Abstract
As part of modern government, planning is concerned with ‘acting on others’ actions’ in spatial practices. This necessarily entails the exercise of power. This paper (re)frames planning’s power in the context of particular systems of governance and how this power is exercised in the relationship between planning systems and (ab)users of urban spaces. Using material from field research in Zimbabwe, the paper examines three forms of power exercised through planning in specific socio-economic contexts. The discussion interrogates planning’s handling of violations of spatial controls by two socio-economic groups: the privileged affluent and the marginalized poor. The paper demonstrates that planning exercises direct sovereign power and cruder and more overtly violent forms of disciplinary power in less privileged context while exercising pastoral power and subtler forms of disciplinary power in affluent contexts. The paper argues that planning’s continued affinity to and unbending deployment of sovereign and crude and overtly violent disciplinary techniques in its dealings with marginalized townspeople is counterproductive and ineffective. The paper proposes the cautious appropriation of pastoral power – especially as it relates to the co-opting of individual and group agency – into planning’s operations in less privileged contexts.
Power may become the acid test of planning theory.
Handling planning violations
On 19 May 2005, the authorities in Harare announced the official launching of an urban ‘clean-up’ campaign, which the state later codenamed ‘Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order’ (OM/RO). The ‘prime targets’ of the crackdown were ‘informalised urban employment and “illegal” low-income housing solutions across the urban hierarchy’ (Potts, 2006: 274). At an official level the two-month long operation was avowedly the state’s response to the illegal use of urban spaces. As the destruction rapidly spread, it became obvious that OM/RO was a two-tiered operation. Its two phases coincided with geographical areas corresponding to socio-economic status. In Harare, OM/RO was at its most ferocious in the early days, when it was concentrated in the poorer residential areas (the high-density, low-income areas and informal settlements) and in areas where informal activities of the less privileged proliferated. It is in the period from late May to mid-July that OM/RO decimated illegal land use practices in the less privileged urban spaces. In addition to physical violence, the authorities unleashed verbal abuse against the offenders, calling them all sorts of insulting names such as ‘maggots’ and ‘filth’.
Nicknamed ‘Tsunami’, by urban dwellers, OM/RO consisted of several related activities executed by the law enforcement, defence and security services amply supported by parastatal youth militia (SPT, 2005). During the operation, illegal structures were destroyed; vagrants, street children and vendors operating in undesignated places were violently evicted. In Harare and other major cities, a good number of these displaced ‘culprits’ were arrested and detained. Some were carted off to makeshift ‘transit camps’ – veritable concentration camps – outside the cities, ostensibly ‘pending relocation to other destinations’ (Tibaijuka, 2005: 49).
On 15 July, as the OM/RO moved into upmarket residential areas, the Minister of Local Government, Public Works and Urban Development unexpectedly announced the suspension of the operation (Chimhete and Maponga, 2005). As part of the unilateral moratorium, the authorities granted a last-minute reprieve to owners of illegal structures and people engaging in illegal land use practices in the more affluent areas (Kamete, 2007). They indicated that they were giving the culprits the chance to regularize their properties and practices with a view to legalization. In keeping with the statutory and regulatory requirements of spatial planning, the offenders were to submit appropriate plans to council, pay the requisite fees and penalties, and meet all conditions to be imposed by the local planning authority. The threats, violence as well as the name-calling and branding all but stopped as the ‘rich and guilty’ rushed to meet the official two-week deadline.
This case reveals two contrasting responses to spatial unruliness by the planning system. In a way, it also exposes forms of planning power and how these are exercised in different situations. In this paper, I use a Foucauldian perspective to (re)frame planning’s powers in the context of particular systems of governance and how this is played out in the relationship between planning and (ab)users of urban spaces. Using material from research in Harare, Zimbabwe, I critique the forms of power exercised by planning in different socio-economic contexts. I deploy this framework to analyse planning’s production of urban space, its ‘conduct of conduct’ in spatial practices, and its handling of deviations from what it deems ‘normal’. The discussion will proceed as follows: In the next section I discuss three forms of power – sovereign, disciplinary and pastoral – and link these to spatial practices. I then examine some illustrative cases from Harare. This is followed by a detailed critique of the specific forms of power deployed by planning in specific contexts. I make the argument that different forms of power are deployed in different socio-economic contexts. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of this differential treatment of deviance.
Power in planning studies
As part of modern government, planning is concerned with the ‘conduct of conduct’ in spatial practices. This ‘government of conduct’ (Hindess, 1996: 122) obviously entails the exercise of power. For the purposes of this discussion power is defined as ‘action on others’ actions’ (Gordon, 1991: 5). It is ‘a general matrix of force relations at a given time, in a given society’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983: 186). The exercise of power amounts to ‘a mode of actions upon action’ where ‘certain actions structure the field of other possible actions’ (Foucault, 1983: 222). This Foucauldian ‘analytics’ of power is analytically more helpful than other views. In amplifying the important relational aspects of power, this view probes deeper into the workings of power than Weber’s and Dahl’s views of ‘power over’ someone (Dahl, 1957: 201; Weber, 1978: 53), or Giddens’ conception of power as ‘the capability to “make a difference”’ (Giddens, 1984: 14), all of which reduce power to a mere ‘generalized capacity to act’ (Hindess, 1996: 1).
Acting on others’ actions is what planning does. Not surprisingly, power has been discussed extensively in the planning literature. Although there has been quite a lot of scrutiny of power and power-plays in the planning system, there is not much on urban Africa with its particular systems of governance, most of which can be described as ‘authoritarian democracies’ (Kamete, 2009a: 91). One of the first coherent studies of power in planning practice was done by Forester in the seminal book Planning in the Face of Power (Forester, 1989). In the book, Forester demonstrates the futility of professional blindness to relations of power in societies characterized by inequalities of power and the inevitability of failure attached to such blindness. He asks planners to synthesize ‘the interests of all, especially the interests of the underrepresented, into planning decisions’ (Morrow, 1990: 826). However, Forester does not examine the workings of power per se; he grapples with the problem of how planners can become effective in negotiating power, conflict and powerlessness.
Proponents of various strands of communicative planning have been criticized for overlooking the issues of asymmetric power relations and how these distort the whole terrain of planning (Flyvbjerg and Richardson, 2002). Some of them have responded to these criticisms in different ways. Innes (2006: 12), for example, insists on making ‘a distinction…between power around the table and power outside the dialogue’, arguing that ‘the former can largely be equalized with skilful management of dialogue, shared information, and education of the stakeholders [whereas] the latter is untouched by consensus building.’ Healey, who reminds critics that ‘a concern with power relations is a pervasive influence’ in her work and that of other proponents of collaborative planning (Healey, 2003: 113), makes a more comprehensive response to the criticisms. Pointing out that she believes that ‘power is a relation not a thing’ she dismisses as unhelpful ‘the dualistic oppositions of “Rationality”…versus “Power”’ (2003: 113) famously propounded by Flyvbjerg (1998a).
Perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of power in planning has been done by critics of communicative planning. Among these is Flyvbjerg (1998a, 1998b) who brings out the ‘dualistic opposition’ of rationality and power. In a powerful treatise, Flyvbjerg and Richardson (2002) deploy Foucault’s power analytics to demonstrate the futility of planning practices that ignore the ‘dark side’ of planning. Power is at the centre of Flyvbjerg and Richardson’s critique of communicative planning theory. They argue that ‘the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning’ (my emphasis). Hillier (2002) makes a more balanced analysis of power, but after vividly demonstrating that ‘networks of power and power-plays may have distinct and important influence on planning outcomes,’ she ends up siding with those who decry the masking of power in conventional planning styles and Habermasian communicative theory.
Not content with mere critique of Habermasian consensus, Hillier (2003) introduces aspects of Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonism (Mouffe, 2000) into planning theory, powerfully demonstrating ‘the possibility of permanence of conflict, non-reciprocity and domination…which may productively explain some of the power games enacted in planning decision-making’ (Hillier, 2003: 37). Taking up the theme of agonism as it relates to ‘permanence of conflict’, Pløger (2004: 71) argues that in a pluralistic, multicultural society ‘conflict is immanent to planning’. The two argue that planners and authorities tend to view disagreements as antagonism – conflict between enemies – which has to be dealt with by power (Pløger, 2004: 72). They advocate for a view of disagreements and conflicts as ‘agonistic strife’ between adversaries (Pløger, 2004: 72). In this way, planning practice can ‘domesticate the destructiveness of antagonism to the potential constructiveness of agonism in which disagreement need not be construed as disrespect’ (Hillier, 2003: 39).
Obviously, there is no shortage of analyses of power in the planning literature. However, a lot of the literature examines the power that is exercised by some actors or institutions outside the planning system or that manifests itself in relationships between or within actors or institutions with respect to planning issues (cf. Flyvbjerg, 1998a; Forester, 1989; Sandercock, 1998). This paper complements the now fairly extensive work published by planning theorists such as Flyvbjerg, Huxley, Hillier, Gunder, Fischler, and Watson, which analyses forms of power inherent in and exercised by or through the planning system.
Space, the primary focus of planning, is a ‘power-full’ phenomenon. Foucault (1991: 252) recognized the central role of space not only in communal life, but also ‘in the exercise of power’. This role particularly became evident at the end of the eighteenth century when architecture became involved ‘in problems of population, health and the urban question’ at which point ‘it becomes a question of using the disposition of space for economico-political ends’ (Foucault, 1980a: 148). Being a discipline that ‘mobilises space and architecture’ urban planning is, for Foucault ‘no longer the expression of power, but…[it is] power itself’ (Hillier, 2002: 53). Indeed, the city, which urban planning builds through the production of space, is itself ‘rarely the site of disinterested practices’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 105). In analysing the city, Amin and Thrift (2002: 105), effectively associate it with ‘the “hard” issues of power, domination and oppression’ and bring out ‘the role of cities in defining who or what is normal or what is abnormal, who or what is appropriate and who or what is inappropriate, and who or what can be conceived and who or what is inconceivable.’ Needless to say, urban planning plays a key role in this process.
In light of the above, it is appropriate that the exact forms of power that planning exercises in specific cases be mapped out and critiqued. Writing about power in educational institutions, an educationist suggests, ‘We should be asking what form of power we face, for power is multi-faceted’ (Covaleskie, 1993). The admonition should undoubtedly apply to planning, which has been described as ‘an inherently normative discipline’ (Hillier, 2002: 53) that supposedly ‘seeks the rational, orderly and efficient use of land’ (Dear, 2000: 120). In this vein, Huxley rightly argues that ‘planning can be seen as a form of what Foucault…calls “governmentality” – practices shaping the actions of others and strategies for the management of a population’ (2002: 137).
The educational literature has addressed the question of forms of power head-on (see, for example, Atkinson, 2002; Covaleskie, 1993; Schutz, 2004; cf. Butin, 2001). Regarding schools as no more than disciplinary institutions, some educational scholars have used the post-modern perspective to unravel the forms of power that educational institutions wield. Perhaps unsurprisingly when these commentators identify forms of power, control and domination, they refer directly or indirectly to Foucault. These analyses apply to planning, which, like education, is an integral part of the modern state apparatus. The rest of this section will examine three forms of power and apply these to planning. It should be noted that although this discussion is informed by insights drawn from Foucault, it is not my intention to limit myself to a strictly Foucauldian framework. For this reason, I have to some extent (over)simplified Foucault’s distinction between the different techniques of power to serve my own purposes.
Sovereign power is the most visible form of power. It is the power exercised by a ruler (such as a king, president, or prince) based on some form of legitimacy such as inheritance or election. As such, sovereign power is ‘that form expressed in recognizable ways through particular and identifiable individuals’ (Covaleskie, 1993). This form of power is associated with the absolute monarchy of old. As Bevir (1999: 350) contends, the sovereign ‘had a synthetic relation to his territory: he stood apart from it – with no organic link to it – even as he ruled over it’ resulting in the monarch’s rule being ‘inherently fragile’. Therefore, to ensure his continuity, the sovereign had to invest a lot in the ‘identification and forestalling of potential threats to his position’ (Bevir, 1999: 350). This was achieved through sovereign power, ‘an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not unconnected with the functions of war’ (Foucault, 1995: 57; my emphasis). Even today, sovereign power is ‘exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations’ (Foucault, 1995: 57). Covaleskie (1993) identifies ‘the “nodes” of this form of power as the king, the prince, and the agents thereof’ noting that ‘these individuals are visible agents of power, known…to be such’. The exercise of sovereign power is ‘sporadic and discontinuous’ (Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 202), mostly in response to ‘a certain set of circumstances and through a specific and identifiable agent or set of agents’ (Covaleskie, 1993). Planners are part of this set of ‘identifiable agents’ that also includes the police. The enforcement of planning regulations and the exacting of penalties for violating them are some of the ‘set of circumstances’ where sovereign power is exercised in planning. To compensate for its sporadic and discontinuous nature, sovereign power is exercised in ‘excessive form’ such as ‘spectacular public executions and elaborate rituals of the courtroom’ (Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 201).
The form of power widely discussed in the literature, including that of planning, is disciplinary power. The nature of this form of power is brought out in Foucault’s oft-quoted work Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1991). It is ‘relatively crude’ and ‘is overtly (often “violently”) imposed’ (Schutz, 2004: 15). Disciplinary power acts directly. It epitomizes ‘the external controls associated with negative aspects of power’ (see Bevir, 1999). Unsurprisingly, disciplinary control is often characterized as repression. It is closely associated with the concept of police 1 , itself an attempt ‘to exert disciplinary political power over men [sic] and their activities, including schooling, work, family life and consumption’ (Bevir, 1999: 351). Despite its crudity, disciplinary power is more refined than sovereign power. 2 The aim of disciplinary techniques is not merely to exert control over individuals; rather they are designed ‘to channel the conduct of individuals in a certain direction’ (Allen, 2003: 71). Disciplinary power seeks to produce a docile body (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983: 134–5), one that ‘may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (Foucault, 1995: 136). To this end, disciplinary power is ‘entwined with scientific or pseudo-scientific categories or norms, “normalising” terms and discourses’ (Kumar, 2007). The human sciences, which have the role of defining what counts as human ‘normality’, are themselves informed by disciplinary power (Covaleskie, 1993). As noted by Jones (1990: 61), throughout history, the human sciences have played ‘an important part in the creation of disciplined subjects, that is, individuals who conformed to certain standards of sanity, health, docility, competence, and so on’. Unlike sovereign power, discipline is regarded as ‘a generalizable technology of government, one whose use is not confined to any particular techniques or institutional settings’ (Hindess, 1996: 117).
The third form of power that should be of interest to planning is pastoral power. It is subversive and subtle. In contrast to the stark violence and open repression of sovereign and disciplinary power, pastoral power nurtures and helps individuals ‘to embody better ways of being’ (Schutz, 2004: 15). Pastoral power is ‘a fundamentally beneficent power’ (Golder, 2007:167) concerned with the welfare of its subjects (Hindess, 1996: 118). In contrast to the intermittency of sovereign power, pastoral power operates more continually. Rather than isolate and violently punish people, ‘pastoral forms of control often coopt individual and group agency’ (Schutz, 2004: 15). According to Bevir (1999: 351), pastoral power, whose techniques were originally developed in the Church, ‘requires individuals to internalise various ideals and norms so that they both regard an external body as concerned with their good and strive to regulate themselves in accord with the dictates of that external body’. Pastoral power does not depend for its effectiveness on overt violence and/or the explicit threat of violence. Instead, conformity is ensured by the prospect of rewards. This is a result of the ‘secularization of pastoral power [which] involved the state replacing the spiritual end of salvation with worldly ends such as health and well-being’ (Bevir, 1999: 35; see also Popkewitz, 1998). In pastoral power, it is ‘no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world, but ensuring it in this world’ (Foucault, 1980b: 215).
The three forms of power are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Schutz (2004: 15–16), for example, maintains that pastoral and disciplinary forms of domination have a tendency to coexist. Even today when the monarch no longer holds sway, the sovereign, now represented by the state in general or a ruler in particular, occasionally resorts to sovereign power in dealing with perceived threats. In most contexts, though, one form of control always predominates. Thus, although pastoral power is not necessarily in a ‘binary and opposing relationship with disciplinary power’ (Caughlan, 2005: 14) it should be possible to identify the exact form of power in operation when the planning system deals with particular cases.
The exercise of any form of power does not guarantee total success; it does not always bring expected results. For example, with respect to disciplinary power, Hindess (1996: 117) points out that ‘the imposition of discipline will not always achieve the desired effects’. According to Foucault (1998), discipline will not always succeed as it often engenders resistance. Further, Foucault (1980b: 141) famously contends that ‘there are no relations of power without resistance’, which resistance ‘is often formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised’. However, as Schutz (2004: 17) argues, there are different levels of resistance in different contexts. Because they are overtly and often violently imposed, crude sovereign and disciplinary forms of control generate more resistance than subtle pastoral controls, a point powerfully illustrated by Scott (1990). In the case of disciplinary techniques, for example, resistance and evasion ensure that the best the techniques can achieve is ‘a disciplinary, but hardly a disciplined society’ (Hindess, 1996: 118).
The broader context
This part briefly considers the broader socio-spatial and political context that might illuminate governmental rationalities and practices, especially as they relate to planning. Zimbabwe’s political system can be described as an authoritarian or ‘guided democracy’, which is basically ‘a tyranny of the elite’ that ‘borders on authoritarianism’ and ‘leave[s] the governed with only limited control over the government’ (Pinkney, 2003: 11–12). Of late, the state has increasingly been characterized as repressive, intolerant and authoritarian. Since 2000, the country has been beset by economic and political crises. This has seen the country’s economic and governance indicators plummet and with them Zimbabwe’s rankings in all manner of global economic, governance and democracy indices. Politically, urban centres have become opposition strongholds, resulting in the ruling party consistently losing local and general elections in the cities and towns.
It is in this context that the government launched the controversial OM/RO. Predictably, there were differences between the government and its critics regarding the real motives behind the operation. 3 Central government insisted that as a sovereign state it launched the ‘clean-up operation’ for technical, legal and practical reasons and that its actions were within the parameters set by appropriate legislation, in particular, the Regional Town and Country Planning Act (Zimbabwe, 1996), a piece of colonial legislation that had not changed much since its enactment in 1976. In its explanation, the government appealed to the principles of planning, planning law and spatial order. According to the government, OM/RO was primarily launched in order to ‘stem disorderly or chaotic urbanization and its attendant problems’ (Zimbabwe, 2005: 16). The government’s passionately reasoned defence of OM/RO was strongly countered by local and international critics, most of whom reduced the operation to politics (Kamete, 2007, 2009b). They dismiss the techno-legal arguments as nothing more than ‘declared intentions’ (SPT, 2005: 14) implying they were part of a public relations ploy, akin to what Flyvbjerg (1998a) terms ‘rationalisation’. There were also claims that the government wanted to depopulate the opposition strongholds by forcing restless townspeople to rural areas, thereby improving the ruling party’s electoral position outside its rural strongholds.
Whatever the arguments, there is no doubt about the modernist nature of the Zimbabwean planning system. The colonial planning system – a replica of the British planning system – was clearly designed to recreate model British towns in Zimbabwe (Kamete and Lindell, 2010). There was no room for informality in the technical urban plans. In their aspiration to achieve the modern city (cf. Swilling et al., 2003), both the colonial and post-colonial governments used planning in ‘practices and programmes aiming to shape, guide and govern the behaviour of others’ (Huxley, 2007: 187) in urban areas. In the aspirations, mentalities and rationalities of the state (cf. Huxley, 2007), informality was regarded as a nuisance, a contaminant that needed to be purged from modern urban spaces (Kamete, 2008).
It is worth noting that while informality overran most of urban Africa (cf. Simone, 2005), Zimbabwe was one of the very few countries that crafted plans, statutes and regulations and religiously enforced them (Kamete and Lindell, 2010). Because there are hardly any discernible changes between the colonial and post-colonial planning systems, it is more productive to focus on its spatiality rather than its temporality. This resonates with Coleman and Agnew’s interpretation of Foucault’s interrogation of power as proceeding ‘more spatially than temporally…[since] relations of power are made manifest more clearly in space rather than sequentially in time’ (Coleman and Agnew, 2007: 319).
The marginalization of and violence against informality started in the colonial era with typical ‘epistemic and historiographical violence’ (Legg, 2007: 265). Not only did the colonial authorities seek to subjugate, invalidate and eliminate local knowledges and ways of knowing from urban spaces, they also sought to do away with practices that could compromise their quest for urban modernity. Informality was seen as disorderly, discontinuous and opaque. It was therefore not amenable to surveillance, calculation and manipulation through existing governmental rationalities and technical practices (cf. Huxley, 2007). The post-colonial planning system did not change its view of and attitude to informality. The system with all its discourses, ideologies, rationalities, techniques, technologies and institutions entered the post-colonial era almost intact and with its hostility against informality undiminished. Indeed, as is the case in the post-colonial world in general, the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe ‘has not signalled the withdrawal of colonial categories, procedures and technologies of rule, nor has it beheaded Europe as the sovereign subject in deference to which many postcolonial…geographies are constructed’ (Legg, 2007: 265).
Unsurprisingly, long after decolonization, Harare, the capital city maintained its reputation of an ‘orderly’ and ‘clean’ city, jealously guarded by orthodox planning traditions and practices (Kamete, 1999; Rakodi, 1995) characterized by strict spatial policing encapsulated in instruments focusing on control, criminalization, regulation and penalization (Kamete 2009b; Wekwete, 1989). However, this image of orderliness has been disrupted by residents who occupy and use urban spaces in direct violation of planning controls. For the better part of the twentieth century, compared to other cities of the global South, Harare had few permanent large-scale illegal land use activities (see Mabogunje, 1990: 122). However, these dramatically increased in the 1990s, particularly in the wake of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), which resulted in mass retrenchments and rising cost of living. After 2000, there was an avalanche of illegal and extra-legal land use activities and practices all over the city, particularly in the city centre, low-income residential areas and suburban shopping centres. It is against this background that the events and practices in this paper take place.
Dealing with planning violations in Harare
This section examines two additional cases that illustrate how the planning system deals with planning violations in Harare. One is about informal activities at a popular spot in the low-income area; the other one is about large-scale illegal land development by a wealthy private property developer in an affluent part of the city. Together with the case of ‘Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order’ presented in the introduction, these cases demonstrate particular forms of powers at play as the planning system responds to specific spatial practices of given socio-economic groups or individuals.
The cases
Informal braai (barbecue) spots are very popular at many suburban shopping centres in Harare. Since the 1990s, one of the most popular spots has been a place in Warren Park D Shopping Centre, better known as ‘KwaMereki’. This is one place where braaing (barbecuing), eating and drinking has created jobs for food vendors and provided entertainment for revellers. But according to the operative local plan for the area the braaing and related forms of informal activities are not supposed to take place there. The land is designated for a primary school. In 1999, council planners condemned the activities and declared them illegal. KwaMereki was raided by the municipal police as the state riot police kept a close watch.
The ensuing flood of pleas, condemnations and expressions of disgust was met with typical planning logic. Senior council officials, often flanked by planners consistently stated that the informal activities had to move to properly designated areas. They argued that the local authority had provided suitably located areas for informal trading; and in the interest of public health, safety, and convenience the vendors had to move there. Attempted (logical?) explanations by proponents of the outlawed activities, justifying why the activities were near the shopping centre and not at the properly designated places were scornfully brushed aside. Protests, threats and recommendations by women’s pressure groups, student leaders, indigenous lobby groups and political moguls were coldly ignored. In the end, planning triumphed. The place was razed to the ground and KwaMereki became desolate and deserted. Stubbornly, the activities resurfaced until the authorities violently wiped them out during OM/RO in June 2005. To be sure, there are sporadic small-scale reappearances of the activities, and the war of words is still raging on, but it does not look as if planning will budge.
On the other side of town, a private developer built a top-class shopping centre in the affluent suburb of Borrowdale. The development was clearly illegal; the area was zoned residential. The developer should have applied for ‘special consent’ to be allowed to build the mall. As the local planning authority, Harare City Council had the power (and obligation) to issue an enforcement or stop order to suspend or halt the flagrantly illegal development. The possibility of this happening was increased when residents raised strong objections to the development. However, for some time, despite debates and controversy, construction proceeded. It later turned out that the then Senior Minister of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development had exercised his call-in powers and called the application to him. The minister regularized the development. He stipulated that the developer should not engage in any more construction after completing what he was then building. However, the developer went on to add more buildings to his ‘village’. Despite continuing strong protests by agitated residents, council did not destroy the structures.
In 1998 the same developer set about developing an office complex in the same affluent suburb. Again, the development was undertaken in an area zoned for residential use. In 1999, just as the city was engaged in a war of words with vendors in undesignated areas of the CBD and residential areas, it was disclosed to the public that the developer’s office complex had no planning permission. Borrowdale residents, backed by the combined Greater Harare Residents’ Association, went to war with Harare City Council and the developer. Central government’s Department of Physical Planning decided to investigate and called on council to answer some questions. It was established that the office complex needed special consent. In the granting of special consent, neighbours would have to be consulted for possible objections. The developer insisted that he had obtained the permit and that the city’s planners and building inspectors had actually approved the plans and made the necessary inspections on the complex, which was now nearing completion. The local authority, using the Regional Town and Country Planning (RTCP) Act, issued an enforcement order compelling the developer to cease all operations and restore the land to its original state.
Council’s decision was possibly spurred on by public opinion, where critics compared the local planning authority’s hard-line stance against vendors with its manifest indecisiveness in the face of the developer’s intransigence. Commentators lauded council’s tough position. Basking in the rare glory, senior council officials went on to emphasize that technical decisions were blind to race and economic status and immune to political manipulation. But then the developer went to court. Building operations resumed pending a court decision on the dispute.
A lot of questions were raised as to what really transpired. The confusion generated by the events surrounding the development left commentators speculating whether it was corruption, inefficiency, incompetence or political manoeuvring that was at play in the office complex saga. It is little wonder that the public and the press suspected some ‘underhand dealings’ in these ‘goings-on’ (The Herald, 14 January 2000; Zimpundit, 2005).
Discussion
This critique is based on my analysis of the three cases, backed by extensive discussions with seven practising planners and 15 ‘offenders’ who had found themselves at the wrong end of the planning system after violating planning regulations (Table 1). The interviews were carried out between August 2007 and February 2008. Of the offenders, 10 were from low-income areas and five from affluent areas (Figure 1). The 10 from the low-income areas were all based at KwaMereki and had participated in a previous study. The affluent offenders comprised those who agreed to be interviewed from a list of 15 randomly selected from council files on planning violations in the previous 12 months. The semi-structured interviews, which were undertaken at the suggestion of two of the planners, supplemented my own analyses and offered some valuable stakeholder perspectives.
Profile of planners and ‘offenders’ interviewed
Map of Harare showing location of study areas
The preceding cases suggest that planning deals differently with different violations depending on the socio-economic status and location of the people responsible for the violations. To put it crudely, it appears sovereign and disciplinary power is exercised when the ‘deviants’ are at the bottom rungs of society and hail from the less privileged parts of town, whereas more refined versions of disciplinary power and pastoral power are deployed when the offending parties are wealthier people in the more affluent areas. Thus, in cases of violations, the more brutal, direct forms of power are deployed on those at the lower echelons of society, namely the low-income groups. The female vendors at KwaMereki were treated more harshly than the affluent property developer. Referring to the developer’s case, Planner M of the local authority denied that the planning system was biased. Interestingly, he quickly pointed out that the developer could be ‘guided along with better results’ compared to the ‘foregone conclusion’ that the vendors would not ‘yield much fruit, if any’.
This apparently class-based differential response to deviance was still the norm eight years later when OM/RO destroyed the housing and livelihoods of the poor. How else can one describe the sudden moratorium declared when the operation was about to move to higher income areas? As Mai Zenzo, who appropriately labelled herself ‘a double-sufferer’ – having had her business destroyed when the authorities destroyed KwaMereki and having lost her house and livelihood during OM/RO – put it, she was ‘treated like dirt because of poverty’ whereas the ‘rich and powerful who committed worse sins’ than hers were ‘treated with dignity’. Not surprisingly, Mukoma Paddy, an informal trader, complained ‘Tisu vekungodhererwa chete’ [We are the ones who are always treated disrespectfully].
A look at the way planning responded to the violations in the cases reveals that the severity of the violence exerted is, according to Planning Consultant B, ‘inherently illogical and contradictory’. Contrasting the ‘durable, permanent large-scale’ commercial developments by the property developer, to ‘the known negative aspects’ of informal food vending, Planner M admitted that the latter ‘did not have the potential to scar the landscape’ as they were ‘merely transient’. Logically, the same planner pointed out, ‘this cheeky b*****d deserved to be punished more severely’. Asked why the developer ‘got away lightly’ another local authority planner, Planner F, explained that despite the large-scale and permanent nature of the development, the developer ‘anoshandika naye’ [he is easy to work with] because ‘he is enlightened and has the resources to clean up his mess’. Planning Consultant B maintained that affluent people such as the developer ‘identify or can be helped to identify with the city’s value systems’. This explains retired Planner G’s assertion that these ‘fat-cat law-breakers’ could ‘be taught to see the light…and to reasonably police themselves’.
Related to this was the planners’ unflattering perception of the poorer people’s ‘level of positive contribution to the city’. To Planner Z of central government’s Department of Physical Planning (DPP), the contrasting – and apparently class-based – response to planning violations was dependent on ‘an informed analysis of the potential benefit of the wrong’. He explained that the private developer was a ‘ratepayer and income tax payer’. In addition, the contentious commercial development had ‘the potential to boost the city’s coffers’ as it would bring in revenue. It was therefore ‘a clear blessing in disguise’, not only to the city, but also to service providers and the power and water utilities, not to mention ‘the spin-offs on the community and the local economy’. To Planner Z, the vendors and those owning or benefiting from illegal structures in the low-income areas were ‘parasites sucking the city dry without pumping anything back’. They were ‘free-riders, who destroy the city for nothing’. As such, their wrongs could ‘not be harnessed for the better, or for the benefit of the city’. So, they had to go because ‘there is no way you can regularize this kind of unproductive illegality’.
Interestingly, the technocrats maintained that the differential treatment of different socio-economic groups was based on their knowledge of ‘the thinking of people’. Referring to the private developer, Planner M said:
We know him: what he is up to; where he has been; where he is going or thinks he is going. We are aware of his thinking because he is not a mystery…He is an open book; we are aware of the thinking of his kind [property developers]. That makes it possible to reason with him…on the basis of the case he presents to us.
About the food vendors and those who had been ‘rightly dealt harshly’ by OM/RO, the same planner said:
Who really are these people? Do we really know them? They come and go. They are too many and…too mixed. We have failed to understand them…What are they thinking? What will they do next?…Where will they be tomorrow? You cannot understand the thinking of these people.
In fact, it is partly this kind of reasoning that was used by planners to tailor responses to specific infractions by particular groups. Because the technocrats could not understand the people, it was, in the words of Senior Planner A, far more prudent to ‘unleash the police on the deviants’. The police would ‘figure out how to discipline them [because] it’s their job to handle miscreants who are impossible to understand’. Perhaps this explains why OM/RO was fronted by the police, the army and youth militia as ‘the appropriate frontline field officers’. This also explains ‘the absence of reasonable warning and compassion’ (Baba Tindo, owner of illegal structure in Warren Park D) when OM/RO was launched. The way the authorities approached affluent groups could not have been more different. Planner D explained:
We did not need the police to serve notices on him [the developer]. We could do it personally…even over a cup of coffee. We felt safe because this was civilized territory we were dealing with. When you were getting in, you knew you would come out of there in the same state you had gone in. No broken limbs, no bloody nose, no BP [high blood pressure].
Sheik Hassan, of the low-density suburb of Belvedere, described by planners as ‘a serial violator’, confirmed ‘always receiving maximum respect and understanding from the guys from Shepperton House [Head Office of planning]’ who always ‘take their time to discuss sticking points in a mature way…even when they believe I am unreasonable’. This preferential treatment of the privileged was also evident during the controversial OM/RO when the authorities ‘took their time to nicely ask the rich and powerful…to kindly comply’ (Planner Z).
Speaking about the marginalized, Senior Planner A pointed out:
Can you honestly explain and discuss revenue, planning law, building lines, overcrowding, aesthetics, health…and safety to [sic] these people? …Just the other day in Avondale [an affluent area] I had an excellent and productive discussion with a guy who violated building lines…Try this with vendors and squatters. You won’t get anywhere. It’s like talking to yourself…assuming they don’t try beating the crap out of you first.
It is because of this perception that the planners felt they could not talk sense to the less affluent offenders. Planner G summarized the official attitude as a choice between ‘talking sense versus beating the sense into them’ (her emphasis). Referring to the vendors and users and owners of illegal structures in poorer areas of the city, Planner M tellingly quoted a well-known pejorative saying: ‘The hearing of an African is through the skin,’ suggesting that physical violence was the most effective way of dealing with offenders from marginalized groups. He defended himself by explaining that it was violence and the threat of violence that got quick results with ‘these people because the language they understand is pain and loss’. Ms Gore who had ‘graduated’ from the slums of Mbare to Msasa Park, a new medium-density suburb, noted the ‘big difference’ between ‘kugarorakashwa’ [always being clobbered] in her previous setting to ‘kutaurirana mune zvakanaka’ [reasonable discussion] in her new, more affluent setting. Ms Gore felt she was ‘now really enlightened’ about planning controls because of ‘helpful guidance’ planners had given her.
As Ms Gore noted, ‘always being clobbered’ was what offenders in less privileged contexts experienced when the local authority decided to enforce planning controls. Spectacular violence was the norm in such cases (Kamete, 2008). Reflecting on this, Planner G explained that this was designed ‘to make an example…of the law-breakers’. Planner F pointed out:
What do you achieve by pussyfooting…? These people have a propensity to break regulations en masse. So, what you need is a strong message…a deterrent to potential deviants…You have to hit them with a bang…clobber them big time. You see, when they see with their own eyes the consequences of causing trouble…they will stay out of trouble. Dealing with crime quietly, with…patience and niceness…won’t get you anywhere.
Planner D endorsed this ‘dramatic use of overwhelming force’, saying it made people ‘think hard and careful [sic] before doing things that invite the full wrath of the law’. According to Planner A, this violent reaction was ‘a reminder of what awaits people if they choose to take the highway of crime’. Reacting to this, Mai Patience complained that the authorities ‘vanongoda zvekuonererwa’ [they love the attention]. Similarly, Brighton asserted that the authorities were obsessed with ‘showing off their power’. On why the heavy-handed methods were reserved for the less privileged, Planner F explained that the more affluent ‘do not sin en masse like flies landing on human faeces’, adding that there was no need to be tough on the wealthy because ‘that will send the wrong message’. Pressed to explain, he said, ‘These people [the more affluent] know the law…plus they are not dangerous repeat offenders…They easily get the message’. Planner Z opined that it was not ‘in the interest of planning’ to alienate these people. He pointed out that what the city needed was ‘to harness their [wealthy offenders’] energies for the eventual good’. Echoing these sentiments, Sheikh Hassan stated that ‘respectable people need correction, not punishment…This is the logical thing to do’.
Planners further explained their contrasting responses in terms of confidence and trust in the respective groups. When OM/RO was about to move to higher income areas, public announcements were made regarding what the authorities expected of those breaking the law. The private developer was given the chance to regularize his development. This was done because the planners knew that there was ‘a 99.99% certainty [sic] of compliance’ (Planner G). Not so the informal business operators and occupants and owners of illegal structures. Planner G was certainly reflecting the opinions of her colleagues and the authorities when she said, ‘Can you really trust these people to even give a thought to understanding simple planning requirements, not to mention complying or even trying [to comply]?’ Perhaps Mai Patience, a food vendor, was not far from the truth when she complained that in the eyes of the authorities ‘we are small stupid, unthinking, children or criminals who cannot be trusted…They [the planners] have no faith in us.’ Seemingly confirming this assessment, Planner M described Mai Patience ‘and her kind’ as ‘without the slightest potential to deliver’.
There are obvious consequences to the partiality of the planning system in its enforcement of planning controls. The most glaring, according to the study, was the growing association of planning with the interest of the wealthy and powerful, who as Brighton, a Warren Park D trader and landlord, said in the wake of another ‘clean-up’ operation, ‘are in a position to abide by all the unreasonable s**t that planners require because it is crafted with them in mind’. In any case, as Mai Dumi, who operates at KwaMereki, pointed out, ‘the rich can break the law without having their bones broken’. Interestingly, all the five respondents from affluent suburbs agreed with Pastor George’s sentiments that it was ‘easier and safer’ for the wealthy to ‘mess with planning’ than it was for ‘poor people from the locations [high-density areas]’.
The second consequence is the proliferation of resistance to planning by the less privileged. Aware of their marginalization and what they perceived as the selective brutality of planning enforcement, the poor devised strategies of resisting ‘the very, very unjust treatment’ (Reggie, informal trader). Unable to comply with the prescription of the abstract space imposed by planners, and faced by the violence of the forms of power exercised by the authorities, the marginalized have devised ways of defending their lived spaces (Lefebvre, 1991). Their strategies range from open defiance and confrontation to subtler ways designed to dupe the system (Kamete, forthcoming). This differs sharply with ‘the civilized measures’ (Dr L, Borrowdale resident) of the affluent groups who ‘consistently engaged in rational disputation’ (Advocate P, with offices in low-density Belvedere) through the courts or directly with the local authority.
Sovereign, disciplinary and pastoral power in Harare?
In Harare the official responses to planning violations are typical of modernist planning, which in the face of spatial unruliness, resorts to ‘crackdowns…because of the ideals of public order and state control’ (Cross, 2000: 30). However, the preceding analysis suggests that Harare’s planning system applies sovereign and crude disciplinary forms of control in the case of offenders from poorer areas of the city and resorts to more refined disciplinary and pastoral forms when offenders are from affluent areas. It appears also that this is not just a crude, irrational response based on mindless partiality. Planners appear to have reasons for treating infractions by different socio-economic groups the way they do. On closer analysis these reasons seem to be driven by planners’ assumptions about the offenders. All the three forms of power deployed against the offenders are based on particular modes of reasoning about methods of planning control (cf. Popkewitz, 1998: 24). They are based on particular ways of reasoning about what in the city is correct, normal, allowed, and so on (cf. Amin and Thrift, 2002: 105). The choice of how to control is in turn based on planners’ assumptions on the nature of the offenders and how they fit into the authorities’ vision of the city.
In these assumptions, erring affluent groups are regarded as redeemable. They can be rehabilitated. As such, notwithstanding their bad behaviour, they are potential partners in the building of the city. Just as the pastors in the Church helped offenders to get salvation in the next world, planning can help redeem offenders on the top rungs of the urban society and guide them to receive ‘the…benedictions of pastoral control’ (Schutz, 2004: 16), such as health, well-being and security (Foucault, 1983: 215). Deviants on the bottom rungs of the urban society are dismissed as irredeemable; they cannot be rehabilitated and are seemingly unfit to be co-opted into serving the mainstream city’s value systems. It is this reasoning that sees the authorities violently punishing divergences from the norm by poorer residents, while readily harnessing certain violations by the higher income classes (cf. Schutz, 2004: 15) even in cases where the affluent have committed worse violations than the marginalized offenders.
Obviously, planners have no confidence in the possibility of offenders at the lower echelons of urban society being successfully redeemed and (re)integrated into mainstream urban society. In a way, this lack of trust in the poor tells a lot about the confidence of planners in their own ability to help these people ‘fit’. It appears planners are convinced that they cannot help the poorer offenders, hence the absence of ‘well-meaning use of gentler, less explicitly directive, pastoral controls’ (Caughlan, 2005: 16), when responding to violations by these people. This task is left to the sovereign and disciplinary powers exercised partly through the agency of the police, army and militia, who do not hesitate to resort to overt violence to restore ‘order’ and ‘sanity’ to the urban landscape.
The admission by planners on the use of ‘atrocity’ – the ‘organized destruction of infamy by omnipotence’ (Sparknotes, 2006) – is a telling revelation. It seems this spectacular display of force has a purpose (see Miller, 1990). Notably, Foucault (1995: 57) referred to a ‘punishing power’ in which ‘crime and punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity’. This is the ‘mechanism of power’ that Harare’s planning system, which operates in a system of authoritarian democracy, deploys on the poor. As they themselves admitted, planners have faith in ‘making an example of offenders’ in less privileged neighbourhoods. Explaining this ‘atrocity’ Foucault (1995: 58) says:
The aim was to make an example, not only by making people aware that the slightest offence was likely to be punished, but by arousing feelings of terror by the spectacle of power letting its anger fall upon the guilty person…Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because…they must be made to be afraid.
This reconstitution of ‘injured sovereignty’ (Foucault, 1995: 48) eerily resonates with the reasoning of planners on the use of ‘spectacles of terror’ (Wennerlind, 2004: 148). Apparently, as ‘respectable people’, offenders in more privileged contexts do not require the strong message that is sent by the ‘unleashing of force’ (Foucault, 1995: 57). They have the capacity to easily get the message, which is why, according to planners, their misdemeanours can be ‘harnessed for the good’.
About pastoral, power Foucault (1983: 214) observes that it ‘cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds…It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.’ This agrees with the planners’ explanation of their preferential treatment of wealthier offenders, which they claimed was based on their knowledge of ‘the thinking of people’. Because planners – who should be counted among the proliferating officials of pastoral power in the service of the modern state – cannot fathom the inside of the minds of residents in the high-density, low-income areas, they cannot risk exercising pastoral care on them. In contrast, planners claimed to know and understand the privileged. This enabled the planners – here acting in a role akin to church pastors – to guide the more privileged individuals towards certain acceptable and redeeming actions (cf. Tsolidis and Pollard, 2007: 52). Thus, the private developer and the wealthy townspeople who violated planning controls could be guided to atone for their mistakes through regularization and mortification in the form of appropriate penalties such as fines (cf. Foucault, 1988: 70). If they complied with the guidelines they would be rewarded through the legalization of the structures or activities.
Obviously, there is a fundamental problem with the way planners treat different offenders based on their socio-spatial and economic status. This denial of the right to the city amounts to an injustice and denial of citizenship based on status. It is an assault on informality, which, to all intents and purposes, is just about the only livelihood option for the majority in the urban areas of Zimbabwe. Indeed, just as is the case in the global South in general, in urban Zimbabwe, it can now be proclaimed that ‘informal is normal’ (Tannerfeldt and Ljung, 2006). Based on this analysis, it is somehow incomprehensible that the planning system in Harare persistently displays this dark side against the marginalized poor (Yiftachel, 2002). The marginalized poor in this paper occupy a space Yiftachel (2009: 89) terms “‘gray space” – positioned between the ‘whiteness’ of legality/approval/safety, and the “blackness” of eviction/destruction/death’. Those in the gray space are victims of a higher form of discrimination, what Yiftachel (2009: 94) insightfully refers to as ‘creeping apartheid’, which is ‘a consequence of deeply embedded institutional, material and spatial systems which accord unequal “packages” of rights and capabilities to the various groups’. Like all state-directed activities, planning is deeply implicated in this ‘urban apartheid’. This use of planning for political ends has been noted elsewhere, particularly in the work of Yiftachel in Israel (Yiftachel, 2002, 2009; Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2004). However, contrary to what Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2004: 217) say about the planning system in Israel strategically ‘allowing, condoning, and even facilitating urban informality’, Zimbabwe’s modernizing governance, with its emphasis on law and order, only condones infractions by the privileged affluent. In this way, redemption and ‘planning citizenship’ (Yiftachel, 2009: 96) is unjustly extended to the officially redeemable few.
Conclusion: time for reorientation?
Based on available evidence, it can be argued that in Harare, the unpopularity of planning and its association with the wealthy and powerful is not without basis. As noted above, the exercise of power will not always achieve the desired effects. This certainly applies to Harare, where illegal land use activities expanded dramatically from the late 1990s and continued to exist even after the supposedly mortal blow struck by ‘Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order’. That the areas dominated by the marginalized boast more of these activities than affluent areas, and that the fiercest confrontations between the system and offenders are experienced here (Kamete, 2008) seems to confirm the inefficacy of the exercise of sovereign and disciplinary power.
The study showed that in Harare, pastoral forms of control seem to be reserved for ‘better’ people, who in this case are the privileged in affluent parts of the city. The planners’ insistence that the gentler, less explicitly directive, pastoral controls cannot work on the people on the bottom rungs of society can easily be challenged. For example, the question can be asked about how it is that planners claim to know ‘the thinking’ of wealthier residents. Responding to this question, planners mentioned ‘reliable data’, ‘surveys’, ‘economic theory’, and ‘common sense’. This raises the serious question on whether these methods cannot work or do not apply to ‘marginalised populations [who] are primarily subjected to discipline and the threat of violence’ (Caughlan, 2005: 14). The professed inability of planners to ‘know’ the poorer urban dwellers is bewildering, considering that the majority of planners interviewed were middle-class professionals with roots in urban high-density suburbs or rural areas, both home to the marginalized. Most of these technocrats were born and/or raised, and/or were partly educated in these areas.
It can be argued that the differential treatment of people based on socio-economic status and location implies a distinction between ‘citizens’ and ‘subjects’ (see Mamdani, 1996). Privileged residents are citizens who can be afforded ‘certain obligations, responsibilities and freedoms (Popkewitz, 1997: 19), and are exempt from the whims of arbitrariness, and enjoy the full benefit of civil liberties even where they break the law. Indeed, they are citizens of ‘social worth and decision-making capacity’ (Stewart, 1995: 74). The less privileged are no more than subjects ‘with little or no voice in broader issues of government and governance’ (Kamete, 2006: 258). When they violate planning codes they are not afforded the same opportunities and liberties as wealthier offenders who benefit from pastoral controls.
There is something wrong with this differential treatment of offenders. In a democratic context where people are ‘expected “to be seen” and “to see” themselves as individuals who can act on their world’ (Popkewitz, 1997: 19), it is demeaning and dehumanising to deny individuals the chance of becoming citizens and basing that denial on some notions of their nature and amenability to certain interventions. By exposing only a small portion of society to forms of pastoral control, planning is in fact actively participating in this dehumanizing and retrogressive exercise. This amounts to discrimination and suggests that the vast majority of urban residents ‘are waste products of social control and are not worth integrating into the “normal” social order’ (Dumm, 1993: 188).
In view of the foregoing, one can argue that it behoves planning to extend the sophisticated modes of pastoral control to marginalized communities. Planning may need to consider the cautious appropriation of pastoral power – especially as it relates to the co-opting of individual and group agency – into its operations in less privileged contexts. This way, the less privileged can have access to the benedictions of pastoral control as they become integrated into the ‘normal’ urban order, will be gently guided when they deviate, and their efforts will be harnessed for the urban ‘good’ whose attainment should not necessarily entail the eradication of informality. It is only through such bold reorientation that meaningful engagement with people outside of the ‘formal urban order’ can take place, allowing the marginalized and excluded a chance to negotiate with the authorities, while simultaneously affording the authorities deeper insight into the spaces of the Other. Hopefully, such negotiation and insight might result in the technicist planning system realising that informality is not a problem, but rather a solution to the wider urban crisis. This might even result in the planning system finding ways to facilitate informality rather than eradicate it (cf. UN-Habitat, 2009).
It is through this bold action that planning can afford to globally extend such benedictions as regularization and legalization that are currently the preserve of the rich. For a profession that came into existence brandishing a progressive and reformist agenda (Yiftachel, 1998; 2002) this reorientation is not an option. Apart from being anachronistic, planning’s continued affinity to, and its unbending deployment of, sovereign and crude disciplinary power in its dealings with marginalized urban dwellers attempting to generate some form of livelihood on urban spaces, is counterproductive and ineffective. It only results in the persistence of unhelpful conflict on ‘small’ matters while neglecting real issues like social change, democracy and social justice.