South African voices and visions : Reflections on the revolution of 1994 and prospects for the future

In the meantime, it will be important for those advocating sustainable development to choose, wherever possible, those cases and examples that are most easily understood by the general public. For example, air pollution is, if not always visible, often capable of being smelt and tasted. Closed beaches are plausible evidence of the pollution of rivers, lakes and seas.

Even if one wishes, or is compelled, to go on to discuss complex issues such as global warming, it is well to begin with the evidence at hand: Health issues also are readily understood by the general public: The basic dictum of pedagogy is to begin where the learner is. This is also good advice for the communication specialist. Start with problems that people feel and understand at the local level. That is both valuable knowledge in itself and, if need be, a basis for moving on to more complex and global understandings. Emotionalism and exaggeration are another frequent source of difficulty.

The press is understandably drawn to those with the most extreme views: More moderate and reasoned voices often go unheard in the din. It has to be recognized that neither individuals nor societies are ready or even able to change their habits and behaviours from one day to the next. Proposals for change, if they are to be effective, have to be feasible.

Both the messages and the messengers have to appear credible and responsible. Nothing is to be gained by scaring people. Alarmist predictions that make it seem that the world is about to end are evidently not conducive to the long-term planning and action that sustainable development requires. On the contrary, it is far more effective to present problems as manageable through responsible conduct and, wherever possible, put forward a realistic solution and a means to take preventive action.

This section has focused upon selected problems encountered in raising public awareness on a complex issue such as sustainable development and the many concerns that it subsumes. Yet, while these problems are important and need to be addressed, there is abundant reason for optimism. People are becoming increasingly concerned about the crises afflicting the environment and impeding development. Scientific data alone have rarely won an argument when people were not ready to accept its conclusions and, equally rarely, have scientific findings lost an argument in which people had an intuitive sense that the data were right and relevant.

The climate of opinion is changing and becoming more favourable to the promotion of sustainable development. This is not an opportunity to be wasted, but a chance to be seized. To do so will require effective leadership — not in the sense of direction from above — but in the form of responsibility and responsiveness. There is also an important role for the press and media in responding and building upon the growing interest of the public in sustainable development concerns. Evidently, the fullest possible use must be made of the new information and communication media, but traditional and folk media must also be creatively employed.

The messages of ancient cultures on sustainable development often took the form of metaphors and analogies. These are still powerful means of communicating, especially with poor peoples who are often little schooled, but very much in tune with their culture. The greatest challenge is precisely that of reaching the more than one billion people who live in poverty and deprivation, often in remote rural regions, urban slums and refugee camps.

These compartments have begun to dissolve. These are not separate crises: They are all one. This is true both within education, where interdisciplinarity is slowly and with difficulty gaining ground, and between the spheres of education, work and leisure as lifelong learning emerges as a key concept for planning and developing educational systems. It is also true as concerns the most important boundary of all: These changes are not occurring nearly as rapidly as would be desired, but they are nonetheless taking shape within education at all levels.

The time when education was the activity of childhood and work the pursuit of adults is long over. The growth of knowledge is advancing exponentially, yet not nearly as fast as the need for understanding and solutions at which it is aimed. As concerns sustainable development specifically, it is impossible to predict with reliability what will be the key issues on which people will need information in five, ten, twenty or fifty years. It is predictable, however, that such developments will not fit neatly into the existing and artificial sub-divisions of knowledge which have been in place for more than a century.

Hence, understanding and solving complex problems is likely to require intensified co-operation among scientific fields as well as between the pure sciences and the social sciences. Reorienting education to sustainable development will, in short, require important, even dramatic changes, in nearly all areas. The importance of education was underscored at the at the nineteenth Special Session of the General Assembly June convened to review the implementation of Agenda 21 five years after Rio. Inherent in the concept of sustainability is the vision of a more equitable world. This can only be achieved by providing the disadvantaged with the means to advance themselves and their families.

And of these means, the most essential is education, particularly basic education. Over million children between the ages of 6 and 11 never attend school and tens of millions more enter school only to drop out within a few months or years. Moreover, there are over million illiterate adults, most of whom have never been enrolled in school. The first requirement in the quest for development and equity must be to change this situation and make schooling of quality available to all. But that goal, alas, is still far off. For the present, the challenge is to make the best of an unfortunate and unjust situation.

The Conference consciously choose to define education in terms of learning outcomes rather than levels of instruction. Given the situation today in many developing countries, it does not suffice to orient formal education towards sustainability. Attention also has to be given to those who are presently unserved or poorly served by schools.

This is a large group, well over a billion people, and a vital one for the future. Girls and women, the mothers of today and tomorrow, are in the majority. They are, or will be, the first and most influential teachers of their children. The goals of educating young children are focused on ensuring their health, development, happiness, well-being and adjustment to the environment in which they live.

If these goals are not achieved, the future of the child is compromised and the prospects of sustainable development diminished.

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Basic education provides the foundation for all future education and learning. Its goal, as concerns those in the pre-school primary school-age population, whether enrolled in school or not, is to produce children who are happy with themselves and with others, who find learning exciting and develop inquiring minds, who begin to build up a storehouse of knowledge about the world and, more importantly, an approach to seeking knowledge that they can use and develop throughout their lives.

Basic education is aimed at all the essential goals of education: It is, thus, not only the foundation for lifelong learning, but also the foundation for sustainable development. Basic education for adults is aimed at empowerment. Indeed in a world in which creativity and knowledge play an ever greater role, the right to education is nothing less than the right to participate in the life of the modern world. Sustainable development cannot be achieved by a small minority on behalf of the vast majority.

It will require the contribution and commitment of each and all.

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That is why it is essential to give all people the means — starting with basic education — to participate in shaping a sustainable future. In spite of the considerable progress which has been made, there are still enormous barriers to reorientation of formal education to sustainability, barriers that cannot be addressed by the efforts of individual teachers or even schools, no matter how committed they might be.

Effectively overcoming such barriers requires commitment by society as a whole to sustainable development. A sustainable society will be one in which all aspects of civic and personal life are compatible with sustainable development and all government departments at all levels of government work together to advance such a society. Education plays a dual role, at once in both reproducing certain aspects of current society and preparing students to transform society for the future.

These roles are not necessarily mutually exclusive. However, without commitment of all of society to sustainable development, curricula have tended in the past to reproduce an unsustainable culture with intensified environment and development problems rather than empower citizens to think and work towards their solution.

The role of formal education in building society is to help students to determine what is best to conserve in their cultural, economic and natural heritage and to nurture values and strategies for attaining sustainability in their local communities while contributing at the same time to national and global goals. To advance such goals, a curriculum reoriented towards sustainability would place the notion of citizenship among its primary objectives. This would require a revision of many existing curricula and the development of objectives and content themes, and teaching, learning and assessment processes that emphasize moral virtues, ethical motivation and ability to work with others to help build a sustainable future.

Education for sustainability calls for a balanced approach which avoids undue emphasis on changes in individual lifestyles. This draws attention to the economic and political structures which cause poverty and other forms of social injustice and foster unsustainable practices. It also draws attention to the need for students to learn the many processes for solving these problems through a broad and comprehensive education related not only to mastery of different subject matters, but equally to discovering real world problems of their society and the requirements for changing them.

This kind of orientation would require, inter alia , increased attention to the humanities and social sciences in the curriculum. The natural sciences provide important abstract knowledge of the world but, of themselves, do not contribute to the values and attitudes that must be the foundation of sustainable development. Even increased study of ecology is not sufficient to reorient education towards sustainability. Even though ecology has been described by some as the foundation discipline of environmental education, studies of the biophysical and geophysical work are a necessary — but not sufficient — prerequisite to understanding sustainability.

The traditional primacy of nature study, and the often apolitical contexts in which is taught, need to be balanced with the study of social sciences and humanities. Learning about the interactions of ecological processes would then be associated with market forces, cultural values, equitable decision-making, government action and the environmental impacts of human activities in a holistic interdependent manner.

A reaffirmation of the contribution of education to society means that the central goals of education must include helping students learn how to identify elements of unsustainable development that concern them and how to address them. Students need to learn how to reflect critically on their place in the world and to consider what sustainability means to them and their communities. They need to practice envisioning alternative ways of development and living, evaluating alternative visions, learning how to negotiate and justify choices between visions, and making plans for achieving desired ones, and participating in community life to bring such visions into effect.

These are the skills and abilities which underlie good citizenship, and make education for sustainability part of a process of building an informed, concerned and active populace. In this way, education for sustainability contributes to education for democracy and peace. Reorienting the curriculum towards sustainable development requires at least two major structural reforms in education.

The first is to re-examine the centralized mandating of courses and textbooks in order to allow for locally relevant learning programmes. Local decision-making can be facilitated through the reform of centralized educational policies and curricula, and the formulation of appropriate syllabuses and assessment policies. This type of syllabus can provide centralized accountability, while allowing schools, teachers and students to make choices about the specific learning experience, the relative depth and breadth of treatment for different topics, the case studies and educational resources used, and how to assess student achievements.

A second major area of structural reform is the development of new ways to assess the processes and outcomes of learning. Such reform should be inspired by what people want from their educational system, as well as what society needs. The period of profound change in which we are living needs to be taken into account by educational systems, which were, for the most part, designed to serve a society which is fast becoming history.

Learning needs to be seen as a lifelong process which empowers people to live useful and productive lives. The reorientation of education along these lines — and in anticipation to the extent possible of future needs — is fundamental for sustainable development, including its ultimate objective not only of human survival but especially of human well-being and happiness. Similarly, there also needs to be a revamping of the methods of credentialing students. The various ways in which students are judged testing, report cards, evaluations and the basis for awarding diplomas at all levels need to reflect the reformulation of outcomes of learning towards sustainability.

What does reorienting education towards sustainability mean in practical terms? This is the question that educators immediately want to know. Does it mean adding courses to an already overweight curriculum? Will it require new teaching approaches and methods? New physical facilities, equipment and textbooks to be purchased from an already severely pinched budget? Is it something that can be achieved in a month, a school year or several years? While the reform of education in this direction is still more talked about than put into practice, there are examples emerging which shed light on how to move in this direction.

One example is that of the Toronto Canada Board of Education which recently undertook a reform of its curriculum through a massive community consultation. Thousands of parents, students, staff and members of the public contributed to full day community consultations aimed at exploring how education should respond to the demands of a changing world. The education that parents and the community wanted for their children was in many respects hardly revolutionary or even surprising.

The six graduation outcomes specified were: These differ from most traditional curricular objectives in that they are broader and more closely related to the needs and organization of life than to the requirements and structures of schooling. The essence of the Toronto reform is that the curriculum is no longer focused exclusively on the traditional core subjects of language, mathematics, history, etc. Mathematics, for example, now includes the skill of comprehending extremely large and extremely small numbers — e.

Much of the success of the Toronto reform is due to the fact that it was not — and was not seen to be — an effort to change education to meet goals set by an elite or unduly influenced by outside pressures. The impetus to change came from within. The new curriculum had equal or greater academic rigour, but far greater relevance to life outside school walls. What it demonstrates is that education for sustainable development is simply good education, and that good education needs to make children aware of the growing interdependence of life on Earth — interdependence among peoples and among natural systems — in order to prepare them for the future.

Toronto had one great advantage in implementing its curriculum reform: In reality, what students learn is not necessarily what is written in the syllabus; it is what the teacher delivers in the classrooms. By far, the most frequent cause of curriculum failure is inadequate teacher training. In Toronto the development of the curriculum itself constituted an informal type of training in which thousands of teachers were involved. This was followed up by more formalized sessions and by systematic provision for teachers to upgrade their qualification through university courses and other forms of training.

In general, reforms aimed at sustainability will require much more of teachers than do traditional curricula. Students will have to be more actively involved in individual and collective activities. This will require teachers to play new roles which, in turn, implies a need for increased training and support. Educational reforms, like the movement towards sustainable development itself, requires holistic and systematic thinking; piecemeal approaches will not suffice and can not produce the required results. It must, of course, be recognized that curriculum reform can take place in different ways and on different scales.

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If schools are granted greater autonomy, as proposed above, significant reforms could take place within schools or even classrooms, rather than at the national, provincial or district levels. Certain of these reforms would be aimed at changes in particular lessons or courses rather than for the curriculum as a whole. Such reforms would not be sufficient to fully orient the curriculum towards sustainability, but they could nonetheless be highly valuable.

It is also necessary to recognize that schools and school systems in many developing countries are struggling under enormous burdens.

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They have insufficient resources to implement their present programmes of study — often only four or five textbooks are available for a class of fifty or more — and no means to aim at the more ambitious objectives that were possible in Toronto and in other industrialized countries. This inequality in educational resources and, hence in opportunities, is itself one of the major causes of unsustainability. If schools are to be a means to the reform of society, it is then essential that society at all levels — local, national and international — invest adequate attention and resources in its schools.

It is clear that the roots of education for sustainable development are firmly planted in environmental education. While environmental education is not the only discipline with a strong role to play in the reorienting process, it is an important ally. In its brief twenty-five year history, environmental education has steadily striven towards goals and outcomes similar and comparable to those inherent in the concept of sustainability.

In the early s, the emerging environmental education movement was given a powerful boost by the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in , which recommended that environmental education be recognized and promoted in all countries. The influence of the IEEP — and the national and international activities which it inspired — has been widely felt and is reflected in many of the educational innovations carried out in the last two decades. That work was inspired largely by the guiding principles of environmental education laid down by the Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education held in Tbilisi in , which followed a comprehensive preparatory process which included the International Workshop on Environmental Education held in Belgrade in to draft the concepts and vision which were later taken up by governments in Tbilisi.

These encompass a broad spectrum of environmental, social, ethical, economic and cultural dimensions. Indeed, the recommendations of the Rio Conference, held fifteen years later, echo those of Tbilisi, as is evident in the following quotations from the report of the conference:.

These principles were successfully translated into educational goals and, with greater difficulty, into schoolroom practice in many countries. The motto of the environmental education movement has been: Over a period of more than two decades, it developed a highly active pedagogy based on this premise. In the early grades, in particular, the emphasis was upon learning the local environment through field studies and classroom experiments. By starting in the primary grades, before the process of compartmentalization that marks secondary and particularly higher education sets in, students were encouraged to examine environmental issues from different angles and perspectives.

The influence of environmental education in promoting interdisciplinary inquiries can be seen at all levels of education. A course on environmental economics, for example, looks to anthropology for insights and source material. It studies the decline of ancient civilizations — e.

Equally valuable lessons might be drawn from tribes and groups that faced challenging environmental conditions, but survived against difficult odds by developing an awe, love and respect for nature. In many such cultures, the environment was placed in the sphere of the sacred and used according to a set of well-defined rules that, whatever their origins, served to prevent the over-use and exhaustion of natural resources. Innovative work has also been done in the field of environmental health by relating illness to environmental stress and ways of life.

In brief, the record of the environmental education movement is one of resourcefulness, innovation and continuing accomplishments. Lessons learned from environmental education provide valuable insight for developing the broader notion of education for sustainable development. A basic premise of education for sustainability is that just as there is a wholeness and interdependence to life in all its forms, so must there be a unity and wholeness to efforts to understand it and ensure its continuation.

This calls for both interdisciplinary inquiry and action. It does not, of course, imply an end to work within traditional disciplines. A disciplinary focus is often helpful, even necessary, in allowing the depth of inquiry needed for major breakthroughs and discoveries.

But increasingly, important discoveries are being made not within disciplines, but on the borders between them. This is particularly true in fields such as environmental studies which are not easily confined to a single discipline. Despite this realization and a broadening support for interdisciplinary inquiries, the frontiers between academic disciplines remain stoutly defended by professional bodies, career structures and criteria for promotion and advancement.

It is no accident that environmental education and, more recently, education for sustainable development, has progressed more rapidly at the secondary and primary levels than within the realm of higher education. Yet, higher education has an indispensable role to play. This is true both in the area of research and in the training of specialists and leaders in all fields. A failure to develop educational programmes related to sustainability in universities and specialized institutes has, therefore, an impact on society as a whole. It is, for example, increasingly important to include appropriate materials on sustainable development in the programmes of study of journalists, engineers, managers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, economists, administrators and numerous other professions.

Universities could also render a valuable service by building components of sustainable development into the special programmes for teachers, senior managers, local leaders such as mayors, parliamentarians and others in leadership positions. Universities also play a key role in international cooperation and would do so more effectively it they gave fuller consideration to the needs of scientists and social scientists from developing countries, especially as concerns interdisciplinary inquires into environment and development issues. Fortunately, the situation appears to be evolving in a favorable direction.

Faculties of economics, for example, are adding specialists in environmental economics to their staffs who, by the very nature of their work, are required to develop expertise in scientific and other disciplines. As students arrive at the university from secondary schools with experience in and a taste for interdisciplinary work, universities in many countries are slowly adapting to meet their needs and demands. Major research projects, such as that on climate change, are also developing in specialists the habit of working across disciplines. Ultimately, the growing necessity for interdisciplinary inquiry can be expected to reduce the resistance imposed by entrenched habits and conservative institutional structures.

The effectiveness of awareness raising and education for sustainable development must ultimately be measured by the degree to which they change the attitudes and behaviors of people, both in their individual roles, including those of producers and consumers, and in carrying out their collective responsibilities and duties as citizens.

Both of these roles — the private and the public — are indispensable and mutually reinforcing. Sustainable development requires both individual enlightenment and responsibility and appropriate policies and action by public authorities and the private sector.

Reimagining the South African university and critically analysing the struggle for its realisation

If, for example, an individual wishes to use public transportation to reduce urban congestion and pollution, this choice can be effective only if such transport exists and, for most people, will become habitual only if the it is both economic and convenient. In short, the move toward sustainable lifestyles is not merely a matter of individual choice; it also requires collective action and responsibility.

The caretaking consumer insists upon purchasing products that are kind to the environment. While this choice is often regarded as a virtuous one and as a burden on the consumer, that need not be the case. It is, for example, possible to develop automobiles that would provide the same comforts as present models, but would go twice as far on a litre of fuel.

Production close to home — the site of consumption — is also more energy efficient and, in the case of food, offers greater freshness as well. Yet, ultimately, the producer must provide what the consumer demands. In this way, alert and informed consumers can exercise an influence on what is produced and sold.

Eco-efficiency calls for better management of existing processes or products to reduce waste, use less energy and facilitate reuse and recycling. New and alternative technologies may also allow for cleaner production. Brazil, for example, is one of several countries that has established training programmes for industrial designers aimed at creating more efficient products. There is also a growing tendency for ecologically responsible firms to assume responsibility for a product throughout-life-cycle: A more radical approach is to look at the underlying need that a consumer meets through consumption, rather than at the means which are currently used to meet that need.

For example, the primary use of a car is to provide mobility. Providing suitable, reliable alternatives — such as public transport, car-sharing schemes, home shopping or interactive communications — may enable consumers to meet their needs while having a lower impact on the environment. Eco-efficiency may thus entail a switch in thinking from the supply of products to the supply of services.

Sustainable consumption does not necessarily mean consuming less. It means changing unsustainable patterns of consumption by allowing consumers to enjoy a high quality of life by consuming differently. For example, consumers might be encouraged to buy products which have a longer life, which can be easily repaired or updated.

Here, too, education has an important part to play. Obviously, sustainable consumption has a different meaning when applied to the poor in developing countries and to the socially-excluded in developed countries. For the poor, sustainable development is not only about preserving the environment, but also and even mainly, it is about providing for human needs such as food, clothing, shelter, health care and security. However, even in the poorest countries, sustainable consumption means avoiding waste.

The special session of the United Nations General Assembly on the follow-up to the Earth Summit emphasized the need for developing countries to promote sustainable consumption patterns in the development process. To sum up, the individual through wise consumer choices and responsible behavior can certainly play a useful role in reducing waste and favoring products that do less harm to the environment. These are valuable and practical contributions, but also symbolic ones. The willingness of citizens to sort their trash for recycling, for example, sends a message to elected officials that voters are concerned about the environment.

The engaged citizens of a democratic society can exercise a strong influence on behalf of sustainable development through their civic role as well as through their behavior as consumers and producers. Individual lifestyles are inevitably strongly conditioned by public policies. Sorting trash, for example, serves little purpose if the collection service then throws everything into a dump. Individual action must be complemented and supported by public policies at all levels. The main instruments of public policy are laws and regulations, tax and fiscal policies ie.

Regulation is the most direct approach: Tax policies, including subsidies, are highly effective in influencing relative prices. Ecological tax reform usually consists in heavily taxing environmentally harmful products and favoring products that are kinder to the environment through reductions in taxes or through subsidies, designed to make such products more competitive. An important part of such reforms is to correct the negative incentives in present tax codes. In European countries, by contrast, the automobile is a major source of state revenues.

Reflections on injecting the spiritual ethos of the Early Town planning movement into planning, planners and plans in post South Africa. Recent developments in South Africa in the field of planning, the domain of plans, and the world of planners, would suggest that planning and plans are viewed in a positive light, the local planning profession is in good shape, and these instruments and actors can play a meaningful role in the development and transformation of the country. In this article, these assumptions were explored through the lens of the attributes and convictions that gave birth to and drove the early 'town planning movement' in the industrial cities of North America and Western Europe.

A key theme in this analysis was the role played in the early town planning movement by compassion, passion and care for progressive change, and the conviction that it was possible to do so through the application of reason, technical ability and ingenuity. Based on this analysis, the argument was put forward that, while planning, plans and planners in South Africa could potentially play a crucial part in the crafting of a different country, a number of crucial changes would need to be made.

The challenges associated with effecting these changes were subsequently explored, and the article concluded with a proposal for doing so by tapping into the metaphors as deployed, and the drive and passion as displayed by those in the early town planning movement. Over the last few years, a series of highly publicised long-term development plans were adopted, the long-awaited national Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act was passed, and job advertisements for planners and calls for proposals for planning-related work have increasingly tended to include registration with the South African Council for Planners as a requirement see City of Tshwane ; Gauteng Provincial Government ; National Planning Commission ; Republic of South Africa As such, it could easily be assumed that planning and plans are held in high regard, the planning profession is in good shape, and planning and plans are viewed as vehicles for 'bringing about a better future' for the country.

In this article, this view on planning, plans and planners is questioned. Starting with the birth of modern town planning in the industrial cities of Western Europe and North America, and from there making its way through the dawn of town planning in early twentieth century colonial South Africa to current day post-apartheid South Africa, the argument is made that there are certain crucial ingredients for a societal and political buy-in to, and institutional anchoring of, planning.

These ingredients, it is argued, are not present in South Africa today. It is furthermore held that planning, plans and planners can play a key role in the creation of a very different society, but that this will require a number of considerable changes to be made. After a section in which the appetite for the kind of changes that would be required and the possibility of effecting such changes are pondered, a proposal is made for the injection of the idealism of the early town planning movement when it was less about professional status and recognition and more about true conviction, impassioned preaching, belief and action, into planning, plans and planners.

This story requires no previous exposure to planning and given its trajectory from 'social movement to just another job in a bureaucratic institution', may strike a chord with readers from other disciplines or fields of endeavour who have made similar journeys. Key to this endeavour was the utilisation of a series of powerful religious metaphors drawn primarily from Christianity, notably those of: While steeped in Christian faith, and with their eyes set on the heavens, the instruments of the 'early town planning movement and planners' were the earthly activities of science and the application of 'the scientific method' i.

This relationship with science was a dualistic one, with science on the one hand being respected and valued for having, amongst others, given humanity the steam train, electricity and the printing press, emboldening thinkers, and creating an aura of 'anything is possible', while on the other hand, being disdained for having created the Industrial City of ultimate darkness and its poisonous simmering brew of exploitation, instability and chaos - a 'world out of control' spiralling rapidly downwards towards the eternal fire Geddes ; Nettlefold ; Oranje ; Robinson The connection with art was equally dualistic, with on the one hand a rapidly-accelerating escape from realistic, 'photographic' representation to abstraction, impression and expression, and which was increasingly attributing art to human ingenuity, gaining pace, while on the other hand, many still seeing artistic talent as a gift from the heavens that had to be revered and used to serve the Creator and capture and celebrate Creation in as true or realistic a way as possible see Jack ; Lilley ; The Royal Institute of British Architects As such, it could be likened to a 'secular religion' displaying both Catholic elements in its recognition of sin and the need for remorse and repair, and Protestant virtues in its approach to taking responsibility for failure and for 'setting things right'.

This acceptance and incorporation into the state machinery of this new discipline and area of work was in many cases a hard-fought victory against powerful interests who saw no need for meddling social activists, and who fiercely opposed it for this reason. What eventually swayed leaders in the nascent nation states of the day was the acute concern they shared with the early planners of this turbulent zone of production, trade, finance, power and unrest that was the Industrial City Aldridge ; Cullingworth ; Rydin ; Ward A key reason for this being that as meddling as the instrument was, it held out the promise of order, beauty, healthier, stronger and hence more productive workers, and very importantly, stability, none of which were undesirable attributes in the eyes of the industrialists or the propertied classes Aldridge ; Rydin ; Ward What this early period demonstrates is that, even though the world in which this simple, yet powerful metaphor-laced tale of sin, remorse, redemption and salvation, coupled with its dire warning on the wages of sin was unleashed was often hostile and filled with vested and powerful interests, its proponents were able to have it incorporated as an institution within the broader institution of the nation state Aldridge ; Hall ; Krieger a; Ward It was, however, also this institutionalisation that would lead to its entrapment and closing down of its revolutionary, transformative power.

As to how this came about at the time, it may be that this is 'the way of the world' where social movements that start off with fervour, passion and belief are concerned, thus those in power use the instrument for their own objectives and not those of the movement. It may also be as a result of the way in which the institutionalisation was done at the time, through rudimentary legislation that was all about instilling order through strict regulation and had no place, 'code' or language for passion, belief and change.

Whatever the reason or sets of reasons, the outcome was the end of the early, revolutionary organic town planning movement in a state bureaucracy; very much as some believe the first, early, organic Christian movements became entrapped in church and church-state-meshed bureaucracies Evans Once it was part of the state bureaucracy, the 'town planning movement' moved from what Berman The crude but modest requirements of this latter task would lend itself to the emergence of a 'broad-spectrum profession' in which initially a motley crew of architects, engineers, health officials and surveyors were involved; later giving rise to the creation of a distinct profession, coupled to university programmes by which access to the profession could be gained and in which a clear set of rules and a structured socialisation scheme could ensure a predictable and reliable reproduction model Rydin ; Ward In this model, the early idealism and dreams of radical change and the heaven-eyed crafting of a fair, just and productive city would increasingly find its way to the vaults of 'planning history' - narrated and presented as a distinct era of utopianism and megalomania, of dreams without reality and dreamers without a destiny see Hall ; Oranje Filling the void left by the departure of care and concern would be an essentially elitist, often-even patronising mixed-up, cut and paste project of normative positions and thoughts about 'doing good and being right' Hoch , which would be presented as 'Planning Theory', and increasingly be written by a new special class of planner - the 'planning theorist' see Allmendinger ; Hagen ; Hoch , ; Krieger ; Oranje ; Taylor This new, strongly normatively-angled creation, that is, 'Planning Theory', would in its later cynical, morbid, angry, deeply introspective postmodernist stages also entail a series of startling, sardonic knife-in-own-heart-slowly-turning disclosures about 'the dark side of planning' and the twisted, even evil intents and nefarious power-soaked collaborations of planners Oranje In all of this, the historical gleam of the victorious tale in which planning and planners came into the world to create a better world was lost, despite its initial significance and crucial importance in selling and believing in, and institutionally harbouring and funding it.

The loss of its founding rationale and the remaining, otherwise scanty set of hard technical skills without the hard, driving edge of social purpose and conviction would soon lead to planning and planners looking strangely and ironically out of place and time in a neo-liberal world in which return on investment and hard, tangible, sellable skills in support of this greed-soaked pursuit had once again become the sole driver Sager ; Tasan-Kok Despite being thousands of miles away from the Industrial City of North America and Western Europe, the early 20th century 'town planning movement' in the then newly created Union of South Africa initially had some semblances of its first, fledgling manifestations in this very different setting.

With the newly established State, consisting of four provinces, still struggling to find its feet, establishing its authority, and determining 'who does what' in terms of powers and functions, and a massive town-ward movement underway from rural South Africa, a space was created for highly profitable land speculation and piece-by-piece urban expansion Callinicos ; Floyd ; Hamlin ; Mabin a, b; Oranje As such, highly receptive conditions in the eyes of the powerful for a State-activity like town planning were being created, that is public health, safety and civil unrest threats or concerns in slums; cluttered roads, with no overall planning for the vehicles of the captains of the machine age, notably the car; and potential loss of value in land and investment due to the unregulated transformation of farmland into residential areas Coaton ; Mabin a, b; Oranje ; Parnell Layered over this was the 'mixing of races' in the slums of the rapidly expanding urban areas on the Witwatersrand.

This challenged the prevailing idea of separation of races and the eugenic conceptions of the superiority of Europeans, and swept under the colonial carpet questions about the exclusion of black South Africans from the creation of the Union in , and the earlier established racially-based right to own land on the profitable Witwatersrand Gold Fields through legislation dating back to the late nineteenth century Kruger government Bossenbroek ; Christopher ; Oranje These challenging conditions for the powerful would see the focus falling on primarily public health and housing and being given State attention and funding through legislation, and not on 'town planning'.

This legislation, largely based on the earliest, still-very-tentative and largely 'experimental' examples of such legislation in England in and , was, however, a far cry from the progressive ideals of those in the town planning movement. It was more about the regulation of transformation from farmland to urban land than about the preparation of grand modernist schemes for the salvation of those living in modern, 'out-of-control urban monstrosities' Muller , ; Oranje As such, and through these myopic ordinances, town planning was primarily defined as control and regulation - the zoning of land, the freezing of land-use profiles, and the control of settlement expansion -and not about improving urban spaces, lives and life chances through the informed head and able hand of the State Muller ; Oranje At the same time i.

These legal expressions not only established the pecking order amongst town planning, roads and housing as domains or sectors of interest, but also relegated town planning and its proponents to a subservient role, far behind roads and housing, which the then State saw as crucial for the control and reproduction of established colonial economic and social relationships - a far cry from 'the progressive, purposeful planning of and for urban areas' Muller , , ; Oranje These already ominous developments for the fledgling and struggling local town planning idea or movement worsened further when town planning became a distinct profession in the second half of the century.

In a short span of time, the half-opened eyes of the movement turned from the heavens to lines in the sand - notably the lines of the land surveyors who were the major beneficiaries of the introduction of strong State regulation, surveying and registration or recording of urban land development. It was incidentally primarily also this group that would take the postgraduate diploma courses in town planning, and who would begin to refer to themselves as 'town planners' Oranje ; Prinsen The fact that the main driver for land surveyors and architects to venture into 'town planning work' was to make an income in times when architecture or land surveying work was in short supply further eroded the image and standing of planning in the eyes of notably the other built environment professionals Oranje And so, when the first distinct undergraduate 4-year town planning courses were introduced in the s, the profession had been firmly established as a sober, comparatively low-paying, technical profession; its key areas of focus were land-use regulation and the drafting of residential neighbourhood plans for new settlements or extensions to existing settlements for paying clients, be they public sector entities or private land developers Muller , ; Oranje The bottom-of-the-pack-position of the town planning profession in relation to the architects, engineers and land surveyors, which had been established in the s and s, the drab nature of the work, and the connection of the profession to 'doing-it-on-an-economic-need-to-do basis' would frame and entrench the relationship between the profession and the increasingly draconic apartheid state.

Key to this relationship was that, in its wish to be accepted, the small group in the new town planning profession dared not question authority and very likely had no wish to do so either and would do as it was told Muller , ; Oranje This submissive selling out to the powers that be or were, saw the 'space inhabited, thought about and worked in by planners' shrink ever further and further. It led to the development of a practice-is-all mentality in the profession, in which that which was learnt and done in the workplace was the norm and academia regarded as little more than an initiation school hurdle that prospective 'operators' needed to go through to obtain access to 'the real learning school' - the increasingly myopic world of practice Muller ; Oranje As such, this view ran directly against two threads of the utopian roots of its founders - siding with the powers that be, and instead of questioning, contesting and attacking the status quo, assisting in cementing it, and assisting in creating racially separated and economically stratified urban spaces, and maintaining and deepening their resulting unequal social and economic relations Muller , In its local, South African guise, 'town planning' would go from 'hearing of and slightly dreaming of the New Jerusalem in a senseless trench war on fear-and-blood-drenched battlefields in western Europe' to assisting in the artificial creation and retention of the New Jerusalem for a few.

1. south african voices and visions reflections on the revolution of and prospects for the future;
2. Sachen machen: Was ich immer schon tun wollte (German Edition).
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4. Crimen y criminales II (Spanish Edition)!
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Save for a few isolated spurts of hope, belief and dreams of 'a better world through planning', the town planning profession became a handmaiden of the state, utter-eager to please and to be accepted as a profession. For one, it had only a few years earlier seen the passing of legislation in that created a statutory registration and oversight professional body, laid down rules for registration, and provided for accreditation of planning programmes at tertiary institutions.

One striking feature of the protests is that they were organized beyond party and ideological divides. It was this fact, more than any other that brought thousands of students and their supporters onto the streets at Parliament and the Union Buildings. Yet this united student movement fractured soon after President Zuma announced the zero percent fee increase for This was partially due to the natural process of the mainstream of the student body withdrawing and concentrating on completing the academic year after their immediate collective demand had been achieved.

But as important a causal factor in the fracturing of the student movement was that political parties and ideological groups reasserted themselves to project their own agendas onto this social struggle. The result was that the movement fractured into a cacophony of ideological and protest voices, each with their own distinctive blend of educational and political demands.

If the student movement is to again be brought together across class and racial boundaries, and have the political potency that it demonstrated in the week when it marched to Parliament and the Union Buildings, then it will be necessary for it to address a number of strategic issues. Perhaps the most immediate is the racial essentialism that afflicts certain strands of this movement.

This racial essentialism is particularly pronounced in certain sections of the 'Student Transformation' movement and in some of the political parties. It is of course driven in part by the cultural alienation that black students have experienced, particularly in the historically white universities.

It is also intellectually justified by selective readings of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko. But rejecting an assimilation into western mores and historically white norms, or asserting the importance of black leadership, does not need to lead to an automatic degeneration into the crude racism that is sometimes displayed by certain factions of the student movement. Neither is it intellectually legitimate to read racial essentialism into the ideas of Biko and Fanon.

It is especially an injustice to Biko given that he wrote in the crucible of apartheid. To now interpret Biko literally in , without understanding the distinction between apartheid and democratic South Africa, is to do a disservice to the intellectual legacy of one of South Africa's fallen heroes. The problem is in part with the broader narrative that has come to accompany some parts of the students' political resurgence. Too many students glibly dismiss both the contributions of earlier generations of activists and the political settlement itself. Particularly obnoxious is the dismissal of the contribution of Nelson Mandela by some young activists who have accused our collective icon of having sold out.

Even if we ignore the temerity of a group of born free activists to pronounce on the contribution of a leader who gave 27 years of his adult life to imprisonment for the anti-apartheid cause, one still has to question the intellectual wisdom of reading the political settlement from the perspective of This is not to suggest that the settlement cannot be criticized.

I myself have been very critical of its compromises, neo-liberal character, and propensity to corruption. I have also been particularly scathing of its enabling of increased economic inequality. However, this must not result in the misleading conclusion that no successes were recorded in the struggle for emancipation by the settlement. It is worth underscoring the fact that the generation that preceded the current students, whatever their mistakes, left the world a far better place than the one that they inherited.

And while the current students may be correct to demand a measure of humility from our political elite and institutional leadership who have become complacent by the entrapments of power, the leadership and activist base of the student movement itself could do with a dose of the humility that it demands of others. Equally worrying is the propensity to violence by some strands of the student movement. Again, it is important to state that the vast majority of student protestors respected the boundaries of peaceful protest.

I recall a moment at the height of the protest in the Wits concourse when private security entered the premises unauthorized, leading to a serious momentary altercation with the students. The student leaders who I was with at that moment — including two of the most militant — immediately surrounded and protected me. At no point during my engagement with the students did I feel threatened. Yet, despite my personal experience, it would be hard to deny that there has been a greater propensity to violence by certain strands within the movement. At the most basic level, this was reflected in the attempt across campuses to close off the entrances and exits of universities by lying in front of the gates.

No attention was given to the fact that this violated the rights of others. It prevented parents from picking up their children, staff and students from leaving the campus, and even in one or two cases, individuals from visiting their doctors. Protestors were so focussed on their rights that they had forgotten their obligation to respect the rights of others. And while it is the goal of peaceful protest to create inconvenience and disruption, it is definitely illegitimate to violate the rights of others on such a wide scale.

The propensity to violence manifested itself at it most extreme level as the protests wore on. It was most volatile at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and Tswane University of Technology where there was widespread violence, residences were set alight, and the universities had to be closed. But it also manifested itself at other institutions including the Universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and the Witwatersrand.

At the latter, when some protestors partially set alight a bookshop and a university vehicle, police were called in. At Cape Town, a university bus was set light, as were a few vehicles at Stellenbosch. Protestors suggest that the resort to violence was prompted by university authorities who called in the police. While this was definitely the case at some institutions, in many others including Wits, police were only called in once protestors had already resorted to arson and violence.

There is no doubt that the resort to violence was in part facilitated by strands of the movement that deliberately adopted a strategy of violence. In part this was prompted by particular interpretations of the writings of Frantz Fanon who was seen as an advocate of revolutionary violence.

Educating for a Sustainable Future: A Transdisciplinary Vision for Concerted Action

It was suggested that poor black people are daily confronted with structural violence as they have to experience the consequences of inequality, poverty and corruption. In this view, it is therefore legitimate to respond with black violence to protest this structural violence. First, Fanon wrote about revolutionary violence in the crucible of the colonial struggle. It is not legitimate to transpose those ideas to a democratic era which, however flawed, provides the space not only for protest, but also the right to vote out the political elite.

Second, how is the struggle against structural violence advanced by attacking other students and destroying university property that is intended for the housing and teaching of the students themselves? If anything, such actions are likely to consolidate the very effects of the structural violence against the poor and marginalized.

Finally, such actions compel the state to respond with force in order to protect public property thereby creating a militarized atmosphere that works against the immediate interests of the protestors and the legitimacy of the protests itself. Finally, equally damaging to the realization of the goals of the movement is the failure of some strands within it to recognize that success will result not from a single event, but rather from a process of continuous struggle, engagement and negotiation. The achievement of quality, affordable higher education is going to require trade-offs, both within the institution and the society as a whole.

The Department of Higher Education and Training estimates that the total cost will be in the region of an additional R56 billion per annum, R19 billion for increased subsidy and a further R37 billion in increased funding to NSFAS. Some strands within the movement are not prepared to think through trade-offs. Some are sometimes not even interested in negotiations, whether at the institutional or national level. But such an approach is damaging to the movement for it allows the decisions around trade-offs, and therefore the substantive outcomes, to be determined by a narrow group of political and institutional leaders.

To be fair to the student leadership, not all of them are averse to engagement and negotiation. In the presidential task team and even in the national negotiations on the zero percent fee increase for , student leaders were at the heart of striking the compromises that were required. Similarly, at the institutional level at Wits, not only were student leaders important to negotiating solutions to the financial challenges confronting the student body, but they were also instrumental in fashioning compromises in the task team on the insourcing of vulnerable workers.

But the problem is that the broader narrative of the movement has been opposed to trade-offs and compromise, with the result that negotiations have been continuously bedevilled by issues of legitimacy. But students cannot be the only stakeholders within the movement that must be subjected to critical scrutiny. Perhaps it is even more necessary to subject the conduct of some of the academics who supported the movement to a critical reflection. Again it is important to note that the broader academic support base of the movement behaved impeccably within the boundaries of legitimate solidarity action.

But again, there were strands within this support base that acted in ways that must be questioned. First, there was a shocking level of casualness about violence among some members of staff. Not only were many silent about the abuse of the rights of other non-protesting students, but some even had the temerity to articulate views that suggested that violence may be a necessary protest strategy in certain institutional contexts. Second, a number of academics actively participated in the de-legitimization of institutional structures of governance. Under the pretext of democratizing the Senate and Council — a legitimate demand — they proposed a series of solutions that demonstrated a worrying lack of understanding of both context and the post-apartheid history of reorganizing governance arrangements in the higher education system.

Indeed, many were oblivious of the fact that a number of the recommendations that they advanced had been attempted some 15 years earlier in some institutions with disastrous consequences. These academics had forgotten the cardinal rule of progressive Transformation; namely, that thoughtful activism and appreciation of context is necessary if unintended consequences are to be avoided. But perhaps the most damaging feature of the engagement of this strand of academics was their failure to understand the importance of trade-offs in enabling progressive outcomes. Many of these academics were at the forefront of struggles to increase salaries, enable insourcing of vulnerable workers, and reduce fees without any recognition that there may be a tension between these demands.

Some have opposed all of the trade-off recommendations that have emerged — including increasing student numbers or introducing more measured salary increases for academics — around how to sustainably finance the costs of simultaneously addressing all of these demands. In the same vein, a colleague on the Wits Council suggested that other councillors were too focussed on their fiduciary financial responsibility.

Implicit in his argument was a suggestion that councillors should be willing to sacrifice their financial fiduciary responsibility in favour of their academic and social responsibilities. It is necessary to think through the wisdom of this strategy, in particular because it is premised on a widespread assumption among the left that the state would be compelled to bail out the university were it to get into a financial crisis.

But this strategy has been tried before with devastating consequences. In the late s what was then the University of Transkei effectively embarked on a strategy to address its historical infrastructural disparities by deliberately pursuing a deficit financial strategy. Within years the institution was on the brink of insolvency and while it was eventually bailed out by the state, it was never at the levels required or within the time frames necessary. The net effect was that what was then one of the strongest historically black universities was academically destroyed as the financial crisis prompted the departure of both top academics and students.

It is an academic crisis from which the university has never truly recovered. The tragedy of this proposed strategy is not that it is likely to fail, but rather that it repeats past failures simply because it is dislocated from any understanding of the history of Transformation of the higher education system in this country.

It reminds me of a lesson once taught to me and other colleagues by noted educationist and political activist Neville Alexander. Alexander often remarked that while he may have been a noted Marxist theoretician and scholar, his socialism only developed a political relevance when ANC notable Walter Sisulu taught him African history while on Robben Island. It is this nationally responsive and contextually relevant Marxism that lies at the core of his magnum opus, One Azania, One Nation , written soon after his release from Robben Island.

This is the lesson that this group of academics need to learn. If we do not understand our history, and if we do not understand the relevance of our context, we risk repeating the failures of our past. First, they have not only achieved a zero percent fee increase for , but they have also compelled the state to cover the fiscal burden of the decision through an additional grant of R1. Second, the Presidency has accepted the recommendations of its task team on short term financial challenges for the university system which include, among others, a further additional grant to universities in of R4.

Third, there is now an explicit commitment at the highest levels of government, NSFAS and the private banking system to establish a new funding vehicle in to assist middle and lower middle class students with financing the costs of their higher education. Finally, a presidential commission has been established to investigate free education for the poor and a sustainable fee regime for universities.

The student protests then not only won short terms gains for immediate fee concessions, but also opened up the systemic parameters to enable an investigation into the restructuring of the fiscal foundation of post-apartheid higher education. But the establishment of a new sustainable fiscal foundation that is progressively grounded on the principle that higher education should be available to all qualifying students without any financial hindrance will not magically appear.

It will still require ongoing public action and institutional engagement. For this reason, if no other, the following lessons of the student protests need to be learnt:.