The Functional Settlement Typology was originally developed by the CSIR as part of the National Spatial Trends Overview project (2008-2009) commissioned by the South African Cities Network, The Presidency and former DPLG to inform Cabinet discussions on urban development policy aspects and the process of developing a National Urban Development Framework (SACN et al, 2009). It was developed through an interactive technical and consultative process, overseen by an expert reference group. The typology development was widely consulted, presented and utilised within development planning, and government policy and planning units (Van Huyssteen et al, 2009 & Spocter et al, 2010). Figure 1 provides an indication of the core building blocks utilised to develop the original 2008/2009 typology.

Figure 1: Original methodology of the CSIR/SACN functional settlement typology

The National Planning Commission has since its inception made use of some of the spatial analysis, as well as spatial planning and policy inputs developed over the last couple of years in support of national policy and planning processes, provincial planning processes, as well as municipal (especially district and metropolitan) planning processes. After a number of discussions on the possible nature of a spatial narrative, and the development of framework for such a narrative, that could support the NPC work, the CSIR was requested to provide support to strategic spatial analysis and planning support to the NPC in terms of inter alia refining typologies and profiling of settlements and sparsely populated areas.

The basic methodology followed, was to focus on providing some profiling and enhanced understanding of settlement and land-use patterns to inform the Spatial Diagnostic and Spatial Narrative. Given the request, the basic value that could be added within limited scope and budget, making use of most recent investment by the CSIR during 2010-2011 in terms of updating the mesoframe (basis of former typologies), updated disaggregation methodologies (utilised for disaggregation of data for the platform), as well as recent updates in data, have been that of revisiting existing typologies in order to support the identification, description and understanding of:

• Nodes, Settlement and land-use patterns (figures 2 and 3),
• Sparsely populated areas of SA, in terms of key land (figure 2) and
• Municipality wide settlement patterns.

Below are the results of the updated settlement and land-use description at a mesozone demarcation:

Figure 2: South African scale settlement patterns (2018)

Figure 3: CSIR Town Typology 2018 (Update of the former SACN/CSIR Functional Settlement typology, 2013)

The spatial distribution of cities, towns and settlements according to the typology is set out on Figure 3, whilst more detailed definitions are set out in Table 1. It’s important to note that place names of the biggest and most well-known town/settlement are used for ease of reference and location identification and metro’s and secondary cities are included within the ‘city area’ category within the typology.

Typology of Town areas based on settlement sizes and role within hinterland

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