By Bongani Majola
THE City of Johannesburg has set aside R1-billion for more than 170 projects to upgrade and rejuvenate the inner city and the previously disadvantaged areas.
Multiple spatial development framework (SDF) projects will have a wide-ranging focus from improving storm-water drainage and developing parks, to road construction and the building of 100 000 houses. The SDF programmes are aimed at reconstructing local infrastructures, upgrading and regenerating targeted areas, and consolidating newly revamped districts.
These ambitious plans were revealed last week at the first council sitting since last month's budget debate. The SDF will guide City's future development projects by, among other things, making sure population densities are concentrated along areas of economic activity and by ensuring that similar businesses are clustered together in the same location in future.
"The projects are about translating budget figures into real economic and infrastructure development," a statement from the City said.
"The City of Johannesburg will now use the framework for all decisions about the use of public space, the building and location of new structures, including parks and shopping centres," the statement added.
"From its birth, in 1886, Johannesburg developed as the business and development hub of South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, and the city was subjected to diverse and complex growth demands." Some growth demands were caused by the previous political dispensation, while others were based on economic imperatives of the city.
With the "the dawn of the democratic era in South Africa" and the subsequent change in the approach to city planning it was necessary to review how the country's urban and rural areas develop. Planners had to be aware of the historic backlogs in social engineering service provision and the financial constraints associated with public spending, the statement said.
The new projects, therefore, sought to rectify years of politically motivated growth patterns where "city planning fell within the country's historical social engineering service provision which tended to favour certain groups over others".
For these reasons most of the 170 projects would be skewed in favour of the previously disadvantaged areas and the inner city, since certain components of the city had prospered at the expense of others, the statement added. "The growth of Sandton as a business district, and the decline of the inner city in the 1980s and 1990s is a well-known example."
