Democracy, reconstruction, and changing local and regional economic planning in South Africa

The objective in this article is to provide a picture of the newly emerging dispensation and particularly to focus on the changing roles of local and regional economic planning in a democratic South Africa. Two major areas of discussion are presented. First, the essential building blocks of the new South Africa are discussed. An outline is sketched of the RDP (regional development programme) which is the foundation for policy formulation in the immediate future. In addition, the reshaping of South Africa is examined in terms of the contours and features of the country's new regions or provinces. Against this background, in the second part of the article, the implications of recent development, including the RDP, for changing local and regional economic planning are reviewed. The key argument that emerges is that policymakers in South Africa must evolve a national urban and regional development strategy in order to provide coherent spatial coordinates for directing reconstruction and to overcome inherited patterns of uneven development. -from Author