Manfred Spocter

Stellenbosch University | SUN · Department of Geography and Environmental Studies

Township tourism has evolved as a niche tourism offering in South Africa with the potential to create economic opportunities in townships. The experiences of tourists as expressed on online platforms are important barometers of what tourist offerings are working or not. This study analyses the star ratings of and written feedback about tourist attr...

This book analyses urban planning in Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa, exploring its history and advocating for new approaches. In a climate changing world, cities need to be reimagined and designed to be more sustainable, but despite being one of the fastest urbanising continents, Africa has generally weak urban planning systems. The...

The maintenance and the rehabilitation of municipal infrastructure are formidable challenges facing many local municipalities in South Africa. Infrastructure is crumbling because of years of neglect, resulting in the under-provision of basic municipal services. This chapter investigates the state of municipal infrastructure regarding potable water,...

Urban open-air markets are indispensable institutions in the global South. Yet they are most often confronted with formidable environmental problems such as improper solid waste management (SWM). Accordingly, when research is initiated into the complex world of urban market environmental management (UMEM), the focus tends to be on either SWM techno...

Residential developments can potentially play a part in urban sustainability through the greening of new homes or the retrofitting of existing homes. Eco-estates, a subtype of gated communities, are marketed as green developments in South Africa with a view to contributing to green residential living through a number of eco-practices. This paper in...

Globally, gated communities have been associated with negative social, economic and environmental impacts that are not conducive to sustainable urban development. Eco-estates have been touted as the answer to these sustainability issues and are viewed as the new “green” gated communities. Nature is a key aspect of eco-estates as it promotes a back-...

The discovery and mining of diamonds has played a crucial role in the establishment of Kimberley as a settlement and its subsequent urban growth and decline. This holds true even in post-apartheid Kimberley’s post-resource era. The closure of diamond mines has had a negative impact on the city. However, the designation of the city in 1994 as the ca...

The abaTembu and amaMpondo’s donation in 1860 of land along the Mthatha river for a colonial settlement signalled the start of Mthatha’s function as a regional administrative centre. This administrative role reached a peak with its designation as the capital of the Transkei Bantustan in 1976. In post-apartheid South Africa Bhisho was designated in...

Cities undergo constant change and their industrial spaces are particularly impacted on by new technologies, changing industries and the vagaries of the global and national economies. This paper reports on an investigation of the changing commercial and industrial landscape in Cape Town, South Africa, by focussing on commercial park spaces, specifi...

In Ghana, housing practices for the majority of urban residents lie outside the scope of formal housing markets and planning regulations. This has made urban upgrading a key component of physical development in cities in Ghana. In the face of accelerated urbanisation and the corresponding upsurge in informal housing practices, local authorities con...

Gated developments are a defining feature of the post-apartheid residential landscape. The fortification practices witnessed in gated developments are part of a wider securitisation of the South African urban- and ruralscapes. This research resides in the ambit of the theory of crime and violence as a precursor to the growth in gated developments....

Gated developments are a ubiquitous feature of the post-apartheid urban landscape. However, there is a dearth of research on gated developments in nonmetropolitan areas. A gated development security level index was created to assist in the investigation of the relationship between crime levels and differing levels of securedness of gated developmen...

Amid a growing ‘turn’ towards Southern cities, South African urban geographers continue to remind us why and how to attend to local context and draw on theory from elsewhere. Human Geographies of Stellenbosch: Transforming Space, Preserving Place? (edited by Ronnie Donaldson) provides a deep look at crucial questions facing one of South Africa’s mo...

Amid a growing ‘turn’ towards Southern cities, South African urban geographers continue to remind us why and how to attend to local context and draw on theory from elsewhere. Human Geographies of Stellenbosch: Transforming Space, Preserving Place? (edited by Ronnie Donaldson) provides a deep look at crucial questions facing one of South Africa’s mo...

Gated communities have evolved into providing unique residential offerings aimed at specific markets. Eco-estates and eco-friendly estates are examples of such niche estates which have witnessed increasing growth in their development throughout South Africa. This paper overviews the literature on the evolution of gated communities and provides a sp...

Housing mobility is an overlooked aspect of pro-poor housing policy debates despite the growing complexities of downstream housing sectors in cities of the global South. Stable housing regimes confer multiple socio-economic advantages on households and the incidence of housing relocation, especially involving very poor families, foists a considerab...

The Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Stellenbosch University is the oldest geography department in South Africa and celebrates its centenary in 2020. This paper provides insight into a range of publications that emanated from the department during that time. The presentation is periodized in three sections of review and analysis...

The FIFA World Cup™ organised in 2010 in South Africa represents a mega-event because of the symbol of its location, as well as the constructions it implied. In a developing country where inequalities are sizeable, the need to provide transportation for thousands of visitors led to the adoption of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) urban model. This model...

An under-investigated impact of urbanisation is the decrease in green spaces like domestic gardens, which does not bode well for urban sustainability. To this end, research was conducted in a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa to ascertain the degree to which residents use their garden spaces for the cultivation of edibles and to establish their man...

Research into place names has evolved to beyond the encyclopaedic rendition of their etymological and taxonomic foundations. Toponymy was criticized as atheoretical, apolitical and uncritical until the toponymic turn in the latter half of the 1980s and early 1990s. In South Africa, this change can arguably be traced to the mid-1980s with Pirie’s in...

The management of crime and violence finds expression in the built environment. Citizen-driven home fortification has changed the character of established residential suburbs as the populace attempts to mitigate unacceptably high crime rates in South Africa. By employing the crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) thesis this study us...

Residential mobility practices have assumed a central role in low-income housing strategies and debates in recent times. It is argued that such practices could potentially open up opportunities for the accumulation of socio-economic advantages for the low-income population. However, housing mobility practices in the global South are exercised in a...

There has been a surge of interest by geographers in contemporary South African small towns. This paper reports on the sale of municipal land in small towns from 1974 to 2014 in selected municipalities of the Western Cape. Attention is focused on the sale of municipal golf courses as an example of privatized municipal land that has not contributed...

Gated communities are a global phenomenon that has taken root across the globe. They are a defining residential feature of the post-apartheid built environment and are not only found in major cities, but in smaller settlements as well. There are gated communities that cater for specific niche markets. Gated retirement communities are such a niche m...

Gated developments are not only found in urban areas, but have also increasingly become a part of the rural locale in South Africa. While rural gated developments offer features of security, community and exclusivity in an idyllic rural setting, their proliferation can be linked to a wider process of post-productivist change in the rural locale. Co...

In his 2001 State of the Nation address former President Mbeki announced the launch of the Urban Renewal Programme (URP) as an area-based approach which would form part of a 10 years initiative to address poverty and underdevelopment in targeted areas. It had a specific emphasis on improving joint government planning and implementation. Townships w...

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This paper provides a brief overview of the relevant post-2000 South African policy for regional (provincial) spatial development within the context of the quantitative findings of a study conducted on the growth potential of non-metropolitan settlements in the Western Cape. The findings are presented at municipal level. Five indices (social needs,...

Gated developments, more commonly known as gated communities, have become a feature of urban living throughout the world. Gated developments in South African cities are an ubiquitous feature of the contemporary urban landscape with many new housing developments in the form of secure estates or fortified town house complexes. A review of internation...

Gated developments have long been a subject of research the world over. Most international and South African studies have focused on gated developments within the metropolitan sphere, with very few studies done on non-metropolitan gated developments. This research attempts to address this research gap by focusing on the spatio-temporal aspects of n...

This study seeks to show that the closure of urban public space by residents in a South African context is not a recent phenomenon and that successful citizen-driven urban public space closures have been a feature of the urban landscape before the rise of gated communities and monitored urban public space. The primary objective of the study was to...

South African cities were subjected to artificial, unnatural growth patterns brought about by apartheid planning that legitimated exclusionary practices in the city and which created and maintained racial, social and class differences between people. Post-apartheid South Africa has witnessed processes of urban fortification, barricading and the gat...