Abstract Background and purpose South African cities face a distinctive urban risk problem: disaster vulnerability is not produced by hazards alone, but by the interaction of apartheid spatial legacies, informal settlement growth, infrastructure fragility, fragmented municipal governance, weak risk data and uneven implementation of planning policy. COVID-19 exposed these weaknesses across housing, sanitation, transport, food security, public health and emergency coordination. Focusing on South Africa as a theoretically and policy-relevant national case, this paper examines how urban planning can be reoriented toward risk-informed disaster resilience in the post-pandemic recovery period from 2023 onward, drawing lessons from the COVID-19 stress-test period of 2020–2022 and aligning them with longer-term resilience commitments toward 2030. Methods A desktop-based systematic qualitative review and a thematic comparative synthesis were conducted in accordance with PRISMA principles. The review examined scholarly literature, policy documents and municipal planning frameworks published between 2000 and 2023. Analysis combined deductive coding guided by resilience theory, risk governance and Sustainable Development Goal 11 with inductive coding to identify emerging themes, including governance fragmentation, informal settlement vulnerability, disability exclusion, municipal data gaps, policy–practice gaps and adaptive planning. Results The findings show that urban vulnerability in South Africa is reproduced through the combined effects of historical spatial inequality, fragmented governance, infrastructure fragility and weak implementation. COVID-19 functioned as a systemic stress test, revealing how everyday planning failures become disaster risks during a crisis. The review further shows that droughts, floods, pandemics, infrastructure failure and health risks operate as cascading rather than isolated shocks. Disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction remains weakly mainstreamed, while participatory governance, green infrastructure and digital risk systems offer useful but conditional pathways for resilience when supported by municipal capacity, maintenance, financing and accountability. Conclusions and implications The paper reframes post-pandemic urban resilience as a problem of compounded risk governance rather than narrow hazard management. It argues that resilience must be embedded into IDPs, SDFs, land-use decisions, infrastructure budgets, community risk assessments and disaster-management plans. Strengthening urban resilience in South Africa requires measurable reforms: improved municipal risk data, disability-sensitive warnings and shelters, coordinated municipal resilience task teams, risk-sensitive land-use planning, green infrastructure where contextually feasible, and stronger monitoring and evaluation. These reforms are essential for moving South African cities from reactive crisis response toward inclusive, adaptive and risk-informed urban governance.
Mangara et al. (Sat,) studied this question.