Browsing by Author "Poswa, Xavia"

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    Implementing Spluma: A review of four ‘Post-Spluma’ provincial planning bills
    (Dullah Omar Institute for Constitutional Law, Governance and Human Rights, 2017-10) de Visser, Jaap; Poswa, Xavia
    Between 2015 and 2017, municipalities across the country developed municipal planning bylaws. Many municipalities were assisted by national government and/or provincial governments. The involvement of both the national and provincial governments was mainly driven by the aim of ensuring that the transfer of power to municipalities occurred in an orderly fashion (see the research report De Visser & Poswa (2017) Implementing SPLUMA: a Review of Municipal Planning By‐laws). More importantly, this was to ensure that municipalities have the necessary local legislation in place to perform their municipal planning function. The scope of the function expanded dramatically as a result of judgments of the Constitutional Court and the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act of 2013 (SPLUMA). SPLUMA is a framework law that does not set out in detail what municipalities have to do in order to effectively execute their municipal planning function. Each province is empowered by the Constitution to pass provincial planning laws to further regulate municipal planning in that particular province and also to regulate the provincial government’s own planning. At the time of writing, it was only the Western Cape that had made use of this constitutional power in the ‘post‐SPLUMA’ era. It is unclear whether the other provinces will complete the planning architecture envisaged by SPLUMA by passing provincial planning legislation. Some may find it sufficient to have SPLUMA and the municipal by‐laws govern planning in their respective provinces without provincial law being the intermediary law.
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    Municipal law making under SPLUMA: A survey of fifteen "first generation" municipal planning by-laws
    (Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal, 2019) de Visser, Jaap; Poswa, Xavia
    The legal framework for spatial planning and land use management changed with the introduction of the new Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act 16 of 2013 (SPLUMA). SPLUMA facilitates the shift of power over critical areas of land use management from provincial governments to local governments, which results from the Constitution allocating "municipal planning" to municipalities. With this comes a responsibility for municipalities to adopt municipal planning by-laws. This article focuses on four of the many challenges SPLUMA needed to address namely (1) the division of responsibilities between national, provincial and local government, (2) the interrelationship between plans and rights, (3) planning and informality and (4) making government cohere. The article introduces these four challenges and examines how SPLUMA seeks to address them. In particular, it conducts a preliminary assessment of fifteen "first generation" municipal planning by-laws to assess how they address the four themes in SPLUMA.
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    Municipal Planning By-laws and the extent to which they give effect to the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act 16 of 2013.
    (University of Western Cape, 2017) Poswa, Xavia; De Visser, Jaap
    The spatial legacy created by the planning laws of the apartheid regime is still apparent in most cities and towns across South Africa. The legacy of apartheid spatial planning reveals not only planning which was undertaken along racial lines and inequality in the provision of infrastructure, amenities and accessibility, but the distances between where the poor and the rich live further perpetuates that inequality. Moreover, these planning laws also created a spatial pattern which resulted in the costs of maintaining infrastructure to be very high and public transport difficult to provide and access. Berrisford notes, "the roots to this legacy are complex and varied, but the regulatory frameworks governing land tenure, development and use played a prominent role in creating problems now faced by South African towns and cities".