1911), the control of which apparently exercised the minds of the more philanthropically and politically orientated members of the settler 61ite (NM 10 May 1912; 9 June 1913).

For the most part, however, the newspapers of the time reveal that the planning issues that dominated in the decade following Union (1910-1920) centred around transportation infrastructure. This emphasis was possibly consistent with national trends since, as McCarthy and Smit (1984:86-90) observe, the installation of 'productive infrastructure' in South African cities was a dominant concern of the ruling bloc in the post Anglo-Boer War reconstruction period.

28 URBAN FORUM 2.2.1991

In the Durban case, transportation was of relevance to the local economic 61ite from two standpoints. First, the development of the city's port facilities were seen as crucial to the growth of local commerce and industry in a context of the accelerated integration of South Africa into the world economy. Thus, publicising the relative advantages of Durban as a port was the one issue that united local industry and capital in the immediate post-Union period (NM 19 Sept. 1911).

The municipality and local newspapers often joined in the chorus in this regard, remonstrating loudly on the relative allocation of central government expenditures on rail and harbour facilities in Durban, as opposed to other localities, such as Port Elizabeth or Cape Town (NM 4 Dec. 1912; 30 Nov. 1917). Within Durban itself, intra-urban transport issues were concerned with the precise location of rail sidings and wharf improvements which, under the direction of the municipality, occasionally provided cause for public dispute and controversy. These controversies often arose as individual industrialists and developers jockeyed for advantage in influencing the Council 's decisions on the location of such facilities (NM 16 Apr. 1915; 28 July 1917).

The second issue of concern regarding transport infrastructure, at least as reflected through the pages of the Natal Mercury, centred upon the electric tramways. This was by far the most newswor thy planning and development issue of the decade. Indeed, the issue appeared to concentrate the potential contradictions between capital, labour and the local state most intensely at this stage. In this regard it would seem that, in Durban, as in Johannesburg, the development of the electric t ramways demonstra ted that t ransportat ion technology 'is not neutral and that in a developing capitalist society it [can] be made to serve different class interests' (Van Onselen 1982). For whilst in Durban, as elsewhere, the electric tramways were instrumental in revolutionising urban geographical form (Warner 1972), they were also crucial to development of class conflicts and class alliances within the context of the local state: conflicts and alliances that were subsequently to provide a basis for what might have been Durban's local equivalent of the national Pact Alliance coalition.

The Local State, the Working Class and Transport It is necessary to elaborate here upon how it was that the electric t r amway came to occupy a central position within a local nexus of relationships between class, capitalist accumulation and the local state in the period 1910-1920. The first point that can be made in this regard is that the electric trams facilitated urban development in regions of Durban that were previously out of commuting range. This included many areas which lay outside the then existing municipal boundary. This same process of transport technology guiding urban expansion was evident also in Johannesburg, of which Hart (1984) observes: "The electric streetcar, more than any other previous form of public transport, facilitated the dispersal of people from the central areas of Johannesburg. Coincidentally, it also initiated a boom in the proclamation of new townships. '


In Durban the electric tram was initially introduced into the central business district (CBD) and its environs, but shortly after its introduction civic associations and property owners from outlying areas began to lobby for the extension of the service to their areas. Working-class residents of districts such as Umbilo, located eccentrically with regard to the CBD, also publicly challenged the Council and the mayor through the media and their ratepayers associations to supply service to their areas (NM 3 June 1910). This was shortly followed by similar claims from civic associations and landowners in areas such as Mayville, which lay beyond the municipal boundary (NM 7 Jan. 1911). By 1913 the Council found itself inundated with similar demands and requests, (NM 30 July 1913) and it responded by attempting to professionalise and depoliticise route allocation. It did this by delegating responsibility for route planning to a Council subcommittee and the city bureaucracy.

This insulation of the transport planning process from public debate apparently led to suspicions that land speculators were gaining influence behind a veil of local state secrecy. Despite efforts to project an image of 'planning in the public interest', the secrecy issue billowed into a major public outcry by 1915. The specific event that triggered the controversy in Durban was not any particular route and its association with land speculation, but rather the differential taxation that was being levied upon central city versus suburban residents in respect of funding for the tram service. In brief, inner city residents appeared hostile to paying taxes that effectively subsidised suburbanites" trips to central shopping facilities, and which inflated the values of lands held by suburban speculators. Connected to this was a general critique of the City Council, mounted by the Labour Party - the largest, of the local socialist orientated organisations - of 'taxation without consultation' (NM 8 Sept. 1915).

The matter was discussed for three hours by the City Council in September 1915 with whole pages of the Natal Mercury and several editorials calling for the Council to be 'more open in its transactions' and referring to a ' t ramway coupon muddle ' (NM 11 Oct. 1915). Labour Party organisers threatened tram boycotts by commuters, whereupon the entire local business community appeared to close ranks, with the editor of the Natal Mercury, for example, now putting the view to his readers that the Council tram route plans were, indeed, 'in the public interest' (NM 11 Oct. 1915).

As the social movement around the financing of the expanding tram service petered out, with the transportation bases for a local 'property boom' remaining intact, new class contradictions emerged to attract the attention of the local power bloc. By 1919 the tramways had become major employers, and the tram drivers, mechanics and support staff soon dominated the scene of local labour militancy. Indeed, in the period from 1919 to 1922, the Tramwaymen's union assumed a very similar status in Durban to the Mineworkers' unions on the Witwatersrand. By 1921, for example, five fairly militant strikes had been organised by the Tramwaymen's Union over wages (NM 4 Jan, 29 Sept. 1919; 7 Sept. 1921).


The most significant of these occurred in early 1921, when the Labour Party was mobilising on the basis of 'bread and butter politics' in the context of a deepening recession. Smuts, for example, visited Durban on 20 February 1921 and declared that the most important issue in the forthcoming Parliamentary elections was 'republicanism and breaking from the British Empire'. In response to issues of wages and living costs raised by the Labour Party he declared that 'man cannot live by bread alone' (NM 21 Feb. 1921). A few days later the Tramwaymen's Union, apparently under the influence of the Labour Party, had become locked in yet another dispute with management for which they reputedly earned "a heavy handed response' from the Borough police, and a generalised crisis of legitimacy subsequently descended upon the Council (NM 9 Mar. 1921).

From Working-Class Transport Politics to Housing Reform A Commission of Inquiry was appointed into the February 1921 strike, which had evidently shaken the local power bloc. Indeed, it would appear that from this time onwards efforts were made to accommodate the interests of the white working classes within the system of patronage politics that dominated municipal affairs. For instance, the municipality rapidly established an extensive system of 'tied' housing for its own workforce, and during the period from 1922 to 1924 municipal expenditures on housing and housing loans achieved levels that were not paralleled again until the late 1940s. 1

The precedents for this housing-reformist effort had, however, already been set by local reformers such as a certain Mr Seals-Wood who, as early as 1919, was criticising 'profiteering landlords'. He linked the living conditions of the white working classes to such 'profiteering' on the one hand, and to labour militancy and emerging patterns of 'industrial unrest' on the other. Seals-Wood reflected, for example, in a full page article in the April 19 issue of the Natal Mercury that 'the effective working life of an employee is ten years longer under proper housing conditions than in our slums', and he urged the local authorities to intervene.

In response to such pleas the Council agreed to work towards a programme to promote home-ownership amongst the working classes so as to bring about 'stability, security and a stake in the town' (NM 11 Apr. 1919). It was also suggested in Council that it might be necessary to extend the Borough boundaries to make land available for working-class housing schemes (NM 11 Apr. 1919). These ideas were workshopped with various ratepayers associations in Durban, and in this way the Council began to secure a modicum of support from an otherwise alienated workforce (NM 17 Oct. 1919; 27 Aug. 1920). At the same time, it kept up pressure for an investigation into the expansion of the Borough boundaries since, not only was land required for white working-class housing, but the tramway system was integrating areas beyond the confines of these boundaries into a more space-extensive system of urban land speculation and development.


This last-mentioned aspect of Durban's history will be examined shortly, but it should be noted that the quietening of labour could not be accomplished by housing solutions alone. The alliance that local 61ites forged with white labour through the local state was a complex one in which racial differences amongst the workforce and conflicts with a nascent Indian land-owning class proved to be crucial. The way in which these conflicts and coalitions operated is perhaps best illustrated by the debate on 'slums' that emerged in the 1920s.

"Slums" and Race During the period 1920-1922, when local labour militancy reached its peak, the problems of slums and 'rack-renting' were popular topics of public discourse. Initially the topics had no racial overtones, and newspaper articles for example referred simply to high rents, poor housing structures and alleged 'profiteering' in the housing sector (NM 29 Mar., 10 July 1920; 8 June 1921). It was not long, however, before debates on housing problems acquired overtly racial connotations. Early in 1922, for example, the first public so-called "anti-Indian demonstration' in Natal emerged in the white working-class area of Umbilo when some municipal land was sold to the highest bidder at a public auction. The highest bidder happened to be an Indian, and the uproar that ensued focused white working-class anger upon a trilogy of alleged evils: the Borough Council, landlords, and Indians (NM 6 Feb. 1922).

In consequence, in 1922 the Council acquired the power, when selling or leasing land, to reserve ownership or occupation for a particular racial group, and used this power to reserve land for 'Europeans' .2 This was the beginning of a conflict that was to endure into the 1950s. The principal actors in this conflict were Indian landowners, the City Council, white 1)usiness groups and working- class whites. It is important to notice that whilst this conflict had developed into national proportions by the 1940s, by the early 1920s housing issues had the effect of beginning to cement a potential political alliance between white working-class people and local economic 61ites around the local state.

It is possibly as a result of the formation of this alliance that from about 1924 in the Natal Mercury both white working-class and 61ite discourse on slums and the housing question in Durban acquired a racially explicit content. There were pleas in the press to Council, asking for example, 'if it was not possible to prevent Indian landlords housing European and Coloured people under one roof' (NM 11 Feb. 1924). The Council's response was that there was a need to further restrict Indian landownership within the Borough (for example, through tightening deeds restrictions), and to plan for 'Indian villages' beyond the Borough boundaries. The latter strategy, in turn, required that the Council gain control over the peri-Durban areas themselves and this, once again, focused attention on the need to expand Borough boundaries (NM 23 July, 26 Sept., 20 Nov. 1924; 25 Mar., 22 Aug. 1925).

In summary, therefore, up to about 1930 in Durban it is possible to identify a complex pattern of conflicts over urbanisation and urban development. These


conflicts brought class, race, environmental and locational relationships into changing configurations. With regard to loca~onal relationships, developments in transportation technology were most critical, and such developments in turn appear to have been strongly influenced by patterns of class conflict. The local state's ultimate control over local applications of innovations in transportation technology, and locational relationships in general in Durban, made it a site of class conflict around changing locational relationships; but these conflicts were subsequently displaced into the realm of 'environmental reform', principally in the housing sphere. A racist component to such environmental reformism emerged with regard to the definition of slums and landlordism, but this was not entirely disconnected from labour's critiques of its exploitation within a laissez-faire property market. Conflicts over housing and changing patterns of locational relationships, in turn, provided the pretext for the geographical redefinition of the local state itself.

THE PROBLEM OF LOCAL STATE BOUNDARIES THE 1930s A N D 1940s

The Basic Pattern of Land Use By 1930, Durban was still a relatively small holiday resort-cum-port city, with the proportions of its citizens of different historical background being approximately one-third African, one-third Indian and one-third European. Industry clustered mainly on the western side of the Bay of Natal, with commerce centred on the northern shores of the Bay. In the residential areas the close correlation of ethnic background with class positions, together with discriminatory clauses in property title deeds, determined that a high degree of racial or ethnic segregation existed. The majority of Indians and Africans were located outside the old Durban Borough boundary which had applied until 1932, and which extended along the Mgeni River to the north, the Berea ridge- line to the west and the Umbilo River to the South.

Those (mainly male) Africans who lived within the Old Borough boundary did so in terms of 'servants quarters' accommodation attached to larger houses, or single-sex 'compound' accommodation attached to factories and harbour areas. Wealthier Indian families who were able to compete relatively freely in the urban land market, on the other hand, gravitated around the central business district where they also successfully practised commerce. For the rest, the Old Borough area was dominated by white-occupied housing.

It was outside the Old Borough boundary that lower-income Indian and African settlement flourished. Often intermingled with market gardening activity and a wide range of unregulated, small-scale commercial,industrial and services activities, Durban's peripheral 'black belt' settlements were typical of their equivalents in colonial port cities throughout Africa (Maylam 1983). As the historian, Cooper (1983), has remarked of the city in such contexts, the core

PLANNING ISS UES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 33

municipality was in the first instance a centre of political dominance over a potentially hostile periphery, allowing, at the same time, for the favourable reproduction of urban living conditions for the Europeans, as they were then called.

The Project of Incorporation: Structural Constraints Such a neat vision of Durban as an archetypal colonial city, however, contains a number of potential anomalies. Why, it might be asked, did a colonially orientated local state in Durban consider it necessary to extend its boundaries and formally incorporate the peripheral areas already described? Surely these areas should have been seen as political and financial liabilities in so far as their inhabitants were largely black and poor?

In answer to this question, it can be noted that the incorporation of peripheral African and Indian settled areas was not seen as posing major political or fiscal problems for two reasons. Firstly, the system of colonial social relations itself determined that Indians and Africans were not enfranchised and could not vote office bearers on to the Borough Council. Secondly, with regard to financing, African urban settlements, which tended to be the areas of greatest poverty, had been made into financially separate entities within the jurisdiction of the municipal budget in terms of the centrally-legislated 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act (Torr 1987). A separate Native Revenue Account was maintained autonomously and wi thout subsidisation, largely because of municipal monopoly in the production of sorghum beer. And as far as the Indians were concerned, without a municipal franchise it was not possible for them seriously to challenge the white-dominated pattern of municipal spending and land use control, which in turn effectively protected white privilege.

The Borough-appointed Durban Boundaries Commission, which reported in 1930 and recommended boundary expansion, was therefore supported by the Council as a whole on condition that no peri-Durban ratepayer be assessed rates or property taxes lower than those in force before incorporation (City of Durban, Mayor' s Minutes, 1930:12). Loans were then raised, by Council decision, to proceed with the redevelopment of the outlying areas (ibid.).

Rationale for Incorporation: The Official Discourse The principal motivations raised by the Boundaries Commission for boundary expansion can be classified into two groups. First, there was an emphasis upon the ostensibly unheal thy and unsanitary conditions in the 'black belt' beyond the old Borough. These conditions, it was alleged, were potentially a source of contagious disease but could be improved through the extension of Borough control and health laws (Hofmeyer 1930:10-15). This aspect of South African urban political thought has, in fact, been elevated by some historians to the status of a minor paradigm on colonial social relationships - the so-called 'sanitation syndrome' (Swanson 1970). But, whatever its merits, the approach fails to account for another major set of considerations explained by the


Boundaries Commission itself. Specifically, the Commission Report emphasised a conflict between (i) the pattern of petty landownership and low income settlement on Durban's periphery, and (ii) a perceived need for land consolidation and rezoning to facilitate industrial expansion. On the one hand, the Commissioners made the following observation;

It would be difficult to imagine a more unfortunate state of affairs than has been brought about in the peri-Durban area as a result of cutting up and laying out of large tracts of land, without the owners or sellers exercising any interest or foresight as to the future development of the area as a whole, but with the single object of obtaining the greatest number of plots of a certain size from a particular tract of land (Hofmeyer 1930:15).

The Commissioners then went on to remark that:

The policy of Durban, so it was emphasised in evidence, is one of promoting industrial development . . . The natural line of industrial expansion is across the Umbilo (River) beyond the Borough boundary, into the South Coast Junction area, where already several factories exist. For the furtherance of Durban's industrial policy, and in the interests of the inhabitants of the present Borough and peri-Durban residents, it is not desirable that such an area should be under separate municipal control (Hofmeyer 1930:19).

This emphasis upon boundary expansion in order to facilitate industrialisation and economic growth did not proceed independently from critiques of health conditions in the peri-Durban areas. In 1931 it was the Chief Inspector of Factories in Durban who compared the unsanitary conditions in peri-Durban with what he saw as the favourable sanitary conditions within the Borough (NM 21 Sept. 1931). At the same time, the high rents levied on workers by Indian "slum-lords', largely in the peri-Durban areas, became the subject of apparently philanthropic interventions by local newspapers (NM 8 Apr. 1932). A 'Municipal Reform Group' lobby grew in Council, supported by the local press, which emphasised leadership by 'responsible heads of big commercial and industrial enterprises' (NM 2 June 1932). Moreover, shortly after incorporating the peri- Durban areas, the Public Health Committee of the Borough Council moved rapidly to advocate 'slum clearance' in areas which were simultaneously being earmarked by the City Engineers and City Evaluators and Estate Departments as suitable for industrial development (NM 18 Sept. 1934).

Popular Response: Resistance to "Urban Improvement" The nature of local state intervention into the newly incorporated areas conditioned the character of popular response. By 1935, for example, the Indian

PLANNING ISS UES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 35

Ratepayers of South Coast Junction, drawing upon the largest constituency of Indians in Durban, had met to protest against the proposed demolit ion of houses occupied by mainly lower income Indians in the areas before any alternative accommodation had been arranged. In addition, the association argued that the areas in question ought to be upgraded in situ by effecting road repairs, street lighting, improved drainage and so forth. Steps were also taken to form a combined Indian Ratepayers Association (NM 4 June 1935).

As far as Africans were concerned, the chief form of opposition to incorporation was less organised and was more of a 'guerilla' type. This opposition was dominated by women in the outlying areas. One example of such opposition was the battle over liquor production. The Durban Boundaries Commission Report of 1930 had justified its intentions to Provincial and Central government, at least partly, in terms of its desire to accommodate peri-Durban Africans in 'proper" locations as proposed in the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act. The Commissioners pleaded:

Indians and Natives whose work is in the Borough live today, both inside the Borough and outside of it, in deplorable conditions. The Council admits its responsibility; it recognises that the application of the provisions of the Natives (Urban Areas) Act in the peri-Durban areas would make it responsible for the housing of several thousands of Natives who now live outside of its boundaries. It feels, however, that the constriction of its boundaries is a serious disability in the carrying out of its policies (Hofmeyer 1930:20).

As indicated previously, the financial means by which the Council had provided housing in terms of this Act was that of reliance upon a municipal monopoly in the production of sorghum beer. This monopoly, however, was continually threatened by a large illicit brewing trade practised mainly in the peri-Durban areas. It was not surprising, therefore, that steps were soon taken to attack the informal liquor trade. However, the situation was also more complex than this.

Durban's male-dominated workforce of African servants, dockworkers and factory labourers lived mainly in single-sex accommodation in the inner city. Women friends or family were largely required to settle outside the old Borough boundary in shacks. These shack zones, in turn, were widely perceived by whites as centres of vice - most notably, areas in which sexual and drinking licence was rife. In the name of 'health and temperance', those who brewed and sold alcohol in peri-Durban areas such as Cato Manor were severely harassed by the police. The authorities were supported in this by local captains of commerce and industry, who coupled their critiques of the illicit liquor trade and shebeen life of their workers at night with philanthropic proposals to 'upgrade Native life' (Durban Housing Survey, 1952). This 'upgrading' was envisaged in terms of municipally supervised locations, and the municipal production of 'proper', low-alcohol beer. Such interventions were in turn


consistent with a moral paradigm of the 'healthy worker' favoured by local industrial employers (La Hausse 1984; Friedman 1985). In the event, the attempt to suppress the illicit liquor trade met with sustained resistance, particularly from African women, and some of the strongest assertions of African resistance centred around the liquor question. This was partly because the attempted suppression of the illicit liquor trade was often associated with more comprehensive efforts at community removals, styled as 'slum clearance', which impacted upon the full range of social and community life (NM 12 Dec. 1935; Maasdorp and Humphries 1975). That the protests should have been led by African women is not surprising given that strong gender differentiation had developed within African areas, with women concentrated very heavily in the peri-Durban areas, and men concentrated in the work-centres in compounds (Friedman 1985; McCarthy and Smit 1988).

In summary, the incorporation of the peri-Durban areas in the 1930s revealed that incorporation was motivated by a number of considerations including health concerns, the functional (for example, transport) interdependence of the city and its surrounds, the designs of industrialists to secure lands then occupied by a multiplicity of home owners, artisans and small-holders, and the desire to 'reform' the non-working social habits of the working classes. Race issues did not loom large in the period immediately prior to incorporation, and only resurfaced again strongly once incorporation had been accomplished.

Race Zoning and the Local State in the 1940s The perception that the local state needed to expand its borders to facilitate industrial expansion was one that was reinforced in the 1940s when urban- based, industrial capitalist accumulation underwent a period of rapid acceleration throughout South Africa. The Durban Council, in anticipation of the planning problems that might be raised by such acceleration, appointed a special committee- the so-called Barnes Committee- to investigate a 'programme of post-war development' (Barnes 1943). The Committee reported in 1943 and made sweeping proposals which were adopted by Council.

A central actor in the formulation of this report was Durban's City Evaluator and Estates Manager. Against a background of repeated investigations into patterns of changing racial occupancy in urban neighbourhoods and allegations by white ratepayers about associated declines in property values, the City Evaluator and Estates manager offered the view that:

Durban is faced with the problem of housing a community made up of four distinct sections, viz. European, Indians, Natives and Coloureds. It is in the racial interests of all sections for them to be housed separately, one from the other. (Barnes 1943:18)

This line of thought, of course, clearly prefaces the philosophy implicit in the Population Registration and Group Areas Acts, brought into effect at the level

PLANNING ISSUES AND POLITICAL E C O N O M Y 37

of the National state nearly ten years later (Western 1981). It should be further noted that the City Evaluator and Estates Manager had seen the need for planning of racial zones as arising partly out of the mutual interdependence of race groups in the production process.

The locational imperatives of large industrial concerns, the City Evaluator and Estates Manager argued, determined that areas to the west and particularly the south of the Bay would be logical zones for future industrialisation. He then went on to make the following observations:

If this [the industrialisation pattern referred to above] comes about, then it will be necessary for housing accommodation to be provided for the four races, so as to enable each to be within reasonable reach of his place of employment. This means, therefore, that housing accommodat ion for the future must be provided for the four races to serve the Old Borough Areas, and also for the four races to serve the industrial area. In order diagrammatically to illustrate my vision, I have prepared a plan indicating the directions in which I think housing accommodation for the future of all times lies, with regard to the needs of different races making up Durban's communi ty (Barnes 1943:19).

The plan or map to which the City Evaluator and Estates Manager referred in his 1943 report is reproduced in that report and is of more than passing interest in political terms. This is partly because the City Evaluator and Estates Manager 's spatial vision was quite different from actual racial-residential patterns at that time (for a description of these actual patterns see for example Kuper et al. 1958). Indeed, his vision was one that envisaged a quite radical transformation of urban settlement and land use, shifting Durban from a largely zonal to a predominantly sectoral urban form. Yet, in point of fact, these 1943 plans and the disruptions and removals associated with them were almost exactly realised through the application of the Group Areas Act in the 1950s and 1960s (see below). How and why this should have been the case is a matter to be considered shortly.

Before concluding discussion of the early 1940s in Durbar/, however, it is important to consider some other crucial developments at the local level. During the 1930s, and reaching a crescendo in the early 1940s, civic associations from the higher-income Berea areas had been expressing concern to local authorities about the so-called problem of ' Indian penetration'. These protests need not be reported at any length here since they are recorded in some detail, for example, in the Durban Housing Survey (1952) and in Kuper et aI.'s (1958) study of Durban.

In essence, these civic associations, in combination with the Durban Chamber of Commerce which was concerned at the competition posed by Indian traders in the CBD, pressed for official Commissions of Inquiry into patterns of Indian settlement and land ownership in Durban. The results were the so-called


Broome Commissions of Inquiry into 'Indian penetration'. Such inquiries, in turn, led to Parliamentary legislation in the form of the Trading and Occupation of Land (Natal and Transvaal) Restriction Act of 1943 and the Indian Representation Act of 1946. Both of these Acts led to the freezing of inter-racial property exchanges in Durban and, in this way, they too prefaced and laid the groundwork for the Group Areas Act.

Events during the 1930s and 1940s in Durban, then, reveal that considerable interdependence exists between the designs of the local state with regard to local economic growth and development, and the local state's projects of slum upgrading and social reform. Despite the often contradictory relationship between the two, for example, in the designation of lower-income residential areas as places earmarked for industrial expansion, the local state's public discourse and official rationale usually presupposed the co-existence of both objectives. The overall dominance of the local economic growth/urban development rationale can, however, be noted in several of the local states' actions during this period. In addition, it is clear that whilst racism per se did not feature in the local states' incorporationist designs, neither the social reformist rationale nor that of local economic growth emerged entirely autonomously of racist planning practices. Indeed, at least in the Durban case, formal racial planning had reached a very advanced stage, as part and parcel of a bureaucratic thrust in both local reformist and local economic growth planning well before the central government initiated segregationist legislation, on a uniform basis, throughout the country.

THE ERA OF "IMPRESS OF CENTRAL AUTHORITY'?

Durban in the 1950s to the Mid-1970s The transformation in urban form accomplished in South African cities during the 1950s and 1960s is a favoured topic of research amongst urban social geographers (for example, Davies 1976; Western 1981). Many have argued that the period was one of the 'impress of central authority', to borrow a phrase from Christopher (1984). The assumption here is that South African cities were considerably restructured during the 1950s and 1960s, both in land use and racial terms, and that this was essentially a reflection of the designs of central government. In particular, it was argued that the centrally-sponsored Group Areas Act of 1950 was imposed upon reluctant local authorities, thereby 'distorting' urban form into racial sectors (Davies 1976; Western 1981).

A problem with this view, however, is that it hardly corresponds to the historical evidence from Durban. Comparison of the 1943 City Estate Manager's race zone map with the actual pattern of Group Areas in existence today for example will reveal a remarkable degree of congruence of the boundaries. The patterns of land use, industrialisation and housing development in the 1950s and 1960s, moreover, correspond with those envisaged earlier in Durban's local state bureaucracy, and dovetail with patterns of racial segregation achieved


during the period in question. Further adjustments to the local state boundary during the 1950s and 1960s were part and parcel of accommodat ing such changes (for example, boundary adjustments to incorporate Chatsworth and Reservoir Hills).

Several features of the land-use pattern realised during the 1950s and 1960s deserve special mention. Firstly, actual industrialisation proceeded in the direction identified in the 1943 report (that is to the south of the Bay of Natal). By 1965, indeed, 90 per cent of all industrially zoned lands (zones permit ted by local provincial and central government for industrial use) were located in areas which, in terms of the 1960 population census, had residential populations which were more than sixty per cent black: that is the so-called peri-Durban shack areas of previous decades (McCarthy 1977; Butler-Adam et al. 1983). Secondly, the displaced populations were rehoused largely in public housing schemes, administered by the local state, in the exact locations identified as early as 1943 in the City Evaluator and Estate Manager 's map (for example, Umlazi and Kwa Mashu for Africans, Chatsworth for Indians, and so forth, all of which were agricultural areas in the 1940s).

Indeed, as indicated above, the only extensions of the Borough boundary made since 1932 were extensions in the Chatsworth, Reservoir Hills and Phoenix areas, all of which were areas of Indian rehousing following their removals in terms of Group Areas and land-use zoning requirements. As far as Africans were concerned, they were relocated into central or regional ( 'homeland') state-administered public housing townships, also in the exact areas projected in as early as 1943 (Umlazi and Kwa Mashu). The older, smaller, formal African townships within the Borough Boundaries (Lamontville and Chesterville) were taken over as the responsibility of central state during this period too. The reason for the transfer of powers here had to do with increasing state concern for centralising control over labour migration (see Hindson 1987). In summary, by the late 1960s the local state was in control of the domain of concern to industrial, landed and commercial capital in so far as their fixed capital investments were concerned, and it also administered those residential environments relevant to whites, Indians and so-called coloureds. Homeland governments, as one component of South Africa's relatively weak regional state structures, assumed limited control over the newer urban townships of Umlazi and Kwa Mashu, and the central state assumed control over the older African townships such as Lamontville and Chesterville.

Returning to the question of the so-called impress of central authority, therefore, it should be clear that whereas most matters concerned with the so- called reproduction of labour power now fell within the domain of central state control (sometimes via 'homeland' governments), the interests of the dominant fractions of capital vis-a-vis their fixed capital investments in the city were secured by their relationship to the local state. It might be argued, of course, that the notion of the impress of central authority was never intended to refer to the security of capital investments, land-use patterns or problems of the division


between production and reproduction. Rather it was intended to refer specifically to racial segregation in residential areas. As indicated earlier, however , there is little evidence to suggest that racial segregation was unilaterally imposed by the central state upon reluctant local political 61ite. The fact that Durban's Group Areas pattern in 1975 almost perfectly mirrored the 1943 suggestions for segregation from within the local state, for example, highlights this point. Indeed, it is important to recall that, in many respects, the Group Areas Act was enabling legislation in terms of which local authorities made specific submissions to the centrally appointed Group Areas Board. 3

Western (1981) has explained that the peculiarities of the Cape franchise determined a presence of so-called coloured representatives on the Cape Town City Council and this, in turn, led the Council to refuse to make specific segregationist recommendations to the Group Areas Board. Elsewhere, however, as Western acknowledges, the pattern of events was different - even in Port Elizabeth where the so-called coloured municipal franchise also applied, the City Council was quick to supply the Group Areas Board with detailed recommendations. Caution should be exercised, therefore, in assuming the Cape Town case to be paradigmatic.

CONCLUSION: QUESTIONS FOR THE FUTURE

If Cape Town is not to be regarded as a complete and reliable guide to South Africa's local politics and planning issues, then neither should Durban. It is to be hoped that the present paper will assist in stimulating further research into the historical development of other towns and cities, each of which presumably has its own implications for theory. The historical case s tudy of Durban nevertheless indicates that relationships between class and race conflict, the local and the central state, reform and economic growth, and processes of urban land use and planning, are rather more complex than is commonly assumed in the literature. In particular, it wou ld appear from the Durban case that the local state may play a more independent , pioneering and influential role with regard to these other considerations than is generally understood to be the case, a conclusion which supports that a l ready reached by Parnell (1988) for Johannesburg in the 1930s.

There can be little doubt, however, on the basis of evidence currently accumulating from historical research, that the time has come for reconsidering the exceptionalist hypothesis on the local state in South Africa: that is, the hypothesis that South Africa is relatively unique in having a highly dependent set of local political processes and local political structures. Indeed, there appears to be sufficient evidence n o w to motivate a really serious research programme on the history of planning issues and the local state in South Africa.

There are of course a number of questions that derive from the Durban case study, and possibly also from research on Johannesburg, that immediately suggest themselves for further consideration. One of the more important of


these concerns possible directions of influence from local to central, and from central to local, in matters of urban policy and legislation. It would seem likely that further research into the history of the local state and urban planning and development issues would reveal more about these relationships of local influence.

The possible mechanisms for local influence at the centre are perhaps the most interesting potential topic for research, but it may unfortunately be the case that little or no documentary evidence is available on such mechanisms. Informal briefings between mayors, city clerks and engineers and cabinet ministers, for example, are seemingly important channels of influence in the current period, and such interactions often go undocumented. Nevertheless, at the very least the historical sequence of policy debates at the level of the locality versus the centre are a guide to possible directions of causality.

More generally, however, for those engaged in the "professions' that seek to influence urban outcomes in South Africa - urban and regional planning being a case in point - there is a need to reflect more carefully upon the nature of the local state in relation to the objective of achieving certain social-environmental- locational goals. A significant proportion of town and regional planning graduates, for example, take up employment in municipal planning departments, yet few such graduates are exposed to a realistic analysis of the local state prior to such employment, and they therefore take their work environments to be naively given. Clearly this is a condition that is neither in the interests of the individual 's career nor in those of urban environmental outcomes. Finally, at a broader theoretical level, it is worth considering how studies of the local state might in future be integrated with the accumulating work of social historians on local political culture amongst the popular classes in South African towns and cities (Van Onselen 1982; Bozzoli 1987; Bonner et al. 1989). As Castells (1983) has observed, the forms of local, popular political culture that develop especially in peripheral capitalist societies are often intertwined with the specific character of the local state, and the responses of state structures in general to popular movements. Given the now quite extraordinary volume of historical research that has been done on the popular classes in South African towns and cities, the question arises as to whether theoretical advances in the broader unders tanding of society would not perhaps be made through a corresponding effort to s tudy local political power blocs and the local state.

N O T E S

. Analysis of capital accounts expenditures for the Durban City Council for the period 1914-1964 reveals the following, for example. During the period 1922-1924 the housing and housing loans component of the capital accounts expenditures averaged approximately 25 per cent of the total. In the period


.

3.

1926-1940, they averaged less than 10 per cent of the total, whereas post- 1940 this once again returned to an average of 25 per cent of total (declining after 1955). For further detail, see McCarthy and Smit (1988). Report of the First 'Penetration' Commission, cited in Kuper et al. (1958:158). See Durban Housing Survey (1952) Kuper et al. (1958), and Maharaj (1991) for a discussion of the Durban Council input into the final Group Areas Board decision.

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