By Philippa Garson
ONE of the biggest challenges faced by those tackling Joburg's renewal is what to do with the poor people who are inevitably displaced by the clean-up operations and the resulting rise in property prices.
Several speakers at the Cities in Change conference, held at the City Hall this week, stressed that regeneration had to be accompanied by job creation and alternative solutions for those dependent on informal trading and low-cost accommodation in inner-city slums.
Andrew Boraine, chair of the SA Cities Network and CEO of Cape Town Partnership, spoke of the many challenges facing South African cities, including the need to address equity alongside growth. Boraine criticised urban renewal strategies for being unconnected and one-dimensional. While the country's nine largest cities have created half of all new jobs in the last few years, they have also experienced high population and high unemployment growth. Job creation is not keeping abreast of unemployment rates in the cities and people without jobs are being pushed to the edges of cities, a trend that has increased over the last 10 years, said Boraine.
While Cape Town's city centre has seen a dramatic turnaround - with R14-billion planned and actual development over the past five years, 80 percent of which hails from the private sector - it now faces marginalisation of the city's poor. "We're not focusing so much on crime and grime but on the new problem of affordability," said Boraine.
With property prices now as high as R20 000 per square metre, old Cape Town communities like Bo-Kaap are under threat, as are informal traders who are being displaced by the "coffee culture" symbolic of the city's new upward mobility. Some Capetonians may celebrate the fact that the city now has 85 coffee shops. However, traditional informal sector traders are being squeezed out. "Formal economic activity has picked up, but where does this leave informal traders?" asked Boraine.
While Joburg's economy is growing at double the rate of the national economy, new jobs "are not being created fast enough to keep pace with demographic growth," said Lael Bethlehem, director of the City of Joburg's Economic Development Unit, in her presentation entitled "Implications of the Joburg 2030 Strategy for Inner City Regeneration". Formal jobs are growing at a rate of around two percent every year, but unemployment is growing at an even faster rate, said Bethlehem.
While huge gains have been made in the areas of housing and service delivery, particularly in light of the backlogs inherited from apartheid, the city is still unable to keep pace with the increasing demands placed on it by an ever-burgeoning population, explained Bethlehem. More and more people are moving to the city, some from other countries but most from other parts of South Africa, and census figures show that housing units increased from 550 000 in 1996 to 790 000 in 2001. Delivery in electricity has shown similar gains. However, the number of people using candles has also doubled, said Bethlehem. "We are pushing out services and jobs but not at a fast enough rate."
While the city's long-term vision was to develop Joburg into a world-class city with services and infrastructure to match, she said no-one wanted a "bland" Johannesburg stripped of its diversity and uniqueness. "We want Joburg to be a truly African city".
In his presentation, Johannesburg Housing Company chair Murphy Morobe applauded the fact that investment is returning to the inner city - both in commercial and residential sectors - but criticised the city's managers for not doing enough for the poor bearing the brunt of urban renewal.
The JHC has in the past nine years added an "additional eight percent of housing stock in the inner city for low and moderate income earners," said Morobe. The JHC has 17 buildings in the inner city for low- to middle-income tenants. The low vacancy, arrears and bad debt levels of these buildings showed that there are plenty of people in the city in a position to pay for well-managed and well-maintained rental accommodation, he maintained.
However, Morobe said Joburg's upliftment was being accompanied by the eviction of poor people with nowhere to go. "The blind spot in this increasing formalisation of the inner city, and the increasing management of the social and financial terrain, is to threaten the presence of the poor. The eviction of people in dilapidated buildings without alternative accommodation deprives not only gangster landlords of a captive income, but also decent, honest people of the cheapest accommodation available … This blind spot, caused by the necessary processes of development, undermines the very development in whose name it is being done."
Although this is a natural consequence of development, Morobe said city managers were not doing enough about the problem. "There is no major subsidy for electricity. There is no rebate policy on rates, or bulk service charges for inner city developments."
Morobe said people had to be placed at the centre of development priorities. "Our City Fathers (need to) ensure that policy is translated into pro-poor practice."
|
Permission to use web site material Publishers may use material from this site free of charge, as long as:
|
