Our cities are doomed without a major overhaul of how they are planned

By focusing on structural and governance issues, analysis of Johannesburg’s deadly fire has missed the forest for the trees, writes XOLELA MANGCU

10 September 2023 - 00:00 By XOLELA MANGCU

Responses to the inferno that engulfed a Johannesburg building and claimed 77 lives remind me of a metaphor that Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris and MIT urban planning professor Donald Schon used to describe organisational learning. They distinguished between what they called single-loop and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning, they argued, referred to surface level solutions to organisational problems while double-loop learning inquired into the underlying causes of such problems.  ..

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