Governance Configurations of Growth Corridors in Chennai and Durban

Authors:
Shazade Jameson
Aurelie Varrel
Diane Scott
Catherine Sutherland

Author draft pre-print, January 2021

Note. This chapter is a draft author pre-print, part of a forthcoming edited volume on the
Chance2Sustain project, edited by Baud, I.S.A., Kennedy, L. and Jameson, S.

INTRODUCTION

Chennai (Tamil Nadu, India) and Durban (Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa) have both used
growth corridors to support their dominant political and economic roles within their state
or province and consolidate their position as regional hubs. These corridors are particular
types of space that are ‘produced’ in order to drive economic growth and urban
development. Giving expression to broader urban development strategies, they result
from the coming together of actor networks, discourses, knowledge and materialities
within a particular space. This chapter uses economic growth corridors as a lens to
explore the coming together of interconnections that produce the city, which are
interesting precisely because they are not representative of the entire city. More broadly,
we focus on the urban governance configurations of growth corridors in both Chennai
and Durban and compare the processes of megaproject development as a conceptual
entrypoint to reflect on the ways in which fast growing, port-industrial cities are being
(re-)invented. This chapter explores the very different configurations within the two cities
that are nonetheless producing broadly similar outcomes with similar genealogies.

Both Durban and Chennai are prominent port cities that act as economic hubs within their
region, drawing in global capital flows and competing at the global and national scales
for economic resources and investment. Though Durban plays a more pronounced role
than Chennai in the economic growth of the province and country, both cities have the
ambition to be growth engines by linking to the global economy through their transport,
logistics and communications-focused economies. Chennai is trying to expand its
economy, while Durban faces the challenge of maintaining a steady economic growth
with a growing population. Both municipalities, together with the private actors who have
invested in and contribute to their economies, actively market and brand their cities as
good investment opportunities through their global, regional and local connections. This
competitive and pro-growth approach shapes the outcomes of city development in both
Durban and Chennai.

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 Author draft pre-print, January 2021

This chapter uses the concept of an ​urban governance configuration​ as a heuristic device
to explore the similarities and differences between these two cities, which share the
challenge of enhancing their economic competitiveness while addressing social
inequalities and environmental risks. The ways in which multiple discourses around the
urban economy and society emerge and interrelate within the diverse actor networks and
the power relations between them shape the outcomes of the configuration. The context
of each city, including its history and geography (socio-economic, environmental and
political characteristics), as well as its physical materiality, provides the framework
within which development is produced, constraining or enabling actors and thus shaping
their discourses. This chapter explores urban governance configurations in both Durban
and Chennai to draw lessons on urban development in regional hubs in the global south.

Table 1: Comparing key characteristics of Chennai and Durban

Chennai Durban

National position 4​th​ largest metropolis in India 3​rd​ largest metropolitan municipality in South
Africa

Political role Political and administrative capital of Not an administrative capital, but eThekwini
Tamil Nadu state Municipality is the primary city in the
province

Economic contribution Contributes 20% to state/regional GDP Contributes 65.5% to the GDP of
KwaZulu-Natal and 10.7% to the GDP of
South Africa

Port Largest port of southern India Second-busiest port in Africa, 60% of South
African imports and exports

State/province Tamil Nadu is a highly industrialised KwaZulu-Natal is a largely rural province

and urbanised state, one of the most with high inequality and poverty
prosperous in India

State/province role in Tamil Nadu contributed 8% to India’s KwaZulu-Natal largest contributor (15.7%)
the nation GDP, the second largest after to the national economy (StatsSA, 2011).
Maharashtra
Sources: StatsSA, 2011; ​www.chennaiport.gov.in/​ 2017

In Chennai, the analytical focus is on the IT Corridor to the south of the city, an
agglomeration of IT parks and special economic zones. The corridor was developed
along a road that was upgraded to meet “world class standards” with an ‘exceptionalist’
developmental trajectory, i.e., outside existing planning frameworks. In Durban, we
analyze the Northern Urban Development Corridor (NUDC), which contains a number of
large scale development projects or mega-projects, including the King Shaka Airport and
Dube Trade port, the Umhlanga Gateway business, retail and entertainment hub, and
Cornubia, an emerging integrated mixed-use human settlements project.

There are some striking similarities between the two cases. Both growth corridors were
part of a process of reconverting cities with a port-industrial focus, using land value

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capture, a process that involves ‘unlocking’ the value of land by converting it from
agricultural to urban uses. In Chennai, the corridor is located on land classified as
agricultural/marshland and tsunami-prone; heavy industrial development was prohibited.
In Durban, the northern corridor consists of agricultural land, much of which was part of
large private land holdings used for sugarcane production, as well as other mixed land
uses. In both cases, the shift to urban development was accompanied by a modification of
administrative boundaries, integrating the corridors into the municipality. In Durban, the
NUDC developed along the N2 freeway, which separates the high-income coastal
corridor from the more mixed income inland zones. It resulted in a shift of the Urban
Development Line (UDL), which marks the boundary between what is conceived as the
urban and rural zones of the city (Sim et al, 2016). In Chennai the expansion of the city’s
boundaries in 2011 brought most of the IT corridor inside city limits.

However, these cases also demonstrate significant differences. In Durban, the Integrated
Development Plan (IDP), which is reviewed every five years, and its associated Spatial
Development Framework (SDF) provides the framework for more detailed local
development plans that are produced at the scale of local areas. The NUDC, which is a
conceptual strategic spatial plan for the north of the city, has informed the Northern
Spatial Development Plan and the local area plans in this region. In theory Plans and
Frameworks are produced by the municipality through interaction with citizens, but in
practice state-civil society engagement is limited in many municipalities in South Africa.
In Chennai the comprehensive regional plan mentions the IT Corridor, but the plan’s
influence is relatively limited. Like other Indian cities, Chennai lacks a coherent, stable
city vision and urban development takes place largely in an ad hoc manner. Finally, while
both South Africa and India project a strong societal discourse about democracy and
citizen participation, Durban and Chennai adopt a largely technical and managerial
approach to governance at the municipal level, which results in forms of participation that
appear more consultative, at best, than deliberative or substantive. However, the realities
on the ground in relation to governance differ significantly in the two cities, as we
explore below.

CHENNAI

Chennai developed on a low-lying, laguna type coastline that was amenable to port
activities: several historical port sites are located in what is today the northern part of the
city, and the shore was lined with fisher villages (​kuppam)​ . The city expanded towards
the west, on a marquetry of interconnected lakes and canals that turned this humid plain
into an agricultural hinterland. Our analysis of the urban configuration of Chennai
focuses mainly on the area to the south of Chennai which has experienced striking
changes in the last twenty years.​1​ This previously peripheral area, which extends for
approximately 30 kilometres to the south of the city, remained largely rural or peri-urban
until the 2000s and was officially incorporated into the municipal boundary only in 2011.
The northern part of the corridor consists of middle-class residential areas that developed
from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, on the southern bank of the Adyar River and along
the coast, in addition to some large public projects such as educational institutions and a
zoo​. ​It is a marshy area, with two large water bodies, the Pallikaranai Marshland and the

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Muttukadu laguna, and relatively poor soil. Thus it was sparsely populated until recently
and utilised for low profit agricultural activities or by small-scale units for light industrial
activities, as well as stone and sand quarries. As it is a tsunami-prone coastal area, the
development of heavy or polluting industrial activities was prohibited by law.
Significantly, large tracts of land in this area were under the jurisdiction of various state
and central government bodies, which contributed to a fragmented pattern of ownership
and land use regulation. For instance, the Slum Clearance Board of the Tamil Nadu
government set up two major resettlement colonies here, Kannagi Nagar and
Semmencheri (in 1989, then 2005), mainly for residents evicted from informal
settlements or displaced as a result of the 2004 tsunami. One of the city’s two
desalination plants was also located here in the early 2010s. The Old Mahabalipuram
Road, which was converted into the IT Corridor, was a secondary road that lost much of
its importance when the scenic East Coast Road was upgraded in the 1990s.

Hence, when two IT companies opened new premises in this area in 1998-1999,
unexpected development perspectives opened up for this neglected periphery. ​The state
government then took the lead in transforming this area by forming a public-private
partnership to upgrade the Old Mahabalipuram Road and offering incentives to IT
companies to locate within the emerging ‘cluster’. Many private sector companies
established themselves in the IT corridor following the improvements in infrastructure.
Figure 1 shows the IT corridor and the location of some main IT companies, as well as
the fieldwork sites of the Chance2Sustain project.

As a consequence, the South of Chennai is now increasingly characterised by the IT

Expressway megaproject, a project meant to connect and foster the agglomeration of IT
Parks and office buildings on both sides of the road. This illustrates the state
government’s will over the last two decades to position the city as a hub for regional
industrial development by attracting global and national capital and supporting private
actors and the historically embedded capital class. The Tamil Nadu government was
among the first states in India to introduce an IT policy in 1997. Since the late 1990s, IT
has had strong links with the growing Indian middle classes as it opened up a new route
to upward mobility for the educated, English-speaking social groups. Since the majority
of the activities labeled as IT that take place in Chennai are actually back office
operations (BPO) and customer service activities for US and multinational companies,
they are categorized as IT-Enabled Services rather than innovation activities per se. We
will use here the acronym IT-BPO to cover engineering and services.

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 Author draft pre-print, January 2021

Figure 1: Integrated map of Chennai IT Corridor (Chance2Sustain research project)

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Discourses

The Tamil Nadu government explicitly envisions developing Chennai, capital of the 6th
most populous state in the country, into a ‘megapolis’ as part of its vision for the state as
a whole (Vision Tamil Nadu 2023 2012: 61). The role of the city as a regional hub and
center of economic growth is emphasized, with relatively little attention to the social and
environmental dimensions that would characterize a more integrated approach to
sustainability​. ​In general, the fast expanding city lacks an overarching unifying
conception linking different projects and trends shaping the city’s future. Private
investors, parastatal agencies and the state government are by far the most influential
actors shaping the city’s future, based on a shared, but largely implicit, city vision. In this
context, there is little space for popular participation in the visioning of the city, which
appears to emerge in an ad hoc manner, driven mainly by investment opportunities and
infrastructure demands.

At the metropolitan level, the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA)’s

Second Master Plan is the main planning document for proposed future land use (2026
Vision). It emphasizes the need to​ ​empower Chennai to compete at the international
level, with a strong focus on export-oriented activities: IT-BPO and automobile
assembly. A major planning strategy since the early 2000s has been to push the
development of these sectors by creating dedicated ‘corridors’ of clustered activities
along upgraded roads. In effect, Chennai positions itself as a competitive city for
investment. The city and the IT corridor in particular have been a strong driver of the
globalization of the Indian economy and fit into the national discourse on technology-led
development.

The formulation of the Second Master Plan also suggests that planners in Chennai have
envisioned a future that explicitly engages with the ‘sustainable cities’ agenda, at least
rhetorically. However, when the discourse of sustainability is mobilized for action in the
city, it is done so in a disconnected, rather than integrated, manner. The state
government’s focus on corridors, narrow stretches of well-equipped urban spaces, lends
support to the hypothesis of fragmented city development, in which economic gains arise
from large-scale infrastructure investments located in particular spaces.​ ​Strategic
planning, including for sustainability, is left to the state government, mainly through its
parastatal agencies. In contrast, the Chennai municipal administration works mainly in a
'managerial' mode, to borrow Harvey’s term (1989), both in discourse and practice,
focusing on the provision of basic urban services.

Our research suggests that one reason for the promotion of transport infrastructure
megaprojects in Chennai is the visibility and appeal to ‘modernisation’ encapsulated in
such projects. Often such projects are associated with a prominent politician, who thereby
proves his/her commitment to Chennai’s development with a ‘pet project’. However,
since these projects are dependent on the ruling party with five year mandates, they can
be shelved after elections, in a context where two major regional parties have alternately
ruled the State over the last four decades. This electoral calendar does not fit well with

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the longer timeframe required for implementing large-scale projects with long-term
visions.

The ‘world city’ vision for Chennai shapes discursive dynamics around land use and
conversion. In a city with the highest population density in India (Census 2011), market
pressures and misplaced recommendations have pushed for filling in floodplains and
lakebeds to create more land for settlements (Coehlo and Raman 2013). These
developments have exacerbated environmental risks. They are normatively labeled either
as an investment for ‘modernisation’, such as the case of IT Corridor largely built on
fragile marshlands, or as unwanted ‘encroachments’, such as the substandard settlements
built on river- and canal- banks. In the latter case, there has been a shift from in-situ
rehabilitation of these encroachments to resettlement towards the city periphery (Alberts,
2016). There is often a complex and nuanced interplay between legal and illegal
encroachment, and the discourse around encroachments is used strategically to position
the city as ‘slum-free’ and promote ecological values by clearing settlements from
floodplains (see Coehlo and Raman 2013; Jameson 2013).

Addressing social inequalities does not figure in the city Master Plan, whose objectives
are more narrowly limited to spatial planning. Rather it is the mandate of the Tamil Nadu
Slum Clearance Board (since 1975), and as such inequality is considered to be the
responsibility of the state government. Census data indicates that 19% of the population
of Chennai Municipal Corporation lived in so-called ‘slums’ in 2001 and 28.5% in 2011.
However, the definition of a slum used by the Census of India applies to heterogeneous
types of settlements, and excludes small slum clusters with less than 300 people, which
are likely to be the most precarious and underserved. Therefore, this percentage does not
adequately capture the extent of housing poverty.

To reach the goals outlined in the Vision Plan, the introduction of ICT-GIS based
knowledge management is seen as a major instrument. Generally, discourses related to
ICT-GIS-based knowledge management systems in India focus on the goal of improving
the efficiency and effectiveness of governmental organizations. In Chennai, digitization
and geo-referencing introduced in governmental processes were presented as supportive
of these goals. Embedded in these discourses are issues of better monitoring of basic
service provision and surveillance against tax avoidance and illicit tapping of municipal
services. This dominant discourse also values engineering-based, scientific knowledge as
the most appropriate for city development strategies, rather than societal- or
community-based knowledge. This implies that decision-makers are not open to
non-technocratic, alternative discourses, particularly those centering on social
inequalities, environmental issues and sustainable use of natural resources. The private
real estate sector is favorable to expanding digital spatialized knowledge for establishing
land values in various areas of Chennai, data that they have collected and analyzed
themselves for their own strategic investments (Rouanet, 2016).

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Actor networks

The Chennai Municipal Corporation (CMC) is the local governing body of the city,
which is largely responsible for providing services such as education, health, and part of
infrastructure maintenance. The Chennai Metropolitan Area (CMA) is the fourth largest
in India and encompasses the CMC as well as surrounding areas. The Chennai
Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) is the planning agency responsible for
development in the CMA area, which includes drafting a Master Plan to integrate and
highlight development priorities. As the CMDA does not have an elected board,
state-level politicians and civil servants consider the Metropolitan area to be under their
jurisdiction. Partly as a consequence of these overlapping jurisdictions, Chennai is
managed in a technocratic manner.

The CMC area was expanded in 2011, merging 42 local bodies, including nine
municipalities, eight town panchayats and 25 village panchayats. It is has 200 wards,
grouped into 15 zones with their ward committees. The main objectives of this expansion
were to accommodate the growing population, provide better services to peripheral areas,
and include the IT Corridor within city limits. The IT Corridor now falls largely under
CMC jurisdiction, to which it pays taxes and receives basic services. The expansion took
place during an election year and had a strong political effect in the local bodies
surrounding Chennai. The municipal restructuring process increased the size of the
political constituencies and diluted democratic representation. Newly merged areas did
not necessarily benefit; it left little scope for local political participation in
budget-making processes, their fiscal power was restricted in that there is no allowance
for spatial competition, and pre-existing participatory community funding schemes were
no longer available (Karuppusamy & Carr: 2012).

In India, municipal administration is controlled by state governments, who legislate on

the functions and finances of urban local bodies. The 74th Constitutional Amendment,
ratified in 1992, whose aim was to empower local governments, outlines 18 functions (in
the 12th Schedule). Of these, only 12 were transferred to the CMC in Chennai, whilst
others were given to parastatal companies. As indicated above, state-level authorities
dominate urban actor networks, creating a regional elite connected with business,
primarily focused on developing Chennai as a regional hub. State-level organizations
provide much of the large-scale infrastructure and services, such as Infrastructure
Development Corporations (SIPCOT, ELCOT), Tamil Nadu Electricity Board, the Public
Works Department and the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board. At the same time, the
national government exerts influence through national programmes (see below), and
through connections with regional political elites. It is significant, for instance, that the
Union Ministers for Communication and Information Technology were politicians from
Tamil Nadu, from 2004 until 2010.

The 74th Amendment held out the promise for improvement in fiscal federalism, through
the creation of State Finance Commissions. This body makes recommendations to the

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State Government for sharing fiscal revenue with local governments. In addition to these
funds, loans and grants are given to the CMC based on central government
recommendations and for implementing Central government schemes, such as for
poverty alleviation and the National Urban Renewal Mission to major cities. Within
Tamil Nadu, Chennai received around 21% of centrally sponsored project funds, and
19% of State-sponsored funds for various infrastructure projects during 2009-10.
Chennai’s dependence on funding streams from regional and central levels indicates the
limited degree of decentralization that has actually taken place in favour of local
government; most functions and finances in the city are connected to the State
government.

Frequent alternation between the two main political parties, and the practice of
transferring high-ranking officers, (belonging to the Indian Administrative Service), who
are perceived as ‘uncooperative’, has resulted in some instability in the bureaucracy. This
has negative implications for maintaining coherent management of large-scale projects,
e.g., mass transit, and may explain the inconsistencies that have been observed, also with
regard to social and environmental issues. The dominant presence of the State
government in local service delivery has been reinforced by new parastatal agencies and
special purpose vehicles, which can bypass existing agencies. Examples include the
Tamil Nadu Road Development Corporation (TNRDC), in charge of building the IT
Expressway, and the Chennai Rivers Restoration Trust, which bypasses the Chennai
Metropolitan Water Sanitation and Sewage Board, the Slum Clearance Board and the
Public Works Department.

In Tamil Nadu the business community appears to navigate both proximity and distance
to authorities. Based on our fieldwork, the private sector claims that it does not have
access to the government but there is evidence to suggest a degree of proximity between
these two broad categories of actors. Economic and political elites interact in various
ways, especially the established capitalist families who dominate a significant part of the
regional economy . New capital seems keener on interacting with the bureaucrats than
with politicians. Politicians are often also themselves involved in business, and the media
often reports on links between money laundering, land speculation and party financing.
Still we cannot talk of a growth coalition in the narrow sense of the term (Molotch,
Logan ​1987​), as there is not a stable partnership pursuing clear, shared purposes. In the
IT Corridor, for instance, the relations between state government, via the TNRDC, and
the IT sector, including its lobby Nasscom, have been irregular and often short-lived,
even though both sides express the desire to collaborate. For instance, a one-time
initiative, the refurbishing of a commuter rail station initiated by some IT companies, did
improve public transport in the corridor. On the whole though, the government of Tamil
Nadu has been in the driver’s seat, specifically the TNRDC, but also the various
industrial infrastructure agencies that manage the large Special Economic Zones in the
corridor. They have created opportunities for the private sector, transforming the area into
an export-oriented, knowledge-based platform, but at the same time keeping them
officially at arm’s length, which corresponds to the political trajectory of Tamil Nadu and
its ruling parties. Nonetheless, it would appear that the private sector has, in the medium
term, managed to effectively develop.

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Materialities

The IT Corridor is interactively shaped by the physical nature of the land on which it was
built. ​Chennai has significant water vulnerabilities, experiencing both floods and
droughts. For example, in 2003, the Northeastern monsoon failed and Chennai
experienced an acute drought. Two years later, unprecedented flooding took place during
the monsoons, and in November-December 2015, unexpected torrential rainfalls
triggered massive floods and large parts of Chennai, including the IT Corridor were
submerged. According to many observers, the catastrophe was a consequence of years of
irresponsible building and lack of rapid response to crisis management. The alternating
cycles of flood and drought complicate long-term water management in a city like
Chennai as state institutions prepare for the two extreme weather scenarios year after
year.

The city has an extensive network of irrigation tanks and lakes, which serve to harvest
water and prevent flooding. These, as well as patches of marshy land, have been blocked,
dried out, and reclaimed, restricting the flow of water to the sea and increasing flood risk
in the flat coastal plain upon which the city lies. This adds to the vulnerabilities linked to
rising sea levels and tsunamis (Coelho and Raman, 2013). The IT Corridor in particular
has been built on fragile wetlands and sandwiched between water bodies such as the
Pallikaranai Marshland and Muttukadu Laguna. This location contributes to significant
flood risk, but is also what enabled the development of the IT corridor in the first place,
as the undeveloped land was available to be reclaimed. Marshlands as such are not
recognized in the land use codes and hold the label of ‘wastelands’, imposed by the
British administrators, apparently without understanding their seasonal nature as flood
sinks (Vencatesan, 2006). The Pallikaranai Marsh also houses both the largest garbage
dump in the city, as well as a nature reserve for migratory birds, directly adjacent to the
IT Corridor. This coming together of conflicting land uses further underscores the
fragmented development of the city.

As well as assembling flood risks, the IT Corridor, and the modernist vision it promotes,
has direct and indirect consequences on substandard settlements throughout the city.
Firstly, it is home to several large resettlement colonies, which predate the corridor.
Secondly, it presents new threats of demolition for the squatter settlements along the
Buckingham Canal and other riverbanks, as these sites have potential for new
developments. These include beautification plans, reviving the Canal as a navigation
channel, and the building of retaining walls for flood control. The key aim of these plans
may in fact be to prevent new encroachments or sub-standard settlements within the
corridor. In March 2012, the State government announced the removal of all squatter
settlements located along waterways, a position reiterated after the December 2015
floods, in light of the vulnerability of these settlements to extreme weather events.

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The IT Corridor also shapes water vulnerabilities in the rest of the city by increasing
demand for and diverting water from the city’s meagre supply. In effect, the criteria for
‘world class’ status require the IT Corridor to have a high level of services. For this
purpose, the Government of Tamil Nadu mandated Metrowater to implement a special ad
hoc project for providing uninterrupted ‘24/7’ water supply and efficient sewerage
infrastructure to the IT Corridor. This highlights the exceptionalist nature of the corridor,
contrasting sharply with the rest of the city having the lowest per capita availability of
water among large cities in India, i.e., 108 litres per capita per day. However, this average
supply figure says nothing about the wide differentials in access to water supply between
zones and income groups. Most households in Chennai are limited to 3-4 hours of water a
day and must diversify their sources, underscoring severe inequalities in access to water
prevailing in the metropolitan area.

The failure of the public utility to supply sufficient water quantities to the IT Corridor
and Chennai more broadly explains why the private sector has emerged as a critical actor
in water governance. Private companies supply water through tankers to Chennai and its
surroundings: Tamil Nadu counts 400 licensed companies, (50% of the total in India);
220 operate in and around Chennai. During the severe water crisis in 2003-2004, the
piped supply for the entire city virtually shut down for a 12-month period. Consumers
became dependent on private tanker suppliers trucking in groundwater from peri-urban
areas. Packaged water vendors have also multiplied. As a result, households in the lowest
income groups that are not connected or with only a few hours of water allowance,
consume the lowest quantities of water, at the highest price per litre.​2

Processes

Spatial digital knowledge management was the core analytical framework used in the
Chance2Sustain project. The IT Corridor was significantly shaped by the way that
knowledge is built up and shared in the governance of public-private development in
Chennai. Spatial knowledge management is linked strongly to the main mandates of
organizations, with an emphasis on administrative classifications and information. This
type of technical organisational knowledge remains confined within organisations in
Chennai, with little scope for knowledge exchange across organisations operating within
the city area.

The collaboration between the CMDA and the CMC does not work smoothly. The CMC
has limited interest in participating in discussions on preparing the Master Plan, as its
mandate focuses more on daily operation and maintenance of basic services and less on
future visioning. Property information is not shared by the CMC with the CMDA, which
has to rely on cadastral information for its work. While the CMC relies on the support of
the Survey of India in terms of base maps, the CMDA develops everything in-house,
including its own GIS section. The spatial and thematic segmentation of the available
maps and databases of Chennai’s development reveals the very limited coordination
between actors across sectors and over time, rather than an integrated planning vision and
process (Jameson and Baud 2016).

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Research indicated a realization within the CMDA of the importance of moving towards
a common database with geo-referencing and common base maps, but the organisational
networks, competencies and mandates still form barriers. The unwillingness to share
knowledge is a wider problem in the Indian context (see Richter 2011). It creates parallel
networks of knowledge production around a particular topic, with limited sharing of
knowledge across institutional or epistemic boundaries. One compelling example is
flooding, where the CMC and PWD are mandated to deal with long term flood risk
through the storm water drain network, or flood relief through emergency services. The
stormwater drain network is an expert feat of civil engineering; however, it only
addresses heavy storm flows and drains are often clogged with sewage and garbage. Due
to the particular geography of Chennai on a flat coastal plain with slow flow of water
across the landscape, large scale rainwater harvesting which collects water in sinks in the
ground is also necessary to prevent flooding whilst simultaneously combating water
scarcity. The latter approach is excluded from an integrated flood management strategy
because government organization mandates are limited to specific sectors, making it
difficult to coordinate between approaches to one issue (Jameson and Baud 2016).

A complementary network of urban planners and social scientists-cum-activists works on

these issues, but their knowledge and inputs are largely disregarded by the engineers in
charge, who are guided by their technocratic ethos. An example illustrates this: after the
decision to build the IT corridor, an EIA was conducted by a consultant close to the SPV;
an alternative EIA ordered and supported by this activist network as a counter-strategy,
underlining the vulnerabilities of this area, was shelved after a direct intervention of the
Government of Tamil Nadu. Also, because the large-scale system of rainwater harvesting
through connected lakes and tanks is considered ancient, outdated, primarily developed
for irrigation and thus not relevant for the city, the potential for integrated flood
management including the complementary infrastructure network is limited (Jameson and
Baud 2016).

One possible tool for integrating the urban vision is to strengthen the mandate of the
CMDA and enforcing the Second Master Plan.​ H ​ owever, the Master Plan remains largely
an administrative tool that must accommodate projects and modifications undertaken
over time. For instance, the current mass transportation plan has largely evolved
independently of the Master Plan. Transport related megaprojects, such as the MRTS-city
train, the future metro and the projected monorail have all been initiated and developed
by the Government of Tamil Nadu. The decision-making processes with regard to these
projects have been disconnected from the planning exercise, in what is termed as
‘exceptional planning’. Such high profile projects are strongly linked to the ruling
political parties and turn out to be ad hoc projects, incorporated a posteriori into existing
planning and vision documents.

The IT Corridor exemplifies such a process. The term “IT Corridor” was borrowed from
a project developed for Bangalore by a Singaporean urban planning consultant in the late
1990s. The transposition of that model to Chennai ​by and large explains the decision in
2003 to upgrade the existing Old Mahabalipuram Road into an IT Expressway (ITEL).

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The aim was to improve connectivity to the rest of the city as well as to the airport
located a few kilometers to the west. The implementation of the megaproject was given
to TNRDC, a parastatal agency, which formed a Special Purpose Vehicle with a private
company. Other parastatal agencies were put in charge of providing high quality services
along the road (power, water). Special provisions and advantages were given by the State
government to private IT companies locating along the expressway (tax incentives, more
flexible building rules, assurances of uninterrupted water and electricity, etc.) and three
large public IT SEZ were also created along the road by other public corporations on
state-owned land. The construction of the expressway was a long journey as the initial
private contractor failed to deliver in spite of incurring huge costs, so that the
management of TNRDC itself was weakened and had to be supported by the State
government in 2006. The 20-km expressway was finally completed only in 2012. Hence
the megaproject turns out to be a largely public initiative, which both anticipated the
needs of an emerging economic sector and expressed a strategy to attract investments to a
city periphery not economically integrated previously. The project created opportunities
for other sectors, most notably the real estate and construction industries, which were
formally invited to invest in the area in the mid-2000s.

Focusing on the South of Chennai as a fragmented space largely shaped by technocratic

institutional arrangements also explains why there was a marked absence of political and
social mobilisation in a city (and region) characterized by competitive politics. There has
been little opposition to this megaproject and its consequences, which is consistent to
some earlier analysis on the lack of resistance faced by SEZ projects in Tamil Nadu
(Vijayabaskar, 2010). In itself the upgrading of a road sounds like a banal,
development-oriented project in the classical repertoire of “development” projects. The
design involved some provisions to prevent conflicts: rebuilding displaced temples and
shrines, creating two covered markets for displaced roadside shopkeepers. The size and
scale of the project itself (more than 20 km length) also diluted resistance across different
constituencies and very diverse socio-economic settings, turning it into mere local
scattered frustrations. The vested interests many local politicians had in the land market
also deprived any nascent opposition of leadership, and promises of job creation also
calmed down opposition. Although there were critiques, especially among environmental
activists, these were mainly small groups of middle-class, educated persons, who lived in
the northern, more established residential part of the corridor. Their interests and claims
turned out to be very different from those of the population in the southern part of the
area, comprised mostly of semi-rural, lower middle-class and working class,
less-educated people.

Generally, our research indicated that social mobilization focuses on the immediate needs
of better amenities; one example of a form of opposition is in Kannagi Nagar resettlement
colony where residents formed a Welfare Association, and with the strategic support of a
rights-focused NGO, organised a media-supported postcard campaign demanding
adequate basic amenities and public services. The state government responded by
organizing a grievance day attended by several ministers as well as establishing a police
station, though recurring water supply and drainage issues were only temporarily solved
(Cummings 2012).​3 ​On the whole, mobilization has proven to be difficult in this

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resettlement colony due to the lack of solidarity among residents stemming from the
settlement’s diversity in population, access to government schemes, and quality of
services. These divisions are often inadvertently deepened by NGOs working to provide
basic services to small sections of the settlement without coordinating with one another
(Dupont et al. 2015).

Overall, the planning and implementation process of slum resettlements in millennial

Chennai is state-led, in ways that express the government’s own interests, reflecting
asymmetrical power relations, and following a pro-growth rather than a pro-poor agenda.
The choice of development model and resettlement for each sub-standard settlement
location surveyed is based on analyses done by private consultants and comments from
the review committee of TNSCB; community-based types of knowledge from lived
experience of social groups do not seem to be recognized in government organizations,
and existing guidelines and rules cannot accommodate them.​4

Outcomes

The outcome examined here concerns the IT corridor, which emerged as a result of a
particular configuration of actors, discourses, policies and material processes. The urban
governance configuration of Southern Chennai is strongly characterized by regional
state-led development interacting with the regional and international private sector, and
largely excluding citizen participation from decision-making processes. The focus on
economic growth marginalized integration of social and environmental considerations in
existing discourses.

Digital spatial knowledge management was part of the world city vision, mainly focused
on efficient and effective local government administration – effective property taxes, and
better insight into land use for the Master Plan. However, existing technical knowledge in
local and state government departments remained in silos, and strong barriers remain for
knowledge sharing across departments and government levels to come to more integrated
development and policy implementation. The economic internationalization strategy,
based on export-led growth and integration in global production chains, also appeared to
ignore completely other types of knowledge, including inputs on the environment.

Decision-making and strategy processes remain based on the complex interplay between
the regional state and private sector, with leading politicians taking on ‘pet projects’ to
spearhead. The reciprocal mistrust between bureaucrats and engineers on the one hand,
politicians on the other, and social mobilizers in the third place, largely hinders
collaborative efforts. The effects have been that (1) efficient implementation of upgraded
infrastructure remains limited and (2) spatial inequalities in access to water and housing
are exacerbated, and (3) the systemic paradigmatic shifts needed to integrate issues of
water scarcity and flooding to prevent catastrophes and improve groundwater water
levels also remain blocked.

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Still, on the economic front the IT corridor was meant to generate jobs and growth, and it
has done so; the daily presence of 200,000 IT employees in the area, plus the revamping
of a formerly semi-rural fringe, has triggered considerable indirect employment
opportunities in retail, support services and transport. There has also been a boom in the
housing sector, resulting in changing urban landscapes, including residential complexes
for the middle-class, multi-storey houses and hostels for workers, and slum relocation
complexes for inner-city slum dwellers and families affected by floods . It is important to
note that informality is central to the development of this area, with a high number of
jobs indirectly serving the development of the IT sector (private buses’ and vehicles’
drivers ferrying the IT employees, staff of the mushrooming shops, construction workers)
whose presence and needs (e.g. housing needs) were not taken into consideration when
the area was revamped (Vijaybaskar, 2016). Meanwhile, water and power provision have
not kept pace with the remarkable increase of daily commuters and new residents,
contrary to initial projections of the IT Expressway mega-project. The situation has
deteriorated to the point where private sector provision is substituting for public sector
provision; for instance companies have to run mostly on water tankers and
uninterruptible power supply generators, which may cause the cluster to lose its
competitive edge over other emerging locations in Chennai or elsewhere in India.

In terms of social impacts, the development of this Corridor has been associated with
slum evictions and relocation from the city as a result of rising land values and
concomitant land speculation, the extension of the MRTS, and various ‘beautification’
operations, especially along the Buckingham Canal that flows parallel to the IT Corridor.
Over the years, the fragmented character of planning and governance has become
obvious as the large resettlement colonies built for evicted slum families since the 1990s
are located on the eastern and western fringes of the zone; they appear incongruous with
plans for high-end development of the area, such as upscale real estate developments
mushrooming all around. Not only have many people been priced out of the area, the
Corridor has been criticized for not creating enough jobs for the local unskilled
workforce that was displaced from their previous agricultural livelihoods.

All in all, the IT Corridor has significantly reshaped the spatial geography of this part of
the city in a ‘technoburb’ (i.e., technological suburb) fashion. In some respects, one may
consider also the IT Corridor as merely the latest avatar of planning Chennai via enclaves
and new townships, which goes a long way back. In more recent times, other instances of
this pattern of urban development can be found, led by technocratic actors to cater to the
needs of changing economic paradigms in the south-western part of Chennai, along the
designated “automotive corridor” (National Highway 45), Maraimalai Nagar, an
industrial township created in the mid-1990s, and the more recent Mahindra World City.
This concludes the analysis of the growth corridor governance configuration in Chennai,
and we will now turn to Durban.

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DURBAN

Durban, or its administrative entity eThekwini Municipality, is a large fast growing

metropolitan city located within the province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), a predominantly
rural province of South Africa. Durban has a population of 3.66 million people and has
high levels of poverty and unemployment, with 42% of individuals being considered poor
(eThekwini Municipality, 2016/2017). The 2011 Census revealed that poor and low
skilled people continue to migrate to Durban, and highly educated and skilled individuals
are moving away (Posel, 2015). This is a major challenge as a small percentage of
Durban’s population generates the revenue base for the city which has to support a large,
growing young urban population with high levels of poverty and low levels of education.

The post-apartheid restructuring of urban space has taken on different forms in Durban
over the past 25 years as city authorities have attempted to promote economic growth,
address poverty, ensure redistribution and re-integrate the city. ​The slow growth of the
economy, as a result of the decline in the manufacturing and textile industries in the
1990s, has been addressed through several major catalytic projects, which have led to
major growth in the construction industry (Hannan and Sutherland, 2014; eThekwini
Municipality, 2014/2015). ​The legacy of apartheid and the new pro-growth and
development trajectory of the municipality, focusing on urban entrepreneurialism and
large-scale projects, has resulted in a spatially fragmented city.

Durban is a sprawling city with an urban core and a large rural periphery (Sim et al,
2016). The spatial form of the city was significantly re-ordered by the national Municipal
Demarcation process in 2000, which increased the city’s land area by 68%. Almost half
of this additional land was rural (45%). A large proportion of the rural areas in the city
are under dual governance, administered both by the traditional authority and the
municipality (eThekwini Municipality, 2014; Sim et al, 2016). This has produced a
complex set of governance and planning arrangements in the municipality, particularly in
the rural periphery (Sutherland et al, 2016). The Urban Development Line (UDL), a
contested concept that continues to shape the urban geography of the city, demarcates the
city’s urban and rural zones (Sim et al 2016). The broader northern development corridor,
located adjacent to a large rural area under traditional governance, shifted the UDL
northwards in 2008 revealing the power of the growth corridor in relation to other
planning concepts in the city.

Within this context of a relatively fast growing city with high levels of unemployment,
poverty, and housing and service backlogs there is also evidence of a powerful
pro-growth agenda being driven by national, provincial and local government within
Durban. The city remains the economic powerhouse of the Province. Its contribution to
the national and provincial economy remains constant, at around 11% of national GVA
by 2012. (Sutherland et al, 2013; see Table 1). Under the ANC leadership from 2002 to

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2011, Durban adopted a pro-growth, urban entrepreneurial approach to development. The

new city leadership of the Mayor and City Manager appointed in late 2016 has indicated
that the city will now also focus on rural development and informal settlements reflecting

Figure 2 The development geography of eThekwini Municipality

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Figure 3 The three main corridors in Durban

a pro-poor transformative approach. However, existing major economic growth projects

and public-private partnerships and powerful private sector actors with large landholdings
will continue to shape growth patterns along a neo-liberal, urban entrepreneurial path.
The economic growth of the city, is focused around major catalytic projects, some of
which could be classified as mega-projects, such as King Shaka International Airport
(KSIA), Dube Tradeport, the Cornubia mixed use integrated human settlements project,
the proposed new dig-out port, the Point Redevelopment project, the Integrated Public
Transport Network (IRPTN) and the new Inyaninga Industrial Estate (Hannan and
Sutherland, 2015; Sutherland et al. 2015; Martel, 2016; eThekwini Municipality,
2015/2016).

This chapter focuses on the broader northern development corridor consisting of the
wealthy coastal corridor with its high income gated estates and the northern urban
development corridor (NUDC) located along the N2 freeway, with its several large scale
projects, including the KSIA, Dube Tradeport, Cornubia, the Umhlanga retail and office
park node, the large townships of KwaMashu and Inanda, with high densities and poverty
levels, and smaller towns. The new Inyaninga development to the west of Dube
TradePort forms part of the NUDC. High-income development is focused along the
coastline, and large development nodes in less well-developed areas are being created in
the NUDC between the N2 freeway, which demarcates the edge of the coastal corridor,
and the UDL (see Figure 4). These development nodes around existing townships
(KwaMashu), small towns (Verulam and Tongaat) and new greenfields development
(Cornubia and KSIA) are shown in Figure 4. The corridor aims to develop a multi-nodal
transportation network with a strong public transport focus. It will achieve this by
enabling and managing public-private partnerships supported by eThekwini Municipality
(eThekwini Municipality, 2012).

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The development of Dube TradePort, KSIA, and the Tongaat CBD has more recently
been framed under Kasarda’s (2000) aerotropolis concept, and is expected to act as
catalyst for economic development and labour intensive development in KZN Province
(eThekwini Municipality, 2014). Dube TradePort and Tongaat Inyaninga are collectively
being proposed as a Special Economic Zone (eThekwini Municipality, 2015/2016),
which aims to trigger economic investment and connections to municipalities adjacent to
eThekwini Municipality in the north. This signals a shift away from eThekwini
Municipality’s previous inward looking position and frames the city as a ‘city-region’.​5

Figure 4 The North Urban Development Corridor concept plan

Discourses

The dominant discourses shaping development in the municipality and the northern zone
reflect the tension in South Africa between pro-growth, pro-poor and environmental
sustainability agendas. Development in South Africa is rights based, given the power of
the progressive post-apartheid Constitution. However, this is tempered by the neo-liberal
framing of economic growth and development by national government and the private
sector. Both the economic growth trajectory and the pro-poor transformation agenda
place pressure on the environment but need to be considered in relation to it, as the
physical environment provides the critical asset base upon which this development
depends (see also Roberts et al, 2013; Scott et al, 2015). There is also tension between the
discourses associated with large-scale developments/megaprojects and the need to
provide basic services and facilities to large numbers of urban and rural poor in the city.
This requires a balancing between the exceptional and the ‘mundane’, i.e., ordinary

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planning and development goals. This is evident, for instance, in the north of eThekwini
Municipality where the coastal corridor contains upmarket high income development
with a high level of economic opportunity, infrastructure and services, while the inland
corridor (NUDC) contains large townships, informal settlements and peri-urban areas
with much lower levels of economic opportunity, services and infrastructure.

Planning and development discourses are reflected in the Integrated Development Plan
(IDP) of eThekwini Municipality. The Municipal Systems Act, Act No. 32 of 2000
(MSA) requires each municipality to prepare an IDP, which is revised every five years.
The IDP is a tool that transforms local government, ensuring that it facilitates and
manages development in line with national legislation and policy. eThekwini
Municipality’s Spatial Development Framework (SDF) is a strategic spatial framework
that directs the implementation of the IDP and guides the overall spatial distribution of
current and desirable land uses within the municipality over the longer term (20 year plus
plan) to effectuate the vision, goals and objectives of the municipal IDP (eThekwini
Municipality, 2014). The four main spatial principles of the 2014/2015 SDF, which also
underpin the planning of the northern development corridor, reflect these tensions and
discourses. They are: mainstreaming and coordinating environmental planning; spatial
concentration (efficiency); economic potential through coordinated planning and
implementation; and balanced sustainable urban and rural development (equity).

Several key discourses will be discussed here: ​pro-growth, neo-liberal agenda;

progressive social redistribution agenda;​ ​sustainability and urban resilience; spatial
integration.

The northern corridor, and the NUDC in particular, has been shaped by and reveals the
spatial expression of a number of dominant discourses present in the city as a whole. ​The
pro-growth, neo-liberal agenda f​ rames Durban as a world-class city, complete with a
world-class port and airport. In the period since 2006 this discourse has expanded as
development has been re-framed and re-structured to reflect megaproject ideals both in
the south of the city, where the port is located, and in the north, where KSIA and Dube
TradePort are located. These mega-projects boost the image of the city in a “highly
competitive global investment environment” (Robbins, 2014), revealing how the highly
mobile global discourse of megaprojects has travelled to and landed in Durban. The port
in the south is now linked to global ambitions of port expansion through the proposed
new dig-out port and the Back of Port logistics zone (see Martel, 2016), while the KSIA
and Dube Trade Port are being configured into an aerotropolis (Robbins, 2014). This
represents a strategic pro-growth approach of economic development and job creation
through the development of exceptional projects that often bypass normal planning
processes and controls, with the expectation that trickle down effects will create more
jobs. The development of KSIA and Dube Trade Port was approved in 2007 despite
being located beyond the urban edge as demarcated on the SDF at the time. The
endorsement and approval of this megaproject by national government led to the
extension of the urban edge to the north in the form of a new spatial concept, the urban
development line (UDL), in the revised 2010 SDF, revealing the power of megaprojects,
and the visions they embody, in reshaping the city discourses (Sim et al, 2016).

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While there has been social resistance to the development of a Back of Port zone and a
new dig-out port, as a result of their impact on residential communities with a long
history of environmental injustice in south Durban (Scott, 2003; Brooks et al, 2010;
Martel, 2016), the ‘greenfield’ development of Cornubia, KSIA, Dube TradePort and
large private land holdings in the NUDC has enabled the north to develop with relatively
limited public resistance. Stakeholder input has been managed through the technical
processes of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), fast-tracked due to the
‘exceptionalist nature’ of these projects. However, in their reflections on the development
of Cornubia, Sutherland et al. (2015) argue that the development of this space is
contested and does not reflect strong public engagement, raising questions about social
and environmental justice in the city and the power of dominant actors.

The municipality also expresses a strong commitment to a ​progressive social

redistribution agenda,​ encapsulated in the IDP with associated budgeting processes. The
transformation agenda focuses on housing and service provision, and more lately the
development of mobility networks through the newly proposed Integrated Public
Transport Network (IRPTN) in the urban core. However, large housing and service
backlogs persist in the municipality reflecting the scale of the challenge of improving
quality of life of the poor. The social redistribution agenda is tempered and shaped by the
power of the neo-liberal project and urban entrepreneurialism. Development in the
NUDC has placed pressure on service delivery. For example, eThekwini Water and
Sanitation (EWS) has had to shift away from its incremental provision of bulk
infrastructure across the municipality to focus on providing bulk infrastructure to the
north to meet the demands for water and sanitation in the NUDC. In the north it is evident
that planning discourses are shaping the housing agenda as informal settlements are being
relocated inland in to the NUDC, away from the prime development land of the coastal
corridor. The relocation of the residents of the Ocean Drive-In informal settlement, which
was located in the coastal corridor in close proximity to KSIA and Dube Trade Port, to a
state-provided low-cost housing project, Hammonds Farm, close to Verulam, is
emblematic of this process (Sutherland, 2016). So while transformation and redistribution
is a dominant discourse in the municipality, the way in which it is translated into planning
and development practices, reveals its relationship to, and the power of, the pro-growth
discourse.

Housing delivery in the municipality is highly politicised as it remains one of the election
promises of both local and national ANC government. At a national level the discourse
around housing provision shifted in 2004 through the Breaking New Ground policy from
the delivery of housing units to the development of integrated human settlements. South
Africa had been very successful in the large scale delivery of housing units post 1994, but
it had failed to produce integrated human settlements that meet the social, economic and
environmental needs of people (Charlton, 2009; SERI, 2015; Sutherland et al, 2016). This
shift in approach is reflected in the development of a large-scale integrated human
settlements project, Cornubia, located in the NUDC. Cornubia, a mixed-use development,
has been identified and promoted as a national priority project which will reflect a new
approach to housing the urban poor in integrated mixed-use developments (Sutherland et

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al, 2015). However, there are concerns about the extent to which this project is creating
an integrated human settlement focusing on the urban poor or whether in fact it is a
neo-liberal mixed-use project, which strongly serves pro-growth interests, with housing
for the urban poor waning in importance (Sutherland et al, 2015).

Over the past twenty years Durban has had a strong focus on ​sustainability ​and, more
recently, on​ becoming a resilient city.​ The strong visionary leadership of the
Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department (EPCPD) has ensured that
sustainability concerns have been integrated into planning and development strategies
and policies in eThekwini Municipality. As a result, the mainstreaming of environmental
concerns into planning and development is one of the main principles of the 2014/2015
SDF. The sustainability discourse is constructed by developers and politicians as being in
opposition to economic growth and transformation, with the protection of the
environment construed as an impediment to development and a ‘luxury’ that can be
addressed once poverty is alleviated (Scott et al, 2015). Clearly, there is still a lack of
understanding among those in power that sustainability is critical to poverty alleviation,
social and environmental justice, and economic growth. Climate change impacts are
helping to shift this position as environmental risks for both the city as a whole and the
urban poor are becoming more evident.

In the NUDC the environment is under considerable pressure due to the high value of
land for development. Through the efforts of EPCPD officials, a large tract of land with
significant biodiversity value adjacent to the KSIA was set aside for conservation as a
condition of the EIA for the new airport. The KSIA was also designed and developed as a
‘green airport’, for example requiring the use of indigenous vegetation in the landscaping
of the airport precinct, to produce a biodiversity corridor. However, the battle for the
environment continues in the north, as agricultural land is turned over to private
development projects and eco-estates. This production of ‘third nature’, which is socially
constructed or designed nature, within development estates contrasts with the protection
of biodiversity, ecological infrastructure and environmental services proposed by
EPCPD. An innovative project of wetland rehabilitation and development as part of
EPCPD’s climate adaptation programme is being developed in the NUDC.

The NUDC concept plan (Figure 4) is partly a representation of the ​spatial integration
discourse which argues that integrated spatial planning will overcome the spatial
divisions in the city produced by apartheid. In its 2014/15 SDF, the municipality refers to
the spatial planning objectives of national government​1​ to achieve planning outcomes that
“restructure spatially inefficient settlements; promote the sustainable use of the land
resources; channel resources to areas of greatest need and development potential, thereby
redressing the inequitable historical treatment of marginalized areas; stimulate economic
development opportunities in rural and urban areas; and support an equitable protection
of rights to and in land” (eThekwini Municipality, 2014: 20). In its SDF (Figure 2) and in
other spatial plans including the NUDC concept plan the city has used the concepts of
urban and rural development nodes and corridors as ‘spatial integrators’, in particular by

1
As put forward in the White Paper on Spatial Planning and Land Use Management (Ministry of
Agriculture and Land Affairs, 2001).

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improving the road infrastructure system to connect less advantaged areas with economic
and other opportunities. The Cornubia new town mixed use development is strongly
framed by the integration discourse and referred to as an ‘integrated human settlement’ in
national housing policy language (Sutherland et al, 2016). The development represents an
integration of housing opportunities across income strata, as well as integration of
housing with commercial, business and industrial development. Cornubia is thus an
attempt to bridge the social-economic divisions through a mixed use, mixed income
development.

However, Durban’s urban entrepreneurialism strategy has translated the principle of

integration as represented in the city’s plans through a neo-liberal lens which means that
the neo-liberal project rather than social transformation dominates the form that
integration takes. This is evident in the clear spatial division of development in this zone,
with the coastal corridor and land immediately adjacent to the N2 reserved for
high-income development, and low-income housing projects developed inland. As
Sutherland et al (2015) show, even in the Cornubia project, which is strongly couched in
integration language, meaningful integration is not being achieved. Through the influence
of its public-private partnership and the power of neo-liberal politics, the voice of the
urban poor is represented only in the construction of a large state subsidized low-income
settlement, whose relative size and in influence has already been reduced in the
development. Furthermore, at a national level, the spatial integration principles presented
in the 2001 White Paper have not been carried forward into the more recently
promulgated national Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act 16 of 2013
(SPLUMA). Hence the application of this legislation will not provide further support to
the integration discourse in the city.

Spatial knowledge in the form of representative spaces based on multiple GIS maps plays
a critical role in informing decision-making, ordering the city and rendering difficult
political decisions technical. This is evident in the NUDC where mapping produced by
the municipality and Tongaat Hulett Properties, is shaping the development of space, at
times in conflictual and contradictory ways. For example the Verulam-Cornubia Local
Area Land Use and Activity Framework produced by eThekwini Municipality in 2011
reflects a different spatial configuration of development nodes for Cornubia than that of
the Cornubia Framework Plan (CFP), which was developed by Iyer Urban Design Studio
for Tongaat Hulett Properties in collaboration with the municipality (Sutherland et al,
2015). The power of Tongaat Hulett Properties in the northern corridor will most likely
result in a stronger neo-liberal focus rather than socially transformative integration in its
spatial plans, with the private sector CFP becoming the dominant spatial framework on
the Cornubia site.

Actor Networks

Devolution of power to the local state in South Africa ensures that local municipalities
play a critical role in shaping planning, development and urban space. Municipalities are
tasked with being the ‘developmental local state’. The politically and technically
powerful local government in eThekwini Municipality engages with both provincial and

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national government within a well-defined legislative and policy framework that provides
clear guidelines on local government mandates and responsibilities. Relations between
the local state and citizens are defined and shaped in numerous ways, such as engagement
around the IDP through the municipality’s annual ‘Big Mama’ workshops, engagement
between councillors, their ward committees and ordinary citizens, and through
managerial and technical platforms such as the Sizekala Centres, where citizens can
address service related issues, and legislated environmental and planning processes.
Social mobilisation in the city, which takes on multiple forms from violent protests to
mundane adaptations of state policy, reshapes state-citizen relations and attempts to
broaden actor networks (Sutherland, et al, 2014; Sutherland et al, 2015; Dupont et al,
2016)

The Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA)

co-ordinates and facilitates planning and decision-making across municipal borders in the
province to “ensure that the spatial implications of planning initiatives between the
eThekwini Municipality and the affected neighbouring municipalities are addressed”
(eThekwini Municipality, 2014, p 46). The focus of joint planning initiatives includes
agreements around the development and sharing of infrastructure services and resources,
the IDP, SDF, environmental frameworks and joint consideration of development
proposals.

At the local government level, the eThekwini Municipality’s Human Settlements Unit,
although under-capacitated given the enormous housing challenges, is instrumental in
shaping space, as decisions regarding the development of relocation projects on
greenfield sites and informal settlement upgrading drive other service-related
infrastructure investment. Engineering Services plays an important role in shaping
planning and development within the city. In some areas, the provision of water and
sanitation services and infrastructure has led to informal settlements emerging as people
‘follow the water’ (Macleod, 06/05/2016).

The actor network of the municipality is made more complex as a result of large areas of
‘rural land’ within the municipality falling under the Ingonyama Trust. This land is
governed by the Traditional Authority, following communal land tenure practices.
Durban is the only metropolitan municipality in South Africa with large tracts of land
under a dual governance system. These areas are governed by both the municipal
administration, with its councillors and officials, and the Traditional Authority, with its
Amakosi (chiefs) and Izinduna (headmen). This land predominantly falls outside of the
UDL in the rural periphery and is not located in the northern development corridor.
However, the rapid densification of traditional authority land is dramatically re-ordering
space in the north-west of the city (Sutherland et al, 2016a). Upper and middle income
residents from existing townships are moving to the traditional authority areas because of
the low cost and accessibility of land through the communal land tenure system, the low
cost of services and absence of municipal rates and taxes, and the rural lifestyle. These
areas of densification are connected to KwaMashu and Inanda and will create new
corridors of growth from the NUDC to the west of the city. Here the city is being built by
individuals from below (Sutherland et al, 2016b). At the same time Tongaat Hulett

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Properties, a dominant private actor in the north, is marketing another mixed-use

development, Inyaninga, on their private land holdings. This development is also located
north west of Dube TradePort and promoted as a unique logistics platform that is part of
the aerotropolis. Individual and large private actors are therefore shaping land
development inland of the NUDC in different ways, and through different relationships
with local authorities.

The private sector large land holders in the north of the city, play a dominant role in
development, most often through public private partnerships (PPPs). In the NUDC,
Tongaat Hulett Properties is a dominant actor due to their large land holdings in the north
and their long history of sugar cane farming. They have been transferring their
investments in sugar cane land to property development over the last thirty years. The
company played a major role in developing the Umhlanga Ridge and Gateway retail,
entertainment and residential complex in partnership with the then North Local Council.
It has well established relationship with the municipality, which has been both beneficial
and at times conflictual, depending on the projects and the interests of both sets of actors.
PPPs have been essential for developing the large scale catalytic projects in the north, as
have been partnerships between national, provincial and local government. Cornubia is a
partnership between Tongaat Hulett Properties and eThekwini Municipality. KSIA and
Dube TradePort were developed and funded by the Airports Company of South Africa,
and provincial and local government. The aerotropolis is a major project of the Provincial
Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs and a new
Aerotropolis Institute, a first in Africa, partially funded by Department of Economic
Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs (DEDTEA), has been established
within the innovation and commercialisation unit at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Dube TradePort Corporation, a state-owned business entity (a special purpose vehicle) of
KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government, is playing a leading role in developing the newly
proposed Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with its aerotropolis concept. Although
marketing material for the Dube TradePort Corporation suggests that the SEZ has its own
governance structure, the SEZ is governed by, and located firmly within, eThekwini
Municipality. The relationship between Dube TradePort and the municipality is complex
and challenging, given the demands this project makes on municipal resources and
infrastructure, its ‘exceptionalist nature’, which implies, but does not mean, that Dube
TradePort can take decisions relatively independently, and the municipality’s reliance on
the project to ensure economic growth in the north.

The SDF of the municipality and most particularly its spatial structuring element, the
UDL, is strongly underpinned and supported by the high technical capacity of the
municipality, particularly in Engineering Services. There is strong capacity in spatial
knowledge management in the municipality and hence GIS and ICT play a significant
role in shaping planning and development. Spatial knowledge in the form of multiple GIS
maps, or ‘representative spaces’, plays a critical role in informing decision-making,
ordering the city and rendering difficult political decisions technical. Here municipal
officials use technical knowledge and representations of space to shift issues from a
political to technical construction. This is evident in the NUDC where different actors

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propose shaping space in ways that are at times conflictual and contradictory. For
instance, the Verulam-Cornubia Local Area Land Use and Activity Framework produced
by eThekwini Municipality in 2011 reflects a different spatial configuration of
development nodes for Cornubia than the Cornubia Framework Plan (CFP), developed by
Iyer Urban Design Studio for Tongaat Hulett Properties in collaboration with the
municipality. These two plans were both approved by the Municipality's Economic
Development and Planning Committee on 3 March 2011, even though they reflect a very
different perspective on where the core node of economic development should be located
in the Cornubia Integrated Human Settlements project. The one is more socially just and
transformative while the other supports the neo-liberal project (Sutherland et al, 2014).

In this context, it is important to point out that consultants play a major role in shaping
development in eThekwini Municipality. They work in partnership with both the state
and the private sector producing spatial information and urban design that reflects
contemporary global discourses of urban development, such as introducing Kasarda’s
aerotropolis concept into the development space of Durban. More progressive consultants
in the city strive to ensure that international and national concepts and best practice are
re-interpreted towards more African-centred concepts of urban development, for example
by connecting formality and informality in innovative ways.

Likewise, civil society organisations (CSOs) work to ensure that development in Durban
adopts a more participatory, democratic approach. The municipality’s dominant approach
of managerial governance, and the highly interventionist and somewhat controlling
national and local state, in practice do not support deep democracy in decision-making.
The ward committee system established through the Municipal Structures Act (Act 117of
1998) was meant to ensure that the voice of ordinary people is brought to municipal
councils through the ward committee of the elected Councillor. However, this system
does not deliver and often the urban poor feel marginalised and controlled by
Councillors, who do not report their issues to the municipality. CSOs play a critical, but
less overt role in shaping developments in the city, and hence strengthening them is
essential if Durban is to adopt a more participatory approach to decision-making.
Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) has played a critical role in shifting the municipality’s
position in relation to informal housing. AbM is a national shack dwellers movement
originating in the Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban, and has challenged the
politics of housing in the city, using protest, court processes and engagement to raise the
profile of in-situ informal settlement upgrades. Other CSOs have also played important
roles in housing and service innovation, often forging partnerships between communities
and the municipality.

Ordinary citizens struggle to find a voice in eThekwini Municipality. The municipality

hosts ’Big Mama’ participatory workshops as part of planning processes, and engages
with citizens through councillors and ward committees. Sizekala Customer Service
Centres located across the municipality provide a technical space where residents can
apply for services and engage with local government around service and council related
issues. However, real public debate about development decisions in Durban rarely occurs.
The EIAs on large projects in the north have included stakeholder engagement, but their

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impact is often limited to mitigatory measures rather than changing the development
trajectory. The contested discourses of the Cornubia development reveal how dominant
actors continue to shape development decisions in the municipality (Sutherland et al.
2015). Social mobilisation and urban insurgency reveal the efforts of the poor to secure
their ‘rights to the city’ in the north of the city (Sutherland, 2016). Pressure from below
has shifted some development decisions and hence social mobilisation remains critical to
social transformation.

To summarize, the development of Durban is shaped by a powerful and interventionist

national and local state and the agendas of post-apartheid transformation and global
competitiveness, which often sit in tension with each other, and sustainability principles.
The latter focus on the protection of the municipality’s natural assets, which are critical to
its social and economic future. The eThekwini Municipality has been relatively inward
looking as a result of its economic and political power, as it is by far the most capacitated
and resource rich municipality in the province.

Processes

The production of the northern development corridor, which includes the coastal corridor,
the NUDC and the more rural inland corridor has been facilitated through a wide range of
processes involving multiple actors who come together in different spaces and alliances
to ensure that their mandates, interests and agendas are met. The corridor is therefore
being assembled through both strategic, and project specific plans, driven largely by
provincial and local government and the private sector. The overall spatial concept of the
northern corridor is encapsulated in the Northern Spatial Development Plan (NSDP), first
developed in 2009 (eThekwini Municipality, 2013/2014). It forms part of eThekwini
Municipality’s SDF, discussed above. The plan is approved by Council and hence has the
input of Councillors or politicians, as representatives of their constituencies. It also draws
on engagements with provincial authorities, neighbouring municipalities and
communities.

The NSDP, which is a 20-year strategic plan, provides the overall framework for
development in the north corridor. It is based on a strategic assessment of the north,
which identified opportunities and constraints for development. Using a managerial
governance approach, the local state, has considered the needs of both the private sector
(investors) in the corridor as well as the communities living there. It provides spatial
development guidelines for this corridor, which are reviewed every five years with minor
revisions undertaken annually. It therefore has drawn on public input, but its limited
extent means that it does not reflect real participatory governance of the north.

Within this broader plan a number of local area plans to guide development have been
undertaken, which reflect the development context and agenda and the dominant
discourses of the main actors within each of the spaces that collectively make up the
northern corridor. The NUDC was initiated to guide the development of the main
transport corridor and inland area along the N2 National Road as part of the NSDP
(2009). It was developed by innovative and progressive planning consultants for

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eThekwini Municipality, who had built up a detailed understanding of development in the

north through urban and planning research, and by conducting a strategic assessment of
development there. To guide development along the N2 corridor, the NUDC contained
new spatial planning strategies and concepts, such as the Urban Development Line. It
was conceptualized as a mixed use corridor as a result of input from a wide range of
stakeholders who manage, work and live in the north of the city.

A more detailed level of planning and development has been undertaken through project
specific planning applications and environmental impact assessments. At this level, the
extent of engagement of multiple actors has varied and in some cases contrasting plans
have been developed, for instance as a result of planning and urban design consultants
expressing different visions(Sutherland et al, 2014).

Processes and procedures as stipulated in national legislation, such as formal planning

applications and EIAs for specific projects, also bring together multiple actors with their
discourses and knowledge into the space of decision-making for the north. These
processes are used to shape other development in the region, even though there has been
concern that EIA processes are site specific and do not address broader social and
environmental impacts. The noise contour produced as part of the EIA of the KSIA has
subsequently been used to reduce the amount of low-cost housing developed in Cornubia,
as sections of this land fall within the 55 db noise contour. This reveals how technical
outcomes of assessment processes can be ‘captured’ and used to support certain political
arguments and agendas in large scale projects, undermining the vision and needs of other
actors (Sutherland et al, 2014).
The spatial knowledge produced by the municipality, through its well developed GIS and
ICT knowledge system, has played a major role in shaping development in the northern
corridor. In the intense space of politics in eThekwini Municipality, officials have used
technical processes and knowledge to shape the development process. In this way they
have rendered more technical the political nature of development in the city, which opens
ethical questions about transparency and participation. Tongaat-Hulett Properties has also
used technical and scientific knowledge to produce representative spaces, which help
planners, designers, engineers and architects to ‘take control’ of and produce space
(Lefebvre, 1991).

Private land holders and Dube TradePort have used the private ownership of land and in
the case of Dube TradePort, their special economic development status, to drive
development in a way that meets their neo-liberal and pro-growth agenda. Due to the
power of these dominant actors, it has been difficult for ordinary citizens and even at
times the municipality to re-shape or challenge their development objectives.
However, given the high levels of inequality and poverty in the city, and the desire of the
urban poor to claim their ‘right to the city’, both urban insurgency and informal
settlements are also reshaping and challenging development plans for the north. Social
mobilization through social protest, mundane adaptation, resistance and legal processes,
challenges the dominant discourses of development in the north. This unsettles the
development landscape. There is a dearth of robust NGOs and CBOs in the city, so that
social mobilization usually occurs locally around flashpoints rather than being an

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ongoing process of challenging the state on its broader development practices. The large
rural inland corridor which connects with the NUDC is also remaking the city from
below, as citizens can access land through the Traditional Authority system and hence
participate in a very different set of planning processes (Sutherland et al , 2016; Sim and
Sutherland, 2017).
The processes producing urban space in the north of Durban, therefore comprise of a
complex set of formal hierarchical plans and processes produced by the municipal
authority designed to order space and city-building from below, through the efforts of
ordinary citizens who construct informal settlements and urban residents who are
producing urban space on communal land through the processes of the traditional
authority. These processes draw in different actors and discourses along the development
corridor, with the discourses of pro-growth being dominating over pro-poor agendas, the
latter being addressed through assumed trickle down effects, catalytic projects, and
integrated planning.

Materialities

The northern development corridor has been developed within a specific geographical
and historical context, which contributed to producing the materialities of this space.
Much of this has been described in the background section on Durban, revealing how the
spatial engineering of the apartheid era continues to shape development in the city. That
legacy and the subsequent restructuring of municipal boundaries as part of the
transformative agenda of the ANC government post 2000 has resulted in a sprawling and
spatially fragmented city.

Yet the spatial structure of the eThekwini Municipality is changing with new strategic
economic hubs emerging on the periphery. The previous structure focused on the central
business district, the port and South Durban Basin and the Pinetown, New Germany hub.
Today, the KSIA and Dube TradePort as well as Umhlanga Ridge and Gateway and the
Cato Ridge node to the west are shifting the spatial concentration of economic activity.
The city is being promoted as a national logistics platform with the two anchors of the
port in South Durban and KSIA and Dude TradePort in the north. The transportation of
goods from Durban to Gauteng has expanded road-based logistics to the west of the city.
Transportation, logistics, the maritime or blue economy and the port’s petrochemical
industry therefore form the material base for economic growth in the city. The sector
tourism, leisure and recreation is also a major contributor to the economy and this is
critical in the northern development corridor, evident from the high land values and high
income gated estates and residential development along the coastal corridor.

The north has been able to capture many of these activities as a result of the large release
of land from agriculture for property, retail and light industrial development. Thus the
northern zone is changing into a more complex and integrated development region,
connected to national and metropolitan logistics interests.

The north of the city, along with the central region contains the highest population
densities in the municipality. Demography therefore also shapes and supports the

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planning and development objectives of this zone. The northern zone also contains
valuable environmental services that support the overall functioning of the city. The
protection of this resource base and its relationship to Durban’s ability to adapt to climate
change has been raised as critical in the development of the northern zone. The impacts
of coastal storms, which are becoming more likely given Durban’s climate change
predictions, and the management of their impact has been recognized in the NDSP. The
northern region of the city also suffers from high water scarcity, and experiences regular
water restrictions. The development of bulk infrastructure and sanitation networks has
been flagged as a critical issue, along with the impact of drought and pollution on water
supply. However, there are concerns that the pressure of development in the northern
zone, including bulk water and sanitation infrastructure, has diverted limited municipal
resources at the expense of the under-developed peripheral inland areas and the
maintenance of water services infrastructure in the urban core.

Outcomes

Durban is a city in transition. The municipality is under pressure to service and develop a
rapidly​ ​informalising and urbanising city with rapid growth and densification in its
peri-urban and rural periphery. At the same time, the municipality has invested strongly
in large-scale projects such as Cornubia and Dube TradePort within the northern
development corridor. The growth and development in this corridor reflects the ‘world
class city’ dream shared by many city governments in the global South. The tensions
between the pro-growth and pro-poor agendas are particularly evident here, where high
income investment is focused in the coastal corridor, with poverty and informality
driving the need for investment and service delivery in the inland peri-urban and
peripheral areas. This results in a municipality which is stretching its resources and
capacity to meet differing development agendas. This has resulted in a mismatch between
capacities of a governing system and demands to meet the quality and volume of
transformational needs (Bavinck et al., 2013; Gupta et al., 2014).

Digital spatial knowledge management is well developed in eThekwini Municipality and

it has played a critical role in providing officials with information on the state of the city,
its development challenges and on the impact of its interventions. It has been used to
inform the development of the SDF, as different layers of spatial information are included
and overlaid to reflect the critical challenges in the city. Spatial knowledge sharing takes
place between different government departments, as they draw on the layers of
information produced on different aspects of life in the city to argue for the forms of
development they wish to support. Further integration and use of this knowledge is
supported by officials.

The past two decades of democratic transformation in Durban have been challenging and
complex. Multiple actors are producing the city in different ways and hence new
configurations are emerging in a fast changing urban context. Currently a coalition of
pro-growth actors with spatial knowledge and technical expertise is dominating
decision-making in the north of the city, countering the politics of bureaucratic and

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political decision-making processes in the rest of the city. The local state has adopted a
managerial approach to governance to enable it to ‘control’ and ‘manage’ the voices of
multiple stakeholders. There is little discursive space or participatory methods to ‘craft’
and politically debate the future of the city, or more specifically the northern
development corridor. However forms of urban insurgency and city building from below
through the informalisation of the city is having the cumulative effect of shifting the
power trajectories, particularly in the periphery of the municipality.

COMPARING DURBAN AND CHENNAI

The reinvention of port-industrial nexus cities

Both Chennai and Durban are examples of cities that already exist as regional hubs
because of their prominent ports and airports; today they are reinventing themselves by
developing new (Chennai) or enhancing existing (Durban)economic sectors through their
growth corridors.

Chennai’s regional and national importance has been strengthened by the IT corridor,
which is an economically specialized corridor. As a major hub in India of the service
outsourcing industry, Chennai contributes significantly to national GDP and exports, and
most of this value in Chennai is created within the IT corridor. But development in
Chennai’s southern periphery turns out to be socially selective as the impacts for the
largely rural, pre-existing communities have been limited if not negative. These
communities have been largely sidelined, if not displaced by the development of the area
into a technological cluster. Built on marshlands, the environmental unsustainability of
this corridor was exposed during the floods of December 2015, when most of the area
was submerged and incurred significant damage.

Durban’s regional importance has been strengthened by the NUDC, a mixed-use corridor,
produced primarily under the banner of the pro-growth discourse and strong local capital
investment of the municipality and private sector and state led mega-projects. The
post-apartheid mandate of integrating pro-growth and pro-poor discourses in urban
development has only partially been achieved here, as the growth corridor has demanded
large budgets for the municipal provision of services placing pressure on resources
required to address the pro-poor agenda and social inequalities in the area. The focus is
on service industries - the growth corridor can be viewed as both a spatial shift of the
core business functions of the city to the north and a shift towards service industries as a
pro-growth development path.

Interestingly, both growth corridors are cases of exceptional planning as they have been
produced, at least to some extent in Chennai, outside of regular institutional spatial
planning processes and in the case of Durban, the corridor has shifted regular spatial
planning processes. Especially in Chennai, urban planners have had to respond to, rather
than lead, developments in the corridors. They also do not possess the same degree of
technical capacity in spatial knowledge management, which is also much less than that in

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the private sector. In both cases, the pro-growth agenda has resulted in job creation and
economic development, but environmental outcomes have been neglected in the case of
Chennai and addressed through mitigation measures of EIAs in Durban, and issues of
social inequality have not been adequately addressed. It is striking that both growth
corridor configurations have relatively similar outcomes, but with very different contexts
and trajectories to get there. The post-apartheid agenda is specific to the Durban case,
where pro-poor discourses must be addressed. In Chennai, its position as an IT hub in
India and its linkage with global services through IT-BPO processing is a key structural
driver, allowing partial fulfillment of its aim to become a global city. Existing social
inequalities are re-created in the new corridor.

Key structural differences shaping the growth corridors

The three major differences in the processes and actor networks shaping the similar
outcomes are 1) major differences between systems of government in India and South
Africa, in particular the degree of power of city government, 2) the historical role of the
social transformation agenda and its embedding in urban planning, and 3) the extent to
which the city development plan was integrated and whether there was an overarching
vision.

In India, municipal governments have received their (partial) mandates relatively

recently, and are subordinate to state (provincial) government, whereas in South Africa
large metropolitan cities are very powerful. Both nations have strong hierarchies in their
government structure, with a strong provincial or state led approach. In South Africa
clearly defined mandates and responsibilities exist across the three spheres of government
(which is more nebulous in India) and hence Durban has been able to assert its role in
shaping development as a regional hub. Overall, inter-governmental co-operation across
the spheres of government and clear mandates means that decision making has been
delegated to the local level in Durban, whereas in Chennai government prefers a
top-down management approach, flanked by informal city-building by residents.
Building on the ongoing social mobilization in South Africa which challenges state
performance, there is a culture of understanding that government will be critiqued and
challenged on its delivery, leaving more room for innovation and local-level leadership.
That said, local actors still require support from the provincial and national level to fund
and develop growth corridors. Top-down leadership in both cities also manifests itself in
the technical, managerial discourse in local governance. There is a clear distinction
between politicians, bureaucrats and citizens, with bureaucrats in charge of regular
city-management, and politicians’ and the private sector often driving a different agenda
through exceptional projects. The technical approach adopted by bureaucrats (officials)
focuses on efficiency and removes the plurality and contestation inherent to democratic
decision-making, which can create exclusionary spaces in the growth corridors, but
which can also, as in the case of Durban, temper the pro-growth agenda through mixed
use development and the provision for example of social housing

The conceptualisation and role of social transformation is also very different in both
countries. As a result of post-1994 reforms in South Africa, social transformation is a

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powerful normative goal, and must be addressed - and crucially, integrated with other
development work - at all levels of government. As a result, in South Africa, the
pro-growth discourse is tempered by the pro-poor agenda, both of which aredriven from
within the city itself. On the other hand, whilst social concerns are a very strong
component of Tamil Nadu’s state politics and it prides itself on having one of the highest
Human Development Indexes in India, social agendas are not embedded in local decision
making, but go through separate channels at the state level rather than the city-level.
Contrary to Durban, there is no discourse about social justice or redress, In Chennai the
the dominant discourse is that ‘growth’ will make development happen. Consequently,
there are exclusionary spaces of development, such as the IT Corridor, where social
transformation ist not embedded.

Both South Africa and India have a strong overarching societal discourse of democratic
participation and this carries over in Chennai and Durban, to varying degrees. The South
African Constitution is important in this regard as it supports a democratic society and
participation in decision making. That said, neither Chennai nor Durban is a particularly
‘participatory’ city. In Durban, participation takes place largely through the ‘invited
spaces’ and platforms constructed by the local state. In Chennai, innovation can occur
when higher-level bureaucrats take the lead, but only within their mandated area and not
across departments. In both cases dominant political parties, working in conjunction with
organized private sector interests, set and carry out the agenda.

Actor coalitions

Both growth corridors were shaped by powerful private actors that were drivers and
co-creators of this space; although in Durban it was one main land-holding actor, and in
Chennai a coming together of multiple local actors. In Durban the state both partnered
with the private actors in the corridor and was a developer in itself, whereas in Chennai
the state became a facilitator of these private interests. Interestingly, contrary to
assumptions about the building of ‘world class city’ projects through global investment,
the international private sector was not developing or investing in the corridors in either
city, but rather it was domestic capital, from both it’s the historical business elite and the
state, that invested in the projects. In both cases, national and local resources were
mobilized to build basic infrastructure in the hopes of attracting foreign investment in to
these spaces

Visioning and policy design happens at a much higher level of government in India than
in South Africa. Visioning is done at the national and state level. At city level in Chennai,
the IT Corridor was not a major part of the Second Master Plan, which in any case does
not present a clear integrated vision for the city’s future. The IT Corridor configuration
unfolded over time, in a piecemeal fashion, with large private actors initially investing in
the area before the regional state upgraded the road, and parastatal agencies promoted
business parks. In Durban, the municipality has a more integrated planning process; the
city vision is represented in the IDP and SDF, as well as in the more detailed spatial plans
for the northern development corridor. The NSDP and the NUDC have been instrumental
in shaping planning post 2009.

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Both cities leadership through their visions of the city and their innovative projects,
although this takes on different forms. In Durban, there is significant leadership on
climate change issues, water and sanitation, and housing, whereas in Chennai the
leadership tends to be project-based rather than focusing on an integrated vision. In
general, high profile ‘pet projects’ are indeed very much linked to the ruling political
parties and turn out to be ad hoc projects often incorporated ​a posteriori​ in planning and
vision documents.

Implications for environmental & social issues

There are stark differences in the way that environmental concerns are addressed within
the two urban governance configurations. Across Chennai broadly there is a disregard for
environmental protection. The only glimpse of a concern with conservation was the
creation of the Pallikaranai Marshland, pushed through as a result of middle class
mobilisation and the support of the then-state Chief Minister. This is an example of how
independent leadership creates exceptional spaces separate from other development
processes. In Durban, on the other hand, individual champions within city government
have demonstrated progressive leadership by linking environmental concerns to the
pro-poor agenda and to climate adaptation, thus ensuring that environmental concerns are
integrated in to municipal sector plans and policies. Environmental Impact Assessment
regulation ensures that developers have to address environmental concerns in
development proposals and have to obtain environmental approval before development
can take place. This process supports inter-sectoral review of proposed projects within
the local state. ; this regulatory incentive is present on paper but by-passed in practice in
Chennai.

That said, in neither of the cities is there a fully integrated approach to sustainability
across all sectors within the local state due to the pressure for development and economic
growth. In Durban, environmental concerns are pro-poor, whereas in Chennai, they are
the opposite. Discourses on water around the IT Corridor are to improve water access to
‘world class standards’ for firms, despite extreme water scarcity for residents across the
city. There is also a move for hazard prevention and risk avoidance, yet ‘silos’ within
government make it almost impossible to coordinate across departments.

In South Africa, inequality is addressed with the intention to reduce poverty, whereas in
India poverty is directly addressed through various targeted programmes, in the hopes of
reducing inequality. The managerial, technical form of service delivery at the municipal
level in Chennai has recognized social issues, but not gone beyond that, particularly as
the dominant pattern is relocation of substandard settlements to the edge of the city. In
both cities, where social mobilization exists, it occurs at the settlement level around local
issues, and the wider civil society landscape appears fragmented. This means the sheer
scale of the megaprojects examined here overwhelms the level of usual social
mobilization, and as a result there was limited opposition or engagement around both
corridors.

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Processes of socio-spatial reshaping

The two corridors are large areas that essentially reshape the materiality of the cities.
Firstly, by developing secondary centralities and new suburbs, the corridors represent a
move towards more polycentric cities by connecting the periphery with the city region.
The IT Corridor reinforced the polycentric nature embedded in the historical trajectory of
Chennai’s growth, whereas shifting the locus of property development, housing provision
and logistics activity in Durban is changing the shape of what was historically a highly
centralised city with southern and western development corridors. Secondly, the
development of the corridors in both cities emphasized the distinctiveness of the affluent
upper and middle class. The IT Corridor increased the middle class identity of southern
Chennai, by reinforcing the difference between the northern and western parts of the city
associated with the port and industry, and the more affluent residential, service-oriented
and university-clusters in the southern and eastern parts of the city. The NUDC also made
a move towards the more affluent north, although tempered by necessity to include
low-income housing in the areas because of the transformative agenda and by the NUDC
addressing development in the large townships of KwaMashu and Inanda.

Like in other cities of the global South, urban materiality includes informality, which is
always entangled with urban megaprojects. As an exceptional and premium space the IT
Corridor attempted to ‘cleanse’ informality, but failed, particularly as the necessary
support services remain informal. The exceptional spaces of mega-projects shift and
become more embedded in the city, as the combination of formal and informal processes
produces more ordinary landscapes that reflect the everyday lived worlds of ordinary
people . In Durban there are similarities, however the large greenfield sites being
developed in this northern region, have made it easier to produce well planned, formal
and regulated spaces, keeping informality to the inland spaces of the NUDC.

Endotes
1​
The Chance2Sustain case studies were also focused here, allowing an in-depth
investigation into various aspects of contemporary urban development.
2​
See Chapter 6 on water- and climate-related vulnerabilities for more.

​ annagi Nagar is included here as an example of opposition even though it is not

3​
K
exactly spatially linked to the IT Corridor as it was a part of the case studies within the
broader project. More more information see Chapter 2 on methods.
4​
See Chapter on WP3.
5​
This development is connected to the municipality’s broader vision of becoming
Africa’s Southern Gateway to trade and travel by 2030 through the expansion of the port
of Durban; KSIA and Dube Trade Port (the aerotropolis); and road, rail and IT
infrastructure connections to Gauteng (eThekwini Municipality, 2014).

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 Author draft pre-print, January 2021

6 The relocation of Ocean Drive-In informal settlement, which was located in the coastal
corridor in close proximity to KSIA and Dube Trade Port to Hammonds Farm, to a state
provided low cost housing project close to Verulam reflects this process (Dupont et al,
2016).
7​
www.dubetradeport.co.za, Accessed 16/09/2016.

​For a broader discussion on city visions across Chance2Sustain cities, see Baud et. al
8​

(2014) ‘Mapping City Visions: Integrating Megaprojects in Urban Development’. Policy

Brief. Available here: http://chance2sustain.eu/83.0.html

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Loraine Kennedy, Isa Baud, and Vicky Sim for their
thoughtful reviews on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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