Repurposing Racial Modernism: Specters of Planning's Past, a Contested Present, and Alternative Planning Futures

Abstract

South African racial modernist planning was undemocratic, acontextual, and top-down, with enduring consequences. This article argues that repurposing built spaces marred by racial modernism constitutes a planning “next practice”: incrementally, repurposing suggests what forms of spatial transformation are possible. Synthesizing primary interviews, archival data, in-situ analyses of urban space, and secondary sources, the article traces how bureaucrats and residents repurpose built sites in Mahikeng/Mmabatho, South Africa, which experienced extreme racial-modernist planning as a receiving site of forced relocation and capital of the apartheid-era Bophuthatswana “Bantustan.” The inquiry reveals planning as dynamic and open-ended, subject to recontextualization and alternative planning futures.