Ruth has been offered a Research Associate post at the University of Cambridge from next year and will be leaving the University of the Free State at the end of January 2018. Stuart will therefore take over the role of Principal Investigator and Ruth will move to the position of Co-Investigator. She will still be involved with the SAPER project and will attend various conferences and assist with the drafting of journal articles and other publications where appropriate. Ruth would like to thank everyone for their support while she has been in the PI role and thank you to Stuart for stepping in at this point. We are confident that the SAPER project will go from strength to strength.       

This year has been an eventful one and we would like to thank you all for your support throughout 2017. Here is a summary of project activities this year:

• In April the UK team visited Bloemfontein and Cape Town where they met with the South African team as well as various members of the South African planning community. This was a fruitful time together which provided an opportunity for both teams to discuss the SAPER project’s aims and goals for 2017.
• In June our online questionnaire was distributed to planners across South Africa. We received an excellent response with 212 questionnaires collected over a short period of time. The data from this survey process is currently being coded and analysed.
• The UK data collection amongst planning academics and planning practitioners in on track and half way through.
• Verna Nel and Martin Lewis (the Chief Executive Officer of SACPLAN) presented papers at the second Urban African Planning Conference held in Lisbon, Portugal - hosted by the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT), University of Lisbon and the International Planning History Society
• Lorena attended and presented papers at the Aesop Conference, in Lisbon
• Lauren and Lorena presented at the 2017 RGS-IBG Conference in London in the special session “The ’battle of the maps’ – (re)imagining geographies of knowledge production” organized by Prof. Ashley Gunter (University of South Africa) and Prof. Parvati Raghuram (Open University)
• Mischka attended the joint ISOCARP-OAPA Conference on ‘Smart Communities´ in Portland, Oregon.
• Phil and Stuart have been moving forward with the Teaching App developed at the beginning of this year. The App was taken through a trial run at UFS with around 20 students participating. As part of an assignment they uploaded photos related to urban sustainability onto the App and then these images were discussed in the group. The App will be rolled out on a larger scale in 2018.
• In October members of the South African team made the trip to Birmingham in the UK. This provided an opportunity for both teams to discuss progress to date and the next steps in data analysis and collection.
• Our PhD students Mischka and Rouve have made good progress with their studies and will continue into 2018
• We have uploaded regular Blog post on our website and been active on social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook. Several YouTube clips have also been posted. 
• The team have also been busy putting together various Briefing Notes which will soon be available on our website. They are also drafting several journal articles which will go in for review early next year. The team is currently working on two papers drawing upon the results on our survey.
• The UK and South African Advisory groups were set up during the course of the year. Each of these groups have met together in 2017 and we are grateful to have some of the top minds in planning as part of the advisory team.   
• Relationships with the Commonwealth Association of Planners (CAP) have been extremely rich and productive with a range of forthcoming activities including an event on 22 March 2018 part of the RTPI West Midlands 2018 CPD programme on “Think Planning-Think Global: Planning Challenges in the Commonwealth”, hosted at the University of Birmingham and the development of an online planning platform (led by Phil)
  

  
Next year
Lorena will visit South Africa from the beginning of February to the end of May. She will work with Mischka and Rouve interviewing planners, academics and students across the country. This data will supplement the information we gathered through the questionnaires in 2017.  UK data collection (specially our surveys to UK planning academics and practitioners will run during this period as well). Ruth and Stuart will also host a session on Planning and Geography in South African Higher Education at the Society of South African Geographer’s Bi-annual conference in Bloemfontein next year. We will present papers at various international conferences including the 2018 AAG in New Orleans (Lauren will attend and present preliminary results from the UK data collection), SAPI congress in October and the RGS/IBG gathering in August. Members of the UK and South African teams will also gather in Birmingham in March and June for team meetings and a writing retreat. The Teaching App will also be rolled out further both at UFS and the University of Birmingham while we hope to have the online platform on CAP website up and running by the end of 2018.

 Ruth Massey / Lauren Andres