Programme Director
Delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen
This Conference comes at a confluence of a whole range of events, and thinking through: that which we are; where we would like to be; and therefore, what is the most suitable path to follow for us achieve our goals. It comes at a time, when we have just concluded our Human Settlements Summit in Johannesburg that committed all our stakeholders to a Social Contract to assist us at Human Settlements to transform our living spaces and our landscapes.
I am glad to acknowledge that one of the signatories of the Social Contract is our host today - the South African Planning Institute, who committed the following:
- “To training and capacity building for target Department of Human Settlements Employees at national, provincial and municipal level
- To implementing development programmes targeting South African youth to facilitate their entry into the planning profession
- To implementing campaigns to equip communities with planning skills and knowledge to fulfil their own human settlement needs as active citizens
- To promoting professionalisation of the human settlements sector as it relates to the planning profession
- To encouraging Human Settlement Practitioners to undertake voluntarily professional registration and to continually improve their professional, knowledge, skills, and competences
- To developing the body of knowledge relevant to human settlements development and planning in South Africa.”
We come from a history that has indelibly left a lasting horrific legacy. For us as South Africans, nothing is more defining of the past, its divisions, its racism, its inequalities and its injustices than the places we live in. It would therefore be commonplace to state that, for us to create the society that best defines our hopes, our dreams, the culmination of our fight against injustice and exclusion, would find its best expression in how we plan our future communities; how we plan that those communities should have access to all the necessary amenities equally; how we plan new cities that define us as a common people; how we plan around an environment that speaks to our future together and all the possibilities that are inherent in us as South Africans.
The relevance of this particular conference for us lies in the fact that within my portfolio, we have now reached a point where the issue of spatial planning has become an absolute priority. I am happy to say that we have concluded our Master Spatial Plan and I have brought with me the Chief Executive Officer of the Housing Development Agency, Mr Taffy Adler, who will present the Master Spatial Plan to you later on, as well as some of my advisers and senior officials and I hope we can use that interactive space at the conference for discussions on our Master Spatial Plan. It is an important plan for us and I believe it is a great plan and will determine for us how we would be able to turn around our deeply divided societies and transform them into my understanding of “Great Places”.
As a country it has taken us a great deal of time to get to this point. Our most immediate need after 1994 was the urgent need for shelter, a roof over our people’s heads and the restoration of their dignity. Ten years down the line we realised that even as we were building houses, we were doing no more than recreating Apartheid in a democracy. This is a sad indictment of our planning. We had to rethink our strategy, rethink how we get ourselves out of the quagmire of the past. I must confess at this point that nothing is more resilient than the past. Through trial and error we arrived at a place where we had latched onto the idea of integrated human settlements that reverse the racial spatial plans of Apartheid. Our policies around this were internationally acknowledged as some of the best. But the reality of our past is so ingrained that even with those policies in place, we are unable to get ourselves on the transformation path we so deeply desired.
The very nature of our decentralised planning and the none-availability of land for human settlements were other burdens. Patterns of ownership of land have not changed and are still steeped in our past. In a recent survey by Statistics South Africa, our worst fears were confirmed, that our policies and our reality were not really having the desired outcomes. The only way we could begin to ensure that policy and land availability spoke to the future we wanted, was to create a Human Settlements Master Spatial Plan that I have spoken of. We hope on this, to ensure that we can divert our infrastructural development, our bulk services and all other services necessary for a decent life towards where our people live and conversely, to create settlements where there are job opportunities and the necessary amenities are already available. You would no doubt already have heard from the Minister of Cogta that they have concluded their Urban Development Plan. We hope to use our Master Spatial Plan to determine that, what our cities have planned for themselves, speaks to the Master Spatial Plan and that the outcomes are common and they are a reflection of what we all want.
We hope that in this way the lives of our people will not only be better, but that transport costs, which take up a huge chunk of the earnings of the lower income bracket, will be made less onerous. Currently the average low income earner needs to take two to three taxis to get to work and another two to three taxis to get home after work. The average time spent on the road is no less than two hours either way.
Our plan for Great Places must make economic sense across all classes. Where all the amenities are easily accessible for all. A plan for inclusive Great Places.
In 2008 this same Planning Conference deliberated on “growth, democracy and inclusion: navigating contested futures”. We did not take full advantage of the opportunity to share views with yourselves, possibly because we were gripping with where we were ourselves. Fortuitously, the 2014 Planning Conference seeks to consider the role of planners to influence and creating “Great Places”. It found us very attuned to your thinking, found us very ready to engage with yourselves and with greater clarity about how we can use opportunities like today. We have got our basics right and are ready now to engage in more complex interventions. In the partnership that we have with yourselves, it requires planners to understand the local conditions and more importantly, communities, dynamics and opportunities to contribute effectively. We would like you, as planners to help our communities and our decision-makers to understand their changing urban environment better and to transform ordinary places into “Great Places”.
Our past has not only burdened us with a racial divide, it has burdened us with a present and future which will see our urban areas ballooning. It is a fact we have to live with that two thirds of our population now live in urban areas. I need not indicate that the only way we can manage our growing cities is to plan and prepare for growing urbanisation. This is where we depend on you. The effect of urbanisation requires us as South Africans to rethink the attitudes and strategies with which we approach and plan for human settlements. As this will set the stage for the next five to ten years of interventions aimed at creating more and better opportunities to provide quality of life for all South Africans.
In providing leadership, we are alive to the fact that we cannot manage this alone. That is why we sought a partnership with civil society, the business sector, with yourselves and other professional bodies. In addition to urbanisation, as you will know, some of the major socio-economic challenges facing us are poverty, illiteracy, alienation due to the extraordinarily high levels of unemployment, the provision of social services, skills shortages, the demand for high level human resources, and globalisation which threatens to increase the gap between rich and poor. The intellectual and expert resolution of these challenges falls squarely within our collective competencies. Your conference and many others are aimed at fulfilling this critical function. It is about putting all hands on deck.
And this will set the stage for the next five years. Together with you, we need to focus on collaborative investment, both intellectual and financial between multiple stakeholders with an interest in the creation of integrated and sustainable human settlements, guided by three spatial targeting principles to integrate our cities, connect communities with nodes and amenities, and create a compact city.
I am pleased that we have formations such as yourselves, whose core business is in planning. Those in the know have advised us that the best way of predicting the future is by inventing it. And you cannot invent the future without a plan.
In the framework of integrating neighbourhoods and settlements - making them more effective to provide access to economic opportunities and providing services and amenities - shelter becomes a major imperative in government’s attempt to address the distorted spatial economy, which has resulted in the inadequacy of dwellings in terms of:
- The numbers and structures;
- Suitable dwellings in terms of resilience to disasters and compliance;
- Limited access to dignified level of diverse services;
- Limited choice in location and diversity in affordable housing opportunities;
- The culture of non-payment that negatively impact on the delivery of mixed-income settlements;
- Outdated town planning schemes
Of interest to this conference would be the study and exploration of the characteristics that would make our cities an embodiment of the best of human imagination. Our plans would be required to take the following into account in creating vibrant cities and reviving rural ones:
- Establishing new norms and a national spatial framework.;
- Integrating diffuse funding flows into a single fund for spatial restructuring;
- Reforming the planning system to resolve fragmented responsibility for planning in national government, poorly coordinated intergovernmental planning, disconnects across municipal boundaries;
- Strengthening government’s planning capabilities;
- Developing neighbourhood spatial compacts to bring civil society, business and the state together to solve problems;
- Enabling citizens to participate in spatial visioning and planning processes;
Further, our spatial development policies would need to take the following into account:
- The principle of spatial justice;
- The principle of spatial sustainability;
- The principle of efficiency;
- The principle of good seamless administration.
We, in my portfolio, have come a long way. We believe the quality of life of our people manifests itself in our human settlements. More so in our case than any other country that I know of. I would like to think that the planning profession has been keeping a keen eye on our developments and now that we have signed the Social Contract, we can count on you to go the rest of the way with us. We urge you to be creative in the solutions that you will come up with today; we look forward to your inputs; we urge you to scrutinise your Regulations and Practices to ensure we are in synergy; we urge you to help us to do things differently. When we are in synergy and aligned the needs of the country, the limitations and the potential, we cannot fail to create Great Places for our people. I look forward to a continued productive relationship with yourselves.
I thank you.
