Ensuring sustainable land use and land-use change at the wildlands-urban interface in the Garden Route against the backdrop of rapid informal urbanization and climate change.

Abstract

Public open spaces (PoS), and urban ecological corridors that often form the Wildlands-Urban Interface (WUI) in the Garden Route, South Africa, are being lost to unplanned informal settlement due to lack of proactive planning for the poor. Proactive planning for alleviating the experience of their poverty, through provision of shelter, basic services and access to PoS, means a more inclusive and community-informed dialogue on adaptive comanagement of the WUI. Drawing on field research, policy analysis and satellite mapping in the Garden Route—specifically Mossel Bay, Sedgefield and Knysna—in the Southern Cape, this dissertation argues for informing urban planning policy with a concept of an ‘ecological commons’, and for adaptive governance in land use management. The idea of ‘ecological commons’, as land that is not suitable for development but provides provisioning ecosystem goods and services as ecological corridors or PoS, can be viewed pragmatically such that communities manage resources sustainably, without state control or privatization. In this understanding of commons, maintaining PoS ensures access, even for the poor, to land that can be used to alleviate the experience of informal settlement dwelling. However, a more nuanced, systems thinking understanding of ‘commons’ is required to ensure that wilderness areas, within and surrounding urban areas, are preserved as functional spaces for civil society, and as a legacy for future generations where ecosystems do not collapse into a ‘tragedy of the commons’ through continued loss of ecological corridors, PoS, as well as exposure of these communities to polluted and degraded landscapes that are flood and wildfire prone. The first paper makes use of a time-series mapping exercise to identify the settlement pattern of informal settlement in the KwaNonqaba township of Mossel Bay over a 16-year period, mapped against the Spatial Development Framework planning for the same time period. The findings of the paper are that the planning does not appear to be able to effectively adapt to the rapid expansion of this settlement type post-establishment. The second paper analyses the requirements for adaptive governance of the WUI, viewed against the risks of informal settlements within these areas to climate change induced wildfire. Provincial expansion plans for urban development along the Garden Route, in conjunction with likely climate change induced migrations, rapid urbanisation and increased wildfire risk at the WUI, suggest that the extent to which these landscapes are resilient is uncertain.