The School offers a range of programmes concerned with the planning and design of our environment. The disciplines represented compliment one-another and create a learning environment that is rich and diverse: Architecture is concerned with buildings and their relationship to society’s spaces and places, Landscape Architecture is concerned with the natural environment and its interaction with human occupation, Urban Design is concerned with the quality of larger scale spaces and places, Planning is concerned ,with the design and management of change in the built and natural environment, and Conservation is concerned with our built heritage and its future existence. All the programmes represented share concerns around the quality of human settlement and the natural environment. The programmes in Architecture and Planning share a strong contextual approach and a commitment to engage with Cape Town as a locus with unique and important challenges.
A career in the design and planning of the built environment involves creative, technical, theoretical and managerial work to meet society’s need for shelter, accommodation and organisation. These needs range from the larger scale of cities and regions, to the intermediate scale of buildings and parks, and to the small scale of rooms and furniture – all of which need to be designed, built and managed. Designers and planners work with many other technical specialists, often in large multi-disciplinary teams, to turn conceptual ideas into reality. This process of design and planning takes many factors into account, including the needs of users, environmental sustainability, functional requirements, legal frameworks and financial constraints. Designers and planners have the intellectual and creative ability to synthesise these complex requirements in coherent and expressive form and policy.
At UCT, the Bachelor of Architectural Studies under-graduate degree (BAS) is a foundation programme in the design of buildings and the urban or landscaped environments around them. This degree provides the necessary ability in design, theory, technology and communication to proceed the graduate professional programmes in Architecture (the design of buildings), Landscape Architecture (environmental planning and design), Urban Design (the design of whole city precincts), and City and Regional Planning (settlement planning at a larger scale). These streams lead in turn to professional practice as Architects, Landscape Architects, Urban Designers, and City and Regional Planners.
The School is committed to creating an enabling environment in which students not only build their knowledge, but also their character. We want our students not only to be equipped with disciplinary knowledge of their field of study, but also a set of values that underpin their thinking and actions.
We value education, learning and knowledge; imagination and creativity; open-mindedness and diversity; perceptiveness and perseverance.
The ethos of this School is strongly influenced by our context, both the physical context, the city, and the broader social, cultural and economic context of the region and the country. We are committed to engage with these contexts in both a meaningful and critical way, not as abstract sites for investigation but rather as peopled places to which we can respond.

Bachelor of City Planning Honours degree and Masters of City and Regional Planning degree (linked).

City and Regional Planning is a profession which contributes to the management of change in the built and natural environment. Planning as an activity is a collective societal effort to imagine or re-imagine an urban or regional environment and to translate this into priorities for investment, conservation, new and upgraded settlement, strategic infrastructure investments and principles of land use regulation. At the core of urban planning is a concern with space and the making of ‘place’. Planning is also fundamentally a political activity rather than a neutral, technical activity. It is shaped by values, and planners are constantly called upon to make ethical judgments in relation to different possible futures (from UN Habitat: Planning Sustainable Cities, 2009).
The Honours and Masters programmes at UCT recognize the particular demands of cities and regions in Africa and in the global South, in the 21st century. This requires us to engage with issues of poverty, inequality, informality, rapid urbanization and environmental change. Our partnership with affiliates of Slum Dwellers International in Cape Town allows students to engage first-hand with the issue of informal settlements and their improvement. The close link to the African Centre for Cities and the Association of African Planning Schools exposes students to the diversities of urban life on the continent and the exciting potentials which these offer.
Graduates from the masters programme find work in government at all levels, in private practice, in NGOs, in related fields of environmental, transport or housing development, or in the property finance sector. Planners generally work in an inter-disciplinary environment with other professionals engaged in the built environment. The planner’s work can range from local scale design to metropolitan planning to policy work. It is a diverse field. While the programme content is shaped by the context of South Africa and Africa more widely, graduates are able to put their skills to good use in almost any part of the world.
The Honours programme (which is shared in part with the Landscape Architecture Programme) is concerned with planning in local and metropolitan settings. Studio projects are supported by lecture-based courses in planning theory, environmental issues, urban infrastructure, urban design, planning law, and the institutional and economic context of planning and urban development. The Masters programme covers regional planning through both project and theory work, with a focus on the generation of economic, landscape and settlement frameworks in regional space. The second part of this year involves individual dissertation work. Contact Ms Naomi Gihwala for applications: [email protected]