T Manuel: University of Cape Town Engineering and Built Environment
students

31 August 2006

The first two lines of the Preamble to our Constitution read:

“We, the people of South Africa,
Recognise the injustices of our past”

Space and its use, was the cornerstone of apartheid. So, the democratisation
of space is an enormously important part of improving the quality of life of
all citizens, as we are required to do by the Constitution.

The economic history of South Africa was shaped by the demands of the mines
– for land and for the creation of a proletariat. The 1913 Lands Act,
accompanied by the introduction of migrant labour soon after the discovery of
gold and diamonds shaped residential patterns in South Africa. Much of the
struggle against apartheid was shaped by struggles against the Group Areas Act
and forced removals. Space was central to the undemocratic practices of
apartheid. So, how do you correct the use of space in the interests of
democracy?

The City of Tshwane covers a huge geographic space. It still contains all of
the elements of apartheid design – so, in one direction there are the townships
of Mabopane and Soshanguve side-by-side. Mabopane is a proper place name; the
township of Mabopane was incorporated into Bophutatswana, as a township for
Setswana speakers, whilst the old area of Mabopane East was set aside for the
Sotho, Shangaan, Nguni and Venda speaking people and called Soshanguve. None of
the Pretoria townships – Mamelodi and Atteridgeville for Africans, Eersterus
for Coloureds and Laudium for Indians, were within twenty kilometres of the
city centre, and each one of them kept distinctly separate. Towards the east,
Ndebele speaking people were herded to areas such as KwaMhlanga, Quaggafontein
and Vlaklaagte, where people still live, whilst they work in Pretoria – people
travel distances in excess of 100 km each way per day, and it is not unheard of
for people to spend in excess of five hours a day in buses to and from work.
Government subsidises these bus trips at the rate of almost R400 per passenger
per month – some of the commuters are contract cleaners, currently on strike
because they earn wages as low as R600 per month. At face value, these
subsidies do not appear very rational.

So, how do you democratise the space in and around Pretoria, within and
beyond the boundaries of the Tshwane Metro area?

Or, let us turn to Cape Town. An imaginary line was constructed at Beaufort
West, called the “Eiselen-De Vos-Malan Line’. This marked the eastern boundary
of the Coloured labour preference area. Africans were preferred in as migrant
workers – with families required to stay beyond “the line”. African people
needed to secure Section 10.1.a rights to live west of “the line” with their
families. Of course, the dompas carried all of the details of where the bearer
was from, where he/she worked, what rights accrued to them and whether they had
paid their “hut and poll taxes”.

All of the geography of apartheid is still present in the Western Cape and
in the City of Cape Town in particular. In terms of the geographic design, the
wealthy, obviously whites, would live on the Atlantic Seaboard, and in the
leafy suburbs at the foot of Table Mountain and Devil's Peak, and Black people
collectively, confined to the Cape Flats. Twelve years into democracy, the
patterns are still very much the same – some blacks, as a consequence of social
mobility now live in the former white areas, but the patterns of the Group
Areas remain, long after its repeal.

Under apartheid the system was maintained through vicious repression,
including the extensive use of Influx Control legislation.

So, how should we democratise space to destroy the patterns of race,
language and class? Naturally, when influx control was repealed and people were
free to move, many people left the poverty of the rural areas, flocking to the
cities in the hope of finding employment. The City of Cape Town saw an
in-migration of 129 400 people between 2001 and 2006 – amongst this number are
the poorest inhabitants of this city. When people leave their rural homes for a
chance in the cities, they are frequently desperate, and therefore do not hang
around until accommodation, employment and schooling are in place. People move
and try and make do – so nationally despite our best efforts, the number of
informal settlements has increased since the dawn of democracy. We built 2,3
million houses since 1994, but during the same period, the number of informal
dwellings grew by about 450 000.

How should we democratise space and the built environment in particular?

Our belief system was shaped by the Freedom Charter, adopted at Kliptown on
26 June 1955 – in regards to space especially, it reads:

“All people shall have the right to live where they choose, to be decently
housed and to raise their families in comfort and security;
Unused housing space shall be made available to the people;
Rent and prices shall be lowered; food plentiful and no-one shall go
hungry;
Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport,
roads, lighting, playing fields, crèches and social centres”

So, how do we perform against our own value system and aspirations?

Part of what we have to unpack is that the very Constitution I referred to
earlier has given us a complex three-tiered system of government, with the
powers of functions of national, provincial and local government defined and
protected. Part of the difficulty is the speed with which urbanisation takes
place – nobody waits for the most appropriate time. Part of the difficulty is
that the backlogs inherited were phenomenally huge. Part of the complexity is
that our economy is not creating sufficient employment for unskilled or
low-skilled workers. So, unravelling this issue is exceedingly an important
part of the measure of the quality of democracy. Yet, there is no reason for
despondency – take a metric of services delivered – 2,3 million houses built;
over 700 clinics built and 215 mobile clinics established; thousands of
classrooms constructed, almost 100 percent enrolment of learners between the
ages of 7 and 16, with literacy rates of 15-24 year olds now at 96 percent;
there are more than 10 million beneficiaries of the social grants system, of
whom 7 million are recipients of Child Support Grants; water has been supplied
to 10 million people, sanitation facilities to over 6 million people and
electricity to about 16 million people, all financed by government; over 3
million hectares of land has been redistributed benefiting some 700 000
households.

Yet all of our best efforts are still far short of that vision set out in
the Freedom Charter which reads:

“Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport,
roads, lighting, playing fields, crèches and social centres.”

This is not a uniquely South African problem; many developing countries
experience similar challenges in varying degrees. There is this wonderful
Brazilian movie called City of God. I say a ‘wonderful movie’ because its
texture is so rich, and it offers a prism through which we can see our own
situation refracted. The City of God – is a slum in Rio de Janeiro – it is a
story of juvenile gangs, heavy drug and arms trafficking and alarming levels of
violence. Why is Brazil still battling to democratise its built environment –
their history is somewhat different from ours – or is it really?

In fact the similarities between the movies City of God (Cidade de Deus) and
our own Oscar-winning Tsotsi are truly incredible, though it shouldn’t be since
life in the favelas in Rio and the townships in Johannesburg are indeed so
similar. In fact, the City of God could be Manenberg, Vosloorus, or even parts
of Chatsworth. Paolo Lins, the author of the book, Cidade de Deus, who himself
is a native of that City of God, talks of three social layers that obtain there
– on top are people who continue to keep families together, and find jobs
outside the slum; in the middle, one finds people who can still organise their
lives, but do so on much lower, and frequently less-formal pay, and at the
bottom are the unemployed, alcoholic and drug-addicted people, striving to
survive their social exclusion. He goes on to ask, “If it was not possible to
sell drugs, what would drug dealers do?”

I repeat that the City of God offers a useful prism through which we should
see the lives of many of our people refracted. The challenge before us is how
to democratise the built environment and who will be the heroes and heroines
who will drive these changes?

Thorstein Veblen was one of the few great economists of the 19th century who
understood that the world was a rough, nasty place, in which businessmen left
to their own devices were savage and unprincipled, and markets are governed
more by greed and power than by prices or competition. He was an untidy,
unkempt neurotic social critic of Norwegian farming stock, who refused to have
a telephone and gave all his students the same grade irrespective of the
quality of their work, except that if someone needed an A instead of a C in
order to get a scholarship he would happily oblige. He wrote The Theory of the
Leisure Class and gave us the concept "conspicuous consumption" and explained
that modern business practices were elaborate constructs for the seizure of
booty through the minimum of physical exertion.

The hero of Veblen's world was not the hard-headed capitalist, nor the
enterprising trader of the "classical" economists, but the engineer.
Businessmen, in his view, were most successful when they deceived the public
and abused the power and opportunities at their disposal: it was the engineer,
the physical planner, the designer, the industrial craftsmen, who was the real
creator of prosperity and modernisation.

The exploitation of a business opportunity requires a single-minded,
blinkered, brook-no-opposition ruthlessness. The organisation of an industrial
operation, or the planning of a city, or the integration of a transport system
- the things that are the business of engineering and operational design and
built infrastructure - these things require intelligent systems integration and
co-ordination and honest transparency.

Veblen was describing the late American 19th century age of rampant capital
accumulation and rapid industrial expansion, and it is an extraordinary feature
of this age that we know more about its great business tycoons, the
Rockefellers and van der Bilts and Carnegies, than about the great engineers
and designers. But think about the extraordinary genius and far-sightedness of
the designers of the great American cities, their transport and sanitation
systems, the construction of electricity and water supply networks, the
calculus and conviction that made high-rise buildings possible.

Nowadays, the headlines are dominated by business deal making and career
prospects in high finance are disproportionately tempting. But in fact, as
Veblen rightly understood, it is engineering design and network planning and
organisational interconnectedness that are the real intellectual challenges of
South Africa's economic reconstruction.

The complexities are not just structural. Think about the difficulties of
designing, financing and managing regional water systems, that serve several
villages and communities, some rich, some poor, in several municipalities, with
several sets of municipal councillors and community groups to consider, a few
farmers and a prospective platinum mine all wanting to secure water rights at
the lowest possible cost, the provincial environmental regulatory office and a
clutter of inquisitive ecology-sensitive non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
and lobby groups to complicate matters, all the uncertainties associated with
weather predictions and climate change to consider, and a rapidly rising cement
price to take into account.

That's just the first clutch of complications. It turns out that the project
is partially funded from the national budget, the province has a regulatory and
planning responsibility and three municipalities all have overlapping interests
in purchasing water for local use. The Public Finance Management Act comes into
play because of the national funding, but so do the Municipal Finance
Management Act (MFMA) and the Municipal Systems Act, and their requirements are
in several respects incomprehensible or contradictory.

Or think about modern communications infrastructure planning: do we really
know whether it makes sense to invest in inter-city fibre-optic cable networks,
or rely on wireless satellite-based transmission; do we shift to digital
broadcasting transmission, or do we wait for the next cost-reducing technical
step-change?

In the early 1890s, the then town council of the leading frontier town of
Grahamstown had to decide how to go about improving the state of lighting in
the main high street and thoroughfares, then served by a solitary paraffin
light. Careful consideration was given to the new-fangled "electricity" option,
but the city fathers decided unanimously that they would invest rather in piped
coal gas as the more reliable and familiar source of lumination energy. Did
they really have the best available advice? Who gets the blame if costly
mistakes are made when network investment decisions are taken?

We never have perfect information at our disposal when these decisions are
taken; technological change is too rapid for that. But this simply makes it
that much more important that good quality analysis is available- to sort out
different categories of uncertainty, to select and plan on the basis of
informed judgment and a healthy sense of the relevant probabilities and
possibilities.

Think now about how the world changes when we move from sluggish economic
growth, even slow decline, behind barriers of self-reliance and sanctions, to
modernisation, accelerated trade and integration into the global industrial and
technological environment. Economic growth even at comparatively modest rates
of 5 or 6 percent a year means something like a doubling of the investment in
new plant and equipment, adaptation of new technologies, learning of new skills
and construction of modern infrastructure, by comparison with the slow-growth
era. It is an enormously more challenging and interesting world, and especially
for the engineering and design of network industries.

This isn't only a technological challenge. In reality, almost any
engineering project brings with it social, environmental, economic and
financial dimensions that involve difficult judgments and value considerations.
Relative interests of rich and poor, farmer and industrialist, households and
businesses, short-term gain against long-term sustainability - these trade-offs
and judgments come into play in all kinds of ways, in the siting of the waste
disposal plant to the pricing of the water services to the choice of
electricity generation technique.

And urban planning, for all its analytical principles and environmental
norms and standards, is very much about how society brings different groups of
people together and how we integrate, or separate, lives and livelihoods. The
old apartheid city planners built just two entrances to every township so that
a Casspir could be parked at each junction to check what was going on. (Do
today's students know what a Casspir is?) Today we have to drive new highways
through those control-points, and build market spaces and trajectories across
town and township that contribute to social consolidation. This is about
thinking laterally, imaginatively and with a long-term vision. And it's surely
a whole lot more fun than merchant banking.

The challenge remains – how do we democratise space? And, how do we right
the injustices of our apartheid past? Are we worthy of our Constitution, or the
vision of the Freedom Charter that shaped the Constitution? Who will be the
heroes and heroines of this new struggle?

Thank you.

Issued by: National Treasury
31 August 2006