• 1 There is a huge literature on high modernist planning (famously, Ferguson, 1999; Scott, 1998) – n (...)
• 2 Again, the Brazilian comparison is important: Avritzer, 2009; Baiocchi, 2003; Baiocchi et al., 20 (...)

2To understand the political, intellectual and archival stakes, recall that in the 1950s and 1960s the US-backed apartheid government created a new set of modernising institutions and co-ordinated bureaucracies – bearing some resemblance to authoritarian regimes such as Brazil1 – which created a new sort of top-down technocratic expertise and archives of industrial and urban development (more widely, Cooper & Packard, 1998; Latham, 2000; Tomlinson, 2003). This meant that the struggle against apartheid was in part a struggle to create a new form of bottom-up knowledge and developmental expertise. Section A discusses the new-left urban planning NGOs that emerged in the 1980s that – looking to examples from Latin America2 – saw the struggle against apartheid as being a struggle to create a new form of self-help housing (autogestion), bottom-up urban-planning expertise and grassroots archives that would secure “the right to the city” to all South African citizens in a post-apartheid democracy (Harrison et al., 2007; Huchzermeyer, 2004; Fraser & Smit, 2007). At the same time, this article will note the institutional muscle of rival South African new-right policy-makers. Most important, the Urban Foundation: a corporate-sponsored not-for-profit – bearing some resemblance to the US foundations promoting freemarket liberalism (Dezalay & Garth, 2002; Parmar, 2012) – that in the crisis and collapse of apartheid saw an opportunity to promote a new set of urban development policies that, to their mind, promoted popular, participatory, liberal freedoms. Interestingly, both new-left and new-right NGOs were conscious that they were creating a new sort of development archives: pioneering participatory surveys and research; developing innovative planning methods; filing/archiving their records to strengthen/retain institutional knowledge; and later depositing their files in historical archives, confident that their work would interest future researchers!

• 3 There is both a radical (Bond, 2000b; Huchzermeyer, 2004; Murray, 2008) and a “pragmatic” (Habib (...)

3The denouement of these rival projects that sought to create new forms of participatory urban development expertise played out in the democratic transition of the 1990s and consolidation of the post-apartheid state in the 2000s. Section B discusses how, in the 1990s, with urban apartheid in ruins, both new-left and new-right activists entered government hoping to drive forward their visions of development inside the embryonic institutions of the nascent post-apartheid state. Intriguingly, the institutions of the democratic transition were fragmented, and these records have never been properly archived. Thus far, our picture of these years largely comes from disillusioned left-wing activists who have influentially argued that the new-right won the battle of ideas/expertise, and thus imposed a market-led programme of urban planning of South Africa that owed much to the neo-liberal Washington Consensus.3 All the same, this article notes that if we track down the “hidden archives” of this period then alternative trajectories emerge that counter this narrative of outright defeat. For the 1990s was also a moment when participatory doctrines of development planning – if stripped of socialist ideology – enjoyed great influence within the mainstream development thinking (Cornwall, 2011; Cornwall & Scoones, 2022; World Bank, 1996). Thus, radical urban planners enjoyed a certain amount of success implementing their projects in South African cities and great influence inside transnational institutions.

• 4 Although, these records were “thinned” in the 1990s during various processes of restructuring and (...)

7Like many US-sponsored authoritarian regimes across the Global South, in the 1950s and 1960s the apartheid government created a new set of modernising institutions to drive an authoritarian form of segregated, industrial development (Freund, 2018; Posel, 1991). In the cities of South Africa, the function of segregated urban planning and administration was gradually transferred from a fragmented set of city councils and native health boards to large Bantu Affairs Administration Boards. At the centre of the state, co-ordinated planning institutions such as the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and the Industrial Development Corporation. Behind this, a formidable assemblage of research and expertise – such as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (est. 1945) and the Human Sciences Research Council (est. 1968). These records of apartheid developmentalism are preserved in libraries and state archives;4 and they formed the subject of numerous studies written by young anti-apartheid activists who would often go on to play leading roles in the fields of post-apartheid urban planning and urban studies (Hindson, 1987; Mabin, 1992; more widely, Maylam, 1995). Perhaps the monograph to most single-mindedly pursue the connection between this politics of knowledge and the segregated urban form of apartheid is Jennifer Robinson’s study of Port Elizabeth, The Power of Apartheid: State, Power and Space in South African Cities (Oxford University Press, 1996) – a Foucauldian analysis of how state power created a spatially segregated apartheid city.

• 5 Pers. Comm., Phil Bonner, 2012.
• 6 Some of this South African grey literature was digitised by the Institute of Development Studies (...)

8Yet for all the efforts of apartheid urban planners to construct tightly planned, racially segregated industrial cities, by the early 1980s this project was rapidly unravelling, South Africa’s cities exploding outwards into a disaggregated, disjointed urban sprawl that remains to this day. For at much the same time as South Africa’s economic slowdown starved city governments of revenues that ended township house-building programmes, rural forced removals and the subsidence of urban influx controls brought successive waves of poor rural migrants onto the fringes of the cities. By 1991, the number of people living in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) conurbation had broadly doubled in two decades to about 4.9 million people – of which 377,000 lived in free-standing informal settlements and another 1.9 million lived in self-built backyard shacks inside the townships (Beavon, 1997; Sapire, 1992). When these urban crises exploded into township insurrections in the mid-1980s, the detailed archives of individual townships were often lost during the tumult of the decade – the records of the West Rand Administration Board apparently destroyed in an arson attack, for instance.5 Nonetheless, the skeleton of the central state remained coherent enough for these archives to be used by radical researchers analysing the collapse of apartheid.6 There was also a slew of research papers and surveys diagnosing the urban crisis produced by a mobilised set of research centres broadly sympathetic to the anti-apartheid movement, such as the University of Natal’s Centre for Applied Social Sciences. Doug Hindson, Mark Byerley and Mike Morris (1994) co-authored one seminal paper on the subject of “The Making, Disintegration and Remaking of the Apartheid City”. Explicit in their exploration of apartheid’s disintegration, was a search for post-apartheid city futures (Mabin & Smit, 1997).

• 7 Gibbs interview, John Spyropoulos, Johannesburg, 2 April 2011; Cape Historical Society, interview (...)

10Crucially, the nascent new-left NGOs were committed to decentralised institution building. South Africa is a large country; and so small knots of student activists, linked to individual universities and research centres, established separate NGOs in each of the major city regions. These NGOs described themselves as “service organisations”: middle class professionals providing support to township “community organisations” in the townships, who were on the frontlines of the struggle for the right to the city. The Built Environment Support Group (est. 1983) worked particularly in Durban and Pietermaritzburg; Afesis-Corplan (est. 1983) in East London and the Eastern Cape; Planact (est. 1985) was prominent in Johannesburg and across the PWV urban region and its hinterlands; the Development Action Group (est. 1986) in Cape Town. Typically, specific urban crises catalysed the formation of each NGO. The Development Action Group, for instance, formed at a time when students and intellectuals at the University of Cape Town were mobilising in solidarity to support the massive informal settlement at Crossroads that was threatened with demolition by apartheid bulldozers. It was out of such initial mobilisations that activists developed plans to upgrade and redevelop these informal settlements, working in conjunction with local community leaders and organisations that had led resistance to forced removals. In these grassroots-orientated, localised histories of activism, urban planning expertise envisioned as a decentralised set of networks, knowledge and archives.7

• 8 Profile of Josette Cole, Archive and Public Culture project, http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/apc/alumni/ (...)
• 9 SAHA, Planact archives, Box 16, file 15.2.14.

12Another attractive feature of these NGO archives – running counter to most historical research that sees the archives of development as monuments to forms of power and knowledge that dominate and exclude (Burton, 2005; Stoler, 2002) – was the commitment of many activists to record and to reflect on their experiences of urban planning. Here one should note the effluence of grey literature and research reports in the radical publishing presses and journals that served as sounding boards for fierce debates inside tight-knit activist circles. For one illustrative example of the thickness of these networks, take the publishing record of Josette Cole, a Cape Town activist who later served as director of the Development Action Group. Her half-dozen publications written about Crossroads and Khayalitsha include books and reports published by the Surplus People Project (1984), Ravan Press (1987), the Development Action Group (1995) and the Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (2007).8 Another example (a few years later), is the brutally honest 24-page internal report written by Julian Baskin analysing the collapse of the self-help housing project he had managed in Phola Park (This showcase housing project had collapsed because of murderous infighting inside the community development committee that had cost half-a-dozen lives). To circulate the analysis of this failure wider, he then published a summary for the liberal/left South African newspaper, The Weekly Mail. Such reflexivity a feature of the participatory planning ideologies of the decade.9

• 10 Gibbs interview, Duma Nkosi, Johannesburg, 7 August 2011 – a classic example of a civic activist (...)
• 11 Compare the rapid and relatively smooth racial transformation of the service planning NGOs, to th (...)

13All the same, one cannot escape the fact that these organisations and their archives were creations of tight-knit circles of middle class – and initially, mainly white – anti-apartheid activists. Foreign donor organisations were firmest (and least subtle) in their criticisms when they noted the irony that South African NGOs committed to bottom-up doctrines of development were, in a certain sense, replicating the educational/professional hierarchies of apartheid. One report of the Canadian International Development Research Centre asks: “[if] the most active professionals in these [service] organizations are white males, does this not create a situation in which poor black community organizations are ultimately dependent on the kinds of structures that they are attempting to change?” (IDRC, 1992). Such arguments require nuance. For one, many planning NGOs were committed to playing the role of “service organisations”: i.e. they did not initiate new projects, but rather worked in alliance with township organisations, sometimes developing strong ties to civic leaders who would take senior political and technocratic roles in the post-apartheid state.10 Moreover, by the end of the 1980s, the NGOs were beginning to hire a rising generation of black urban planners, who would quickly transform the demographic profile of these organisations after 1994.11 Yet for all that important relationships were extended across the wide anti-apartheid movement, suspicion of “white expertise” remained a residual feature in parts of the black led liberation movements (Mayekiso, 1996: 258).

• 12 Interview, Josette Cole. Gibbs interview, Cameron Brisbane, Pietermaritzburg, 19 September 2019.

14Despite these complexities, the idealistic commitment of the service organisation NGOs to grassroots action in the poorest townships of South Africa’s cities remains strong to this day. The leading four service organisations are still headquartered and working in their cities of origin. Many of the veterans who founded these NGOs remain closely bound into these networks of activism and affiliation.12 The thickness of these networks also means that this “heroic era” of anti-apartheid NGO activism remains an object of research, archiving and memory-making. The files of institutions (such as Planact) have been deposited with university archives specially set up to record the histories of the anti-apartheid movement, such as the South African Historical Archive. Then there are the digital archiving projects carried out by platforms such as Digital Images South Africa (DISA) and South African History Online (SAHO). In short, these archives of the service planning NGOs have been set into aspic (Archival Platform, 2018).

• 13 Pers. Comm., Alan Mabin, January 2024.

17Important too, the housing projects pioneered by the Urban Foundation significantly influenced and reshaped the field of South African urban policy during the fast-moving final years of apartheid. The burgeoning informal settlements were key. In the mid-1980s the apartheid government abandoned its failing policies of “influx control” to more subtle forms of restriction and control, through new policies of “orderly urbanisation” that allowed “controlled squatting” on designated greenfield sites on the urban edges. The Urban Foundation played a key role pioneering programmes in these informal settlements: running a series of “managed self-help schemes” across South Africa, from Carletonville (west of Johannesburg), to Durban, to Cape Town. The Urban Foundation also played a key role connecting the reformist elements of the apartheid government to the latest trends in international housing policy, promoted in forums such as UN-Habitat (est. 1976) and the Cities Alliance (est. 1989) at a time when the growth of cities across the Global South was becoming a key concern of transnational institutions and policymakers. South African radical scholars have convincingly shown in general terms how the free-market housing policies promoted by the World Bank in the mid-1980s were translated into South African government policy by the end of the decade (Huchzermeyer, 2004: 118-140 passim). Here, the Urban Foundation worked in tandem with the Development Bank of South Africa, a development finance institution established in 1983 by the apartheid government, which was modelled on the World Bank (Washington). Important too, the South African Housing Trust, a not-for-profit company established by the apartheid government in 1987 to (in its words) promote and facilitate the provision of affordable shelter and security of tenure to the “lower income earning communities of South Africa”. If we were to sift the international archives of development in detail, we might trace the webs of influence of key transnational policymakers – for instance, Alain Bertraud, the principal urban planner at the World Bank (1980-1999) who produced influential research that shaped the thinking of the Urban Foundation housing division.13

• 14 Today, Ramaphosa is one of South Africa’s richest businessmen.

18The complex relationship between the new-right Urban Foundation and the South African left had the angry complicity of a fraught marriage. Reading the grey literature of the leftist press, one’s first impression is one of frozen hostility. One book, published across the border in a newly independent socialist Zimbabwe, described main aim of the Urban Foundation, run by mining magnate Harry Oppenheimer, as “protecting the profit system… [by] making propaganda for capitalism” (Frederikse, 1986: 59). Yet other threads of affiliation emerge in the archives. For one, the Urban Foundation was a formidable network builder, reaching out beyond its core constituencies to bring self-proclaimed socialists such as Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers into its discussion forums (Butler, 2007: 100).14 Likewise, the Urban Foundation research division shaped the field of urban planning by reaching into its deep pockets to commission a huge volume of research reports from experts across the ideological spectrum. “In fact, reading through the list of contributors to the UF’s research effort is not dissimilar from scanning a listing of ’who’s who’ of the left”, teasingly argued one leftist town planner who had recently gone to work for the Urban Foundation (Smit, 1992: 39). Indeed, for all the sharp-edged debate between new-left activists and corporate South Africa, there was a remarkable mixing of personnel and project funding – particularly when it came to the informal settlement upgrading schemes that became an increasingly important part of the Urban Foundation’s work at the turn of the 1990s (Boaden & Taylor, 1996; Charlton, 2006). Perhaps the rival doctrines of the new-left (of “popular empowerment”) and the new-right (of “popular capitalism”) turned out to be more similar than polemicists on either side might have cared to admit.

• 15 Compare the official history of the IDT (Nuttall, 1997) to RW Johnson’s assessment – “Mamphela Ra (...)

19This decade of liberal housing policy reforms culminated with the apartheid government establishing the Independent Development Trust in 1990, a single technocratic grant-giving organisation that replaced the fragmented set of government agencies and institutions that had previously funded housing policy. Crucially, many of the funding mechanisms pursued by the IDT were based on the freemarket policies pioneered by the Urban Foundation and the Development Bank of South Africa (Huchzrmeyer, 2004: 148-162 passim). Tellingly too, the founding chairperson of the IDT was not a member of the white South African business establishment but rather Dr Mamphela Ramphele, the prominent Black Consciousness Movement veteran who had co-written Uprooting Poverty (Wilson & Ramphele, 1989).15 Within a decade, Dr Ramphele would be a director of the Anglo-American mining company and one of the four managing directors of the World Bank in Washington. Thus, the Urban Foundation’s doctrines became mainstream consensus for the South African liberation movements.

• 16 This comes out in the archives of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and Planact, (...)

22Many of the housing experts involved saw the national level negotiations as a straightforward ideological confrontation between new-left and new-right. Interestingly, accounts of this period describe the mobilisation of rival expertise and counter-knowledge. On the one side, there was a co-ordination and consolidation of ideas and initiatives within the broad anti-apartheid left. This flurry of initiatives included, ANC technocrats setting up a research unit at the University of the Western Cape and a new Institute for Local Government to train urban planners; the trade unions developing housing policies and proposals; the establishment the more tightly organised South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO); international donors flying into South Africa to discuss the latest urban planning ideas (IDRC, 1992).16 There was “an effervescence of intellectual power” within the progressive left, recalled one veteran involved in the negotiations.

• 17 Pers. Comm., Alan Mabin, January 2024.

23However, as time went on the bureaucratic expertise mobilised by the Urban Foundation and their allies gained the upper hand in the national negotiating forums (Mabin, 1995; also Bond, 2000a; Mayekiso, 1996). One representative of the new-left NGOs remembers the painful experience being out-argued and outmanoeuvred by new-right negotiators, who could back-up their arguments with a wealth of documented case-studies and expertise.17 Crucially, many of the detailed policies promoted by the Urban Foundation and its allies in the negotiations (e.g. Loan Guarantee Funds and Land Investment Trusts) had already been piloted – sometimes by the Urban Foundation in South Africa, and also by the World Bank in Brazil and India (Pugh, 1995; Niented & Van der Linden, 1988). Importantly too, the Urban Foundation had spent the 1980s building a broad coalition of South African construction companies and potential Black Economic Empowerment business partners, which would stand to benefit from free-market housing policies that offered construction contracts to private companies. Thus, the new-right prevailed in the negotiations and post-apartheid national housing policy developed a blueprint that owed much to the neoliberal principles of the Washington Consensus.

• 18 Gibbs interview, Andrew Feinstein, Johannesburg, 7 April 2011.

25All the same, there are major archival elisions this narrative of defeat told by the radical left (Bond, 2000b; Huchzermeyer, 2004; Mayekiso, 1996). For even if the central post-apartheid government pursued neoliberal housing policies, there were, nonetheless, huge opportunities for new-left urban planning experts to pursue individual innovative projects of participatory housing development at city-level during the 1990s democratic transition. Beneath the national level negotiations, there were numerous localised city-level negotiating forums that hammered out a new modus vivendi between once-segregated institutions of city level government. Important too, were a dozen-odd township reconstruction and development projects run through the ZAR 1.9 billion Special Presidential President Project (Napier & Rust, 2000).18 If one follows the activities of new-left housing experts at city-level and project level, one gains a very different view of the 1990s as a decade when South Africa’s cities gained international renown as “laboratories of innovation”.

• 19 Important too, the archives of the East Rand oral history projects carried out by Sally Sealy and (...)

26This different view of the democratic transition especially comes out in the archives associated with the Special Presidential Projects that document the innovative reconstruction and development projects of mid-1990s. Crucially, this was a period of flux. With apartheid in ruins and structures of city government in hiatus, there was a one-off opportunity for activists in South Africa’s NGOs to pioneer bricks-and-mortar policies that showcased their grassroots visions of development (Gibbs, 2023). The archival record of these Special Presidential Projects is patchy because these were ad hoc projects taking place semi-detached from established structures of governance, carried out by contracted consultants who never systematically archived their correspondence and files. One rare exceptional is the Katorus Special Presidential Project (KSPP). Here we are fortunate that one of the consultants working on the KSPP, Tanya Zack (2006), wrote an excellent PhD dissertation on the project and later was encouraged by historians working with the Wits History Workshop to deposit her doctoral interviews and her professional files in the university archives.19 More often, our records of the Special Presidential Projects initiatives come from the grey literature and project reports written by contracted NGOs and consultants, a well as the dissertations written by students from the architecture and urban planning departments of local universities. For example, the University of KwaZulu-Natal libraries hold a rich trove of pamphlets, reports and dissertations related to the ground-breaking project at Durban’s Cato Manor informal settlement (e.g. CMDA, 2000, 2003).

• 20 Most recently, Thuli Madonsela became the chair of the management board.

28Likewise, as several researchers have noted (Cabane, 2023; Gibbs, 2018), the grounded development expertise that anti-apartheid activists developed inside South Africa in the 1990s proved valuable to transnational organisations in the 2000s. One way to cut into these archives of development would be to follow the transnational connections generated by particular projects. The Durban/eThekwini Warwick Junction street market project, for instance, brought together a cluster of South African researchers who developed thick connections to international organisations such as the Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) network and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). Alternatively, we might map the transnational careers of the progressive South African housing experts who flew high in international policy making circles after 1994. Take the example of Dan Smit. A lecturer in Town Planning at the University of Natal in the 1980s, he ran one of the keynote post-apartheid township reconstruction projects in Durban in the 1990s, and then went on to work for the Dutch Government and the World Bank, taking projects in Dubai, Pakistan and Vietnam. We might also trace the many South African experts who took posts in international organisations, such as the Cities Alliance.20 Thus, the grassroots participative approaches developed by South African anti-apartheid NGOs became one of the “key words” of international policy-thinking in the 2000s.

• 21 Gibbs interviews: Glen Robbins, Durban, 23 August 2018; Mike Sutcliffe, Durban, 25 August 2019.

30Contextually, the rapid collapse of post-apartheid bureaucracies and archives is all the more surprising given that in the 1990s progressive policymakers had paid plenty of attention to the issue of constructing strong, sustainable units of post-apartheid municipal government capable of organising expertise and delivering urban development policies. Crucial here was the Municipal Demarcation Board (est. 1998), tasked with turning the fragmented, racially segregated, unequally funded institutions of apartheid local government into coherent, egalitarian post-apartheid institutions. As in Latin America, these strengthened new municipalities that governed post-apartheid cities were intended to become engines of redistribution. Thus, the strong fiscal and bureaucratic capacities that had constructed the segregated infrastructures of urban apartheid would be redirected towards building more inclusive, post-apartheid cities (Freund & Padayachee, 2002; Pillay et al., 2006). The career of Mike Sutcliffe, a founder of one of the radical NGOs in the 1980s and the head of the Municipal Demarcation Board in the 1990s, is illustrative of this moment when many progressive academics went to work in the corridors of post-apartheid city hall where the levers of power lay. As municipal manager of a dramatically expanded Durban city region (renamed eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality) in the 2000s, he orchestrated a huge RDP housing programme, building some 125,000 units in a decade. His tenure was marked by controversy. Nonetheless, Durban/eThekwini city-hall won international awards for the quality of the municipal engineering that underpinned the RDP housing projects during his time in office (Gibbs, 2023; Robbins, 2008).21

• 22 Pers. Comm. Mike Kirkwood, 2010.
• 23 Pers. Comm. Rasheed Sedat, January 2024.

31And yet there is the paradox that even the strongest units of post-apartheid city government that were reputed to have relatively strong bureaucratic systems (notably, Cape Town, Durban/eThekwini and Johannesburg) stopped sending their files to the provincial archival repositories. A first set of explanations focuses on the hiatus of the democratic transition during which many of the critical back-office filing/archiving systems fell into abeyance, especially as an older generation of experienced apartheid-era officials took early retirement. Nor did it help that few spheres of South African government made a successful transition from paper-based bureaucracy to computerised systems of records management.22 In short, city-hall bureaucracies kept producing of paperworks; but these documents were no longer systematically filed. This would help us to understand why many planning experts who worked in city halls in the 2000s compiled large personal archives (filing cabinets and USB drives full of annual reports, integrated development plans, policy papers, mayoral council minutes, etc.) but that very few of these files have made it into official archives.23 It suggests that city halls preserved institutional knowledge whilst this tight knit cohort of veteran policy experts remained in post; but as this generation retired, then files and expertise quickly dissipated.

• 24 The archives of Jeremy Baskin, Ros Gordon and Tanya Zack were deposited at the Wits Histrical Pap (...)
• 25 Extensive reporting includes: “Mashatile says ’there was no R1.3bn’ allocated to Alex Renewal Pro (...)

32A second set of explanations accounting for the fragmentation of the post-apartheid state and its archives focuses on South African municipalities adoption of methods of new public management in the early 2000s (Brunette et al., 2014). We see this particularly in the field of government housing policy where many township redevelopment projects were outsourced to South African urban policy consultants. Ironically, these sorts of public-private-partnerships – which according to new-right ideologues were supposed to insert more efficient private sector actors into the field of state action – often fractured expertise, institutions and files into a mass of uncoordinated activities. A key example comes from the ZAR 1.3 billion Alexandra [Township] Renewal Project that ran for much of the 2000s: an urban regeneration project involving national, provincial and city government, plus local community organisations and the private sector, which delivered a total of 12 housing projects across the township. In one sense, the detailed files of experienced team of consultants who led the project are a testimony to the depth of expertise that South Africa was able to bring to bear in the field of urban development.24 Yet the expertise and files of these expert consultants was never properly integrated into the various agencies of the South African state. Thus, the project – whose costs rapidly ballooned to ZAR 2.2 billion – quickly became a byword for uncontrolled spending. It turned out, for instance, that the provincial social development department did not have an accurate register of its offices – so the new buildings constructed by the Alexandra Renewal Project lay empty for years. Journalists reported allegations that a clique of ANC city-hall powerbrokers had corruptly allocated contracts to a tight group of politically connected construction firms. Indeed, a later report by the South African auditor general noted that it was impossible to conduct a forensic audit into alleged corruption because the Gauteng Department of Human Settlements had lost most of the project documentation.25 Such were the consequences of bureaucratic/archival fragmentation.

• 26 BESG retains an office in Msunduzi/Pietermaritzburg (BESG, 2018).
• 27 Gibbs interviews, Richard Pithouse, Johannesburg, 15 July 2023; S’bu Zikode, Durban, 25 July 2023 (...)

33Third, there were urban conurbations where clientelistic city-halls developed an adversarial relationship with independent urban planning expertise. Such tensions were particularly seen inside Durban/eThekwini in the late 2000s. One early sign was the demise of the new-left planning NGO the Built Environment Support Group, which was forced to close its offices when it was squeezed of government funding.26 Another telling moment was the violent reaction of city-hall politicians to the attempts of a local civic organisation, the Abahlali baseMjondolo Shack Dwellers Movement (AbM), to start a self-help housing project with national government funding. Self-help housing (autogestion) threatened powerful interests in city-hall and the local construction industry. The project was cancelled and activists were burnt out of their shacks by a vigilante group singing ANC songs. In the next decade, two-dozen AbM activists would be assassinated.27 Thus a city that had once enjoyed an international reputation as a laboratory of progressive urban policymaking became known for killing of civic activists (Gibbs, 2023).

• 28 Auditor General Standing Committee, 2023; Ledger & Rampedi, 2020.
• 29 An excellent studies of Port Elizabeth/Gqberha (Olver, 2017).

34New-left policymakers had hoped that their expertise and developmental knowledge nurtured inside their NGOs in the 1980s and 1990s would be successfully transplanted into the institutions of a strengthened post-apartheid city-halls committed to a progressive politics of participatory development. Sadly, the record of post-apartheid state in the 2000s was often the obverse. The situation only worsened in 2010s, as several large and medium-sized South African cities (notably Pretoria /Tshwane, Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha, and Pietermaritzburg/Msunduzi) suffered financial, infrastructural and political collapse (These trends are part of a more general collapse of local government administration and technocratic expertise, detailed in successive reports of the South African auditor general.)28 In consequence, many veteran policymakers now make careers as consultants, serving on the technocratic rescue teams that get sent in to rescue collapsed city-halls. This remarkable generation remain committed to their vocation as urban planners, even as their political commitments fade from view.29

• 30 Pers. Comm. Two anonymous librarians from university libraries.

35With the collapse of government administration, we are left with archival fragments. The new-left remains prominent insofar as post-apartheid South Africa still has a world class set of urban policymakers, attending conferences around the world and plugged into the latest transnational planning debates (e.g. Wood, 2015), generating a mass of grey literature, reports and dissertations, some of which is archived by the specialist librarians that remain in underfunded, increasingly demoralised university libraries.30 Yet when it comes to concrete city-hall policies and projects, the granular detail once characteristic of high-apartheid state institutions and late-apartheid NGOs has vanished from the official record. Our best hope is to obtain the personal archives of the individual consultants and experts, which is lodged on their computer hard-drives or stashed away in boxes/cartons in their attics, before it is thrown away.