6.2 Epistemic notions
6.2.3 Profit driven development
"Well you see, in my mind, the argument wasn't about spend, the argument was about rates, we had to present a view of the Point and we had to present a view of the City which was basically the case, I mean, for me the evidence was that you increase your base of rateable income of properties in the City, you increase your employment and relatively very high levels of spend .... the important thing is for jobs and more revenue so they can spend that revenue on poor people, so that was my thinking" (Consultant 2, 16/05/05).
So it was widely recognised that the Point was firstly in a strategic location and secondly in physical decay, and out of this arose the impetus to regenerate the entire area. The benefits of this would increase the City's economic base, allowing them to address social issues elsewhere within the Municipality. More specifically the SCH added value to this Point Development, increasing the rate base as well as the property prices in the area. Because urban renewal was viewed as a positive practice in terms of both the City and the Developer's objectives, as well in terms of the socio-economic and physical change it would signify, it was used by nearly every member of the team crossing disciplinary boundaries and became the primary rationale behind the project, thus regularising the manner in which the actors understood the development.
In terms of the involvement of the Developers, (DPDC), one of the Developing Agents (representing Moreland) stressed that 'profits' were their primary objective " ... but again you've got to understand that it's private land and the landholders, landowners obviously have profit requirements otherwise they wouldn't have bought the land in the first place" (Developing Agent 1, 17/05/05). This was the view of a City Official who believed it may have been used as a line to substantiate the need for the SCH: "DPDC and the developers have been pushing for the fact that we need this otherwise the investment that we have in the Point is going to run away because it shows lack of security and everything else" (City Official I, I0/05/05). There was also a clear sense of urgency in terms of vulnerability of the market, as the City Manager clearly noted:
" ... the property developers broadly... articulate in a very real sense, the fragility of the market, and an understanding that you have to be very careful that whatever happens there you don't suddenly turn off investment completely because investment is something that's incredibly mobile and so you've got to deal with those investors in a way that is sensitive to that thing" (City Manager,
14/06/05).
This was acknowledged by both sides of the team (City and Developers) as a potential negative impact for Durban and the Point Precinct if the SCH did not go ahead. However, this narrow focus on profits was perceived as a cause of conflict which developed during the process. As the City Manager noted, the views ofthe actors were disparate:
"I think they have been a little bit fragmented, I think that at times there has been too much positioning and not enough people trying to rise above the immediacy of profits or the immediacy of being a user or the immediacy of having a narrow environmental group" (City Manager, 14/06/05).
Likewise another City Official stated that there were tensions as a result of this being a 'profit driven development':
" specifically the returns from the development, there is a short term profit which is the objective of the Developers, although they claimed that wasn't their objective, and it pitted against a long term requirement for sustainability for the City ... those two things certainly led to conflict" (City Official 3, 20/05/05).
However, despite these tensions, it was also recognised by the team that the City's primary financial concern was to secure investor confidence in the Point area which would serve to
boost Durban's economic standing. Thus, they had to facilitate the perception that the Point would be a profitable location to invest. This was articulated by an Official:
"I think if you also look at it in terms ofour city, we have a some really good real estate areas but we also need to find some more discerning areas, that makes more of a cosmopolitan investment-type city as much as, I think there's pros and cons about, should you be gearing a city to be looking at the super rich, there's a whole question to that but I think the city must also be able to cater for that as well. It's a question of how it does it and at what cost, I think that becomes more of the issue" (City Official 4, 10/06/05).
So 'profit driven development' became an epistemic notion because of its 'formative' power. In other words, team members from opposing discourse coalitions coalesced around the necessity and the urgency of securing investor confidence, which facilitated profits for both private investors and the Developer as well as unlocking the economic potential of the Point which would serve the Municipality's objectives as well. Despite tensions which arose, the critical role of profit was a 'positive unconscious' which guided the thinking of the various actors in terms of their interpretations of the development (Foucault, 1970:xi, cited in Hajer, 200 1:8).
6.3 Discourse coalitions, story-lines and policy vocabularies
This section involves an identification of the vanous sets of story-lines which emerged throughout the process and serves to align them with the related policy vocabularies which together comprise and entrench the six discourse coalitions, namely, Globalisation, IDP, Economic Growth, Social, Environmental and Procedural. As previously defined, story-lines are
"generative statements that bring together previously unrelated elements of reality and thus facilitate coalition formation" (Hajer, 1995:62). In the case of the discourse coalitions listed here, the story-lines facilitated "a process of mutual positioning" and functioned as "expressions of power" during the debates (Hajer, 200 I: 10). The policy vocabularies which have been identified are the "set of concepts which structure a particular policy, consciously developed by policy makers" (Hajer, 2003: I05). In terms of the policy documents guiding the SCH proposal, the Integrated Development Plan (IDP) and the Point Development Framework Plan (PDFP) were the two overarching plans. "The 2004/2005 IDP review is a development road map for eThekwini Municipality" whilst the latter guides the development of the Point Precinct more specifically (eThekwini Municipality, 2004:Preface). It should be noted that the Point Development as a flagship project in the City was mandated to align with IDP objectives and in most cases the PDFP reinforces the related key areas of the Plan. Although the diversity of
policy vocabularies was not notable, their frequency suggests that they had become entrenched in the arguments, legitimising certain discourse coalitions. Each discourse coalition is thus discussed below, along with its associated story-lines and policy vocabularies.