Letter: Policies to reimagine divided cities still outstanding - Business Day

Ivan Turok, in “Constitutional Court got Sea Point right” (July 9), says my column “A city’s soul is a sum of hard choices” (July 6) “ignores the crucial role of governments in building functional cities …” Yet this is really at the heart of my argument.

He writes, “Urban economists understand full well that without the guiding hand of the state, cities will turn out chaotic and dysfunctional. The same argument applies to the fragmented, sprawling and inefficient character of South African cities inherited from the past due to deeply misguided apartheid spatial planning.”

I agree. I described the effects. But the crucial question concerns the nature of that “guiding hand” and the extent to which “policy instruments” (my words) match the dynamism and choice of today’s free society rather than reverting to the restrictive, stifling conditions of the unfree one that preceded it.

Hence, I wrote that, in South Africa’s cities today, “already home to 67% of the population … unless the property developer and the labourer can more or less recognise themselves and their interests in policy instruments directed at overcoming the apartheid spatial plan and everyone’s right to ‘adequate housing’, the truly transformative answer to our long-delayed reimagining of a liberated or democratic or just South Africa will remain elusive”.

I am not qualified to appraise the Constitutional Court’s Tafelberg School decision as law, but, plainly, whatever one’s ideology, the ruling is not, on its own, among the policy instruments on which that long-delayed reimagining must depend.

Michael Morris

Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-07-14-letters-to-the-editor/