Mayor of Johannesburg, Councillor Parks Tau,
Honourable Premier of Gauteng Province, Ms Nomvula Mokonyane,
Members of the Executive Councils of Gauteng and other provinces,
Metropolis President, Mr Jean-Paul Huchon,
Deputy Executive Director of UN Habitat, Dr Aisa Kirabo Kacyira,
Mayors and Vice-Mayors here present,
Distinguished guests,
Delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen.
I am grateful for the opportunity to address this important conference. Cities are important organisms. They are places of creation - of wealth, of opportunities, and of new ideas. They create the agglomerations for production of goods and services at a rapid rate to meet growing demands in their immediate markets and across the globe.
It is for this reason that cities occupy the important space in our discourse as they do. You have gathered to discuss precisely how cities are designed, built and governed. You have gathered because we need shared learning and we need to recognise that there is much wrong with the expansion of our cities in the developing world. Consequently, issues of spatial design, efficiencies and management become extremely difficult.
We have at best a mixed history of the establishment of new capitals and new cities. Many of our older cities were designed for small groups of expats, new administrations were created 'in flight', as it were. The requisite skills, especially in areas such as planning, were not readily available, so governance priorities tended to focus on what was exigent, and possible given available skills and finance.
In a country like South Africa, cities were designed for the colonial elite, albeit that they were resident, rather than expat, and for those who were needed to maintain that elite in style. The rest of the population were hidden and controlled by the perversion of influx control legislation that was mercilessly applied.
These trends in settlement are mirrored to a greater or lesser degree across the continent, for this reason our cities expanded onto the colonial cores in quite a higgledy-piggledy manner. We have a fair idea of what the distant future ought to look like, and yet the transitions from the present to those futures are incredibly difficult.
It is easier for us policymakers in the developing world to hope that the problem either disappears, or that nobody notices that there is actually a problem, if we continue to talk about rural development, and ignore our responsibility for grasping the nettle of urban policy.
We must be bold in reversing these trends. Let me explain why.
Urban populations in Africa have almost trebled in the last fifty years. Our host city, Johannesburg added 1.2 million people to its population between 2001 and 2011, according to the results of Census 2011. This significant rate of growth, the largest in our South African cities, is a signal of a trend, rather than of the uniqueness of Johannesburg.
Most of the urbanisation takes place in informal settlements or slums. For example, South Africa today has almost the same number of people living in informal settlements as it did in 1994. This is in spite of the fact that government has provided nearly 3 million houses during the period. What this means is that people who migrate to the cities find city life alienating in all forms.
They cannot find suitable formal accommodation in the cities closer to places of employment and they cannot actually find formal jobs. People thus resort to informal activities on the physical and economic periphery of the city.
An increasingly smaller percentage of new arrivals are actually able to afford city life. Even people who hold formal jobs battle to live in our cities - the poor tend to live on marginal land, in unplanned areas that are consequently poorly serviced; distances are huge and transport costs expensive. The experiences of dislocation and alienation are very real in the lives of the urban poor.
Let me draw on the South African experience of housing again to make this point. Fifteen percent of households in South Africa have access to mortgage finance. Around 60% of households qualify for state provided housing, leaving a group representing approximately 25% who qualify for neither.
Amongst people who find themselves in this gap are the bulk of public servants, and the overwhelming majority of workers who are organised into trade unions. Because this category of families includes so many people who have an organised voice, there is an increased risk of social upheaval.
In South Africa, the absolute numbers of people categorised as poor, are now considerably larger in urban, rather than in rural areas. While rural areas may be home to relatively significant populations of poor people - given the limited employment opportunities and access to public services, cities are increasingly home or sojourn to higher numbers of poor people.
These observations suggest that our cities were designed for the imagined, affluent populations we believe should live in them. Yet, the reality that too many people wake up to each day is that of shattered dreams of improvements in lifestyle.
I am not, for one moment suggesting that we are not conscious of the challenge. The articulation of where we need to get to is embodied in long-term plans which define the desired state. We probably have a surfeit of these in South Africa.
We have a National Development Plan 2030, the Gauteng province has Vision 2055, and the City of Johannesburg has a 2040 vision, the African Union has Vision 2063, and I am sure that there are even villages with documents such as Vision 2100.
The challenge is to put in place credible plans to transition from the current undesirable situation, to the desired future. Bold leadership and innovation are going to be critical in enabling us to make the transition. And the transition will be a journey rather than an event.
The perennial question is what is to be done? I would like to propose that the first and most important is to put in place effective land use management system. We need land use management systems that allow mixed uses; that make poor people feel that they have a right to the city; that capture the appreciation of land value for the benefit of the public; and that promote the sustainable use of land.
Some of the choices exercised may even appear tough to the outsiders - trends in informal settlements include "land farming" by unscrupulous individuals, and some of these illegal settlements are on land designed for planned uses.
We are also conscious of the way our courts have interpreted Section 26 (1) of our Constitution that reads, “Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing”. The tendency has been to seek enforcement of this right, even where planning approvals appear to have been non-existent. Securing the balances between rights and responsibilities in decisions relating to human settlements is therefore paramount.
Secondly, we need to review our building norms and standards to ensure that they are appropriate for the level of incomes of the citizens in our cities, as well as for the efficient accommodation and movement of dense concentrations of people.
Rules that regulate building height, plot sizes and building material should reflect the affordability levels while providing scope for improvement in the future and taking into account environmental considerations. Using any other criteria will perpetuate inequality and make informality permanent.
Thirdly, we need to put in place urban development policies that allow cities to play an effective coordination role to stimulate the social and economic dynamism of our cities. Effective coordination is necessary to maximise the value of the investment that individuals make in housing, that firms make in commercial property, and that the state makes in social infrastructure and other public goods.
Fourth, we need financial institutions that meet the needs of the different populations of the cities. We need both primary and secondary mortgage markets that target currently underserved segments of the population. Whilst we appreciate the difficulty of developing criteria for affordability, we must do so to avoid the complete bifurcation into either formal high-end mortgages or state provision.
To address the proliferation of informal settlements, we will have to design a range of subsidy mechanisms, premising these on ability, rather than desire to pay. It is in the long-term interest of the financial sustainability of the city to ensure that as many of its residents are able to contribute to the revenue pool. In other words, the extent to which the city can grow its revenue base is dependent on whether it can construct the requisite systems and institutions.
Finally, in South Africa the Municipal Systems Act entrenches the right of citizens to be consulted on development plans. This is in recognition of the fact that citizens have agency, they can direct change in their lives and their living environments. The experience of how this legislation has been used to drive change and affirm the centrality of citizens of our cities and local government authorities is mixed.
However, there will have to be upgrades of the methodology in use - it does not make sense to engage in this ritual at a ward level when the municipal-wide structural plans are kept hidden from view. A bottom-up planning process has many advantages, but the process needs to be given authenticity by a better use of information symmetries.
I want to put in a plug for the availing by StatisticsSA of the results of Census 2011 online, and in the form of an application for tablets. The information is available even in the variation of "My Ward, My Councillor" that provides information on a range of public services and private facilities. When used with the generally available mapping techniques available in our Geographic Information System, both planning techniques and information accessibility take a huge leap forward.
Let me digress, yesterday an important initiative called the Education Collaboration Framework was launched. It aims to take forward the specific proposal in the National Development Plan to establish a national initiative comprising stakeholders from all sectors with the aim of improving learning outcomes.
It draws on the strengths of different sectors - state, business, NGO's, trade unions, and social entrepreneurs - in evidence of our ability to work together to solve our shortcomings. We should certainly consider adopting that model to undertake the tasks I have just outlined.
I hold the view that the scale of challenges such as youth unemployment, spatial and income inequalities, economic exclusion, require that cities should become sites of innovation. City leaders, researchers and policymakers should create opportunities for experimentation with different models of delivering services, developing and maintaining infrastructure, creating jobs.
Similarly, the fact that the impact of unsustainable use of natural resources and environmental neglect will be mostly felt in cities should propel us to invest in finding solutions.
To solve some of the problems of spatial and economic exclusion, the National Development Plan proposes a three-pronged approach. Firstly, it proposes that we should increasingly move certain types of economic activities closer to deprived areas such as black townships.
Secondly, we should promote development along transport corridors to capture the value of the investment in existing infrastructure. And thirdly, we should invest in efficient and affordable public transport systems to link people to different parts of the city.
The Plan offers a strategy to address the inherited problems in our country by:
- Responding systematically, and over time, to entrenched spatial patterns across all geographic scales that exacerbate social inequality and economic inefficiency;
- Implementing strategically chosen catalytic interventions to achieve spatial transformation in a manner that supports locally driven spatial governance;
- Striving to achieve a balance between spatial equity, economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability.
The Plan provides a set of 5 guiding principles to inform all our plans. It requires all spatial development to conform to the principles and explicitly indicate how they would meet the requirements of these principles:
- The principle of spatial justice which aims to remove the historic policy of confining particular groups to limited space, and the unfair allocation of public resources between areas
- The principle of spatial sustainability which promotes the sustainable consumption and production as well as ways of living that do not damage the natural environment
- The principle of spatial resilience which is intended to reduce vulnerability to environmental degradation, resource scarcity and climatic shocks while protecting and replenishing ecological systems
- The principle of spatial quality which promotes the improvement of the aesthetic and functional features of housing and the built environment to create liveable, vibrant and valued places that allow for access and inclusion of people with disabilities
- The principle of spatial efficiency which requires that productive activity and jobs be supported, and burdens on business minimised. Efficient commuting patterns and circulation of goods and services should be encouraged, with regulatory procedures that do not impose unnecessary costs on development.
In responding to our challenges we should also draw on experiences from elsewhere in the world. This annual meeting brings together representatives of 78 cities from 42 countries. Through the sharing of experiences over the next 3 days, months and years thereafter we can learn from experiences of other countries.
The annual international awards for innovation provide a rare opportunity to capture some of the best ideas on how to address different aspects of the challenges facing cities globally.
Premier Mokonyane has announced that we will be jointly establishing a Centre for Urban Innovation to identify and track innovative urban initiatives across the world to provide South Africa and all our partners with lessons.
We have taken the decision to collaborate on this initiative because we understand that with urbanisation expected to continue, the challenges are unlikely to ease. We know that the solution does not lie in merely repeating what we have done in the past.
We are fully cognisant of the fact that unless we act swiftly, the patience of our fellow citizens, who live on the periphery, will run out. We need to urgently devise and implement credible plans to intervene and make our cities inclusive; and bring the majority of citizens of our cities into the mainstream and not the periphery.
We need to equip our people with skills and education to take advantage of opportunities offered by the economies of the cities. We need to plan, design, and manage cities for people. This is why you have convened in this conference. We look forward to the outcomes of your discussions.
Thank you!
