Celebrating Vanessa Watson (1950 – 2021)

Tanja Winkler

Our much-loved friend, colleague and mentor, Professor Vanessa Watson, died on 15 September 2021 after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Vanessa was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer in October 2018. And after a first round of chemotherapy, the cancer was in remission for six months before it recurred. Regardless, Vanessa remained upbeat: committed to teaching, supervision and research endeavours; the various editorial boards on which she served; in addition to the numerous local and international collaborations she had forged. One of her many enduring legacies is the establishment, in 1999, of the Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS), which is a peer-to-peer organisation dedicated to the reform and promotion of planning education across the African continent. AAPS currently consists of 54 planning schools, and it has held four all-school conferences since Rockefeller Foundation funding was secured by Vanessa in 2008. Vanessa also forged collaborations—teaching and learning engagements—with Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN), amongst other organisations. The outpouring of innumerable tributes from current students and graduates is a testament to Vanessa’s inspired teaching and unmatched dedication to PhD and master’s dissertation supervision. Vanessa was also one of the founding members of a Cape Town-based community development NGO, the Development Action Group (DAG), which remains proactive in its fight for social transformation and a more equitable city—aspirations that Vanessa envisaged during its initial conceptualisation.

Vanessa joined the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1979 as a researcher for the Urban Problems Research Unit (UPRU), which was headed by Professors David Dewar and Roelof Uytenbogaart, and which took an oppositional position in relation to apartheid and its impact on social and spatial inequality and racial segregation in cities, towns and rural regions across South Africa. Between 1991—1996, she served as the director of UPRU. Based on the knowledge gained at UPRU, Vanessa, with support from the then Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Professor Cyril O’Connor, spearheaded a fundraising drive that created the platform for the establishment of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at UCT; which was formally founded in 2007. The ACC is an interdisciplinary research centre and teaching programme that focuses on quality scholarship regarding the dynamics of unsustainable urbanization processes in Africa. It remains a UCT Signature Theme, under the direction of Professor Edgar Pieterse; and it is institutionally located in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics (APG). Vanessa was also the convenor of the City and Regional Planning Programme in APG at UCT for many years. In this capacity—as was the case in all her other roles—she was an extraordinary leader: compassionate, caring and supportive with an unwavering commitment to excellence. Moreover, she was humble and always willing to listen and learn from others. The same may be said about her prodigious scholarship and research outputs that had—and will continue to have—an invaluable impact on planning theory and practice not only in South Africa and the global South-East, but well beyond these regions.

Vanessa leaves behind many who loved, valued, respected and admired her. Our heartfelt condolences go out to her twin sons, Daniel and Simon, their wives, Angie and Katy, Vanessa’s grandson, Matteo, her love and partner, Nicolas, and her students, colleagues and friends.

James Duminy

It is a challenge to write about Vanessa Watson as a supervisor because I was Vanessa’s colleague and friend long before I asked her to supervise my doctoral studies. Here I will try to highlight several aspects of Vanessa’s role and meaning as a supervisor, which extended far beyond what most would regard that role to be, and which are unavoidably inadequate in describing what she meant to us, her students.

Vanessa was selective when it came to taking on new students. For as long as I knew her, she never took on doctoral candidates who were fresh from master’s level study. She preferred working with those who had some experience in practice or academia – people who preferably had ‘got their shoes dirty’ in ‘the field’. Her preference for experience in her students probably reflected her own story as a mature doctoral candidate – she undertook and completed her PhD in the late 1990s, after she had occupied a senior role in the UPRU at UCT, having there also lectured in the postgraduate planning programme for some years, and having already produced seminal works on planning problems in Cape Town and South Africa. I remember her saying how she had kept the PhD as a ‘jewel’; one that she coveted and quietly polished over the years until she was finally ready to fill the forms and pay the fees necessary for registration. A jewel it was.

Our relationships with Vanessa were based on exchange rather than prescription. In her obituary, Alan Mabin, officially her doctoral supervisor at the University of the Witwatersrand, recalls being ‘honoured’ to take on this role, even if the ‘notion of “supervision” was a bit odd’ given her established influence on the field. Ultimately, ‘conveying a sense of the nature of a reciprocal relationship’ Vanessa described Alan as her ‘adviser’ in the book that was later published from the thesis. Alan’s description of a ‘reciprocal relationship’ resonated with me. Vanessa was certainly not the hierarchical, dictatorial and micromanaging supervisor. Our meetings (always arranged at my request) were an opportunity to share and talk through ideas. She loved to hear new ideas that we had come across. More than once she asked for details of a reference that I had found and about which I had raved. She would arrange for her ‘advisees’ to meet and talk with one another, sometimes herself included, when she spotted complementary strengths and weaknesses in our knowledge. Following graduation, Vanessa often collaborated with us in writing and project work. Like many of the greatest sport coaches, her attitude was always one of: what do you need to do, and what do you need to do it? It was our journey, our time, our responsibility – and she saw fit to nudge us in subtle ways as we explored our ideas and cases. Above all, she was an attentive and careful listener, which is an immensely valuable trait for all people, but particularly so for a supervisor.

Reflecting her expectations of intellectual and disciplinary maturity, Vanessa demanded much of her students. I first met her during my studies for the Master of Town and Regional Planning programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She was the external examiner for the programme in 2007. She travelled from Cape Town to Durban at the invitation of Nancy Odendaal, and I recall the meeting very well because she asked me a question for which I was wholly unprepared, and which quickly shattered my expectations of a simple box-ticking exercise. She asked, ‘from where does knowledge come?’ I remember the acute sense of panic, the blood shunted to my head and core, my voice quaking while mumbling through an answer along the lines of: ‘survey before plan’. Three years later I read Bent Flyvbjerg’s work on phronetic planning theory, of which Vanessa was an enthusiast, and finally understood what she meant by this question. In retrospect, this was an early indication that Vanessa always treated her students as intellectual equals, expecting us to engage with high-level critical questions and to manage criticisms in a manner as stoic as her own. We weren’t to be coddled through our education and training as planners.

Vanessa encouraged us to engage critically with her own ideas. I first moved to Cape Town, in early 2010, with the idea of starting my doctorate with Vanessa soon after completing a stint of postgraduate study in the United Kingdom. She was interested in my applying her concept of ‘conflicting rationalities’ to the politics of informal settlement upgrading in Cape Town. She was never satisfied with an idea on its own terms – she wanted to see how it landed in practice; how attuned it was to reality and whether it required retroductive revision. She was invariably willing to reflect critically on her conceptual proposals. I balked at the idea of digging into the messy politics of a city in which I had never spent any significant time. Some years later she took on Richard de Satgé as a doctoral student for exactly this project. This collaboration ultimately resulted in the co-authored book Urban Planning in the Global South: Conflicting Rationalities in Contested Urban Space.

Vanessa was incredibly supportive as an ‘advisor’, both procedurally and personally. She was absolutely ‘in your corner’ when it came to the inevitable bouts with university bureaucracy, sending off emails or making phone calls to shake any unsuspected holds, and taking the hit for missteps that were not entirely her own. More than that, she invested in us personally. Gilbert Siame, now teaching on the University of Zambia planning programme that Vanessa helped to establish, recalls that she knew the names of his partner and children, always asked after them, and even sent gifts to Lusaka. She hatched plans for our careers (not always with our knowledge!), hoped for appointments and promotions, helped us to find accommodation in Cape Town, and raved to others about our work (I know of at least two people whom she described as her ‘best PhD student ever’). She wanted to meet my parents at graduation. Whenever she embarked on one of her many trips, she trusted me to look after her beautifully designed house in Hout Bay, perched precipitously across from the dank Oranjekloof forest that sweeps down from the southern edges of Table Mountain. She was always careful to leave some cash to cover the added costs of petrol burnt in the extended commute to UCT. Vanessa embodied pastoral care.

Vanessa inspired with her work ethic. She read and commented on a full draft of my thesis in two days. Vanessa rose early and worked late. She showed how academic work can and does have meaning. She was fearless and strategic. She could read and command a room. She was a role model. And she was humble. When I finally asked if she would write a foreword for the monograph emerging from my doctorate, she replied: ‘It would be an honour’. As I now contemplate life without the mirthful banter and heart-skipping intellectual exchanges that we shared daily in the corridor linking our offices, without her generous mentorship and principled leadership, without the stoic consistency with which she listened to my half-baked ideas and rants, and without the chance to share another dry joke over a fynbos-fringed drink, hued with the swelling reds and gold of a South Atlantic sunset, I can only say that it is I who was, and remains, honoured.

Angelique Chettiparamb

As a planner educated in the global South and with practice experience in the global South, I had of course read Vanessa’s work and was acutely aware of her call for new planning theories that respond to the particular challenges that confront the global South. My experiences of the global South led me to recognize the empirical realities she outlined and I greatly empathized with the challenges for planning that she highlighted. In my mind, there was always a niggling uncertainty though as to whether these conditions warranted a new set of planning theories specific to the global South as she was advocating. I wondered whether the empirical situations that Vanessa highlighted pointed more to a challenge to theories in/of planning instead. Perhaps even the identification of aspects of planning, such as informality for instance, that might not have been readily noticed in the global North but is nevertheless present? Musing on the above, still unsure what to make of Vanessa’s call for new planning theories of the global South, I had the fortune of listening to her presentations and interacting with her. Though still riddled with doubt, I was nonetheless convinced that Vanessa was troubled by what she saw happening around her in Africa and was highly critical of some of the practices she saw rolling out in parts of Africa.

Vanessa was an Editor of this journal when I took over as Managing Editor in 2016. My interactions with Vanessa subsequently became more frequent and I started to get to know her as a person. Her quiet capability and her helpful reviews led me to invite her in July, 2018 to take over a specific responsibility as one of the Special Issue Editors for the journal. She readily agreed without hesitation. Her illness had not yet been diagnosed then and little did both of us know what was yet to come.

In January 2019, Vanessa wrote informing me of her illness and asked for a short break from refereeing until April. She was soon back and wholeheartedly put herself into the shaping of a special issue working with the Guest Editor Catherine Brinkley. We worked together for the better part of the year and the next, with frequent email exchanges and occasional Teams meetings so that she could acquaint herself with the technical aspects of the ScholarOne system. I was impressed by her professionalism and calmness as I saw the promptness with which she responded to pending actions and the diligence with which she handled all queries. Over the next almost two years, I fell back to assuming that all was going to be well with her.

By November 2020, in reply to one of my occasional emails inquiring into how she was, Vanessa mentioned depleting energy levels for the first time. She was clear however that she still wanted to continue to do the job. Though now alerted that all may not have been as well as I had assumed, I was still devastated when in April 2021, Vanessa wrote to me saying that she was resorting to chemotherapy again. Even then she was clear that she wanted to continue working, but promised to inform me if she felt she had to stop. By mid-July 2021, Vanessa finally informed me that she had to withdraw.

Vanessa was an exceptional individual with an admirable work-ethic, that I am honoured to have worked with. It could not have been easy for her to manage her everyday job, her numerous other interests and her personal life whilst battling cancer and still be so utterly reliable, prompt and diligent in her role as special issue editor. I am enormously grateful for her generosity in giving up the limited precious time that she knew she had, to this journal, Planning Theory. On behalf of the community of scholars that benefited from her guidance, I would like to express my sincere and heartfelt gratitude for her dedication.

Irrespective of whether one agreed with her, Vanessa has for sure, brought narratives and experiences from the global South to the mainstream in planning. She was quietly capable, her voice in planning theory was grounded, and her arguments were eminently influential. Without a doubt, her project opened up a new realm of debate and discussion in planning theory and to that extent she was an unequivocally successful planning theorist who will be sorely missed.