Neil Fraser
August 10, 2004
AS its birthday month for us, our 12th, and we are in the middle of our Decade of Democracy, I thought it might be profitable to look back and see what progress has been made over the past 10/12 years in the city regeneration process. Or not!
The Central Johannesburg Partnership (CJP) was established in August 1992 as an outcome of a city-wide workshop held in November 1991. Then referred to as the CBD, today city-wide refers to the metropolitan area.
The organisation opened its doors on 1 August 1992 and spent a number of years in gathering information and undertaking research in order to develop an understanding of the forces leading to degeneration and the steps to be taken to combat them. This related particularly to six major issues that had been identified during the 1991 workshop:
- Safety and security
- Informal trading
- Residential accommodation
- Transportation and taxis
- Urban Design
- Marketing
A further issue of concern was the structuring of local government and its approach to these problem aspects. I'll look at how we've done in each of these over the next few weeks.
Safety and Security
In the early '90s the city was plagued with a very high level of criminal activity. A high percentage of inner-city crime related to opportunism - street muggings and car smash-and-grabs. They became very high profile as too often they involved tourists - yes, we did still have tourists in the inner city in those days! At that time, the inner-city hotels were also used extensively by air crews and, as various members were attacked and robbed on the streets, they moved out of the city, which was a multi-million rand loss to the hotel industry and the city's economy. Crime became the No.1 issue in the inner city, and sensationalised in the media as the Crime Capital of the World, perceptions of the inner centre were damaged locally, nationally and internationally.
At that stage, there were very few SAPS officers in the city. Border wars and KZN had soaked up the majority. As a result of representations made by city business to the then SA President, the Minister of Law and Order and the National Police Commissioner were instructed to deal with the matter. They did so by sending into the city 1200 kits-konstabels with six weeks of training, no weapons, handcuffs or radios! Crime went up! So business offered to pay for fully-trained police officers, provided only that they would be permanently assigned to the city. SAPS refused the offer, saying they wanted the freedom of moving their officers where needed, regardless of who paid their salaries, as the city was not high on their priority list at the time.
The CJP investigated a variety of interventions and, in 1993, set up a pilot Business Improvement District (BID) based on a model we had researched in North America. It had an almost immediate positive impact, and crime was reduced by over 90 percent in six months in the area in which the BID was established. The BID followed the advice we had been given by both police and BID managers in the USA - one of the major deterrents to inner-city crime is highly visible security: preferably police, but in their absence, highly visible private security officers. As in the USA, these were paid for by the property owners. The BID also employed street cleaners and began to address the public environment. Since then the BID approach has spread throughout the centre city area and Braamfontein and is now also in operation in Rosebank, Illovo and Sandton as well as in Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban. BIDs are known as CIDs in South Africa - City Improvement Districts.
Next came CCTV. In 1995, the CJP was requested by the SAPS to set up an inner-city workgroup to investigate the use, funding and organisation necessary for the deployment of CCTV. The SAPS and the CJP undertook an investigation into city-related CCTV interventions in the United Kingdom in early 1996 and, subsequently, Business Against Crime (BAC - Gauteng), the SAPS and the CJP arranged for an international CCTV expert from the British Home Office to visit the city in August 1996. BAC later took over the establishment of the CCTV project in 1999. The operational company was later privatised and CCTV now covers a substantial part of the inner city.
The Metro Police (JMPD) were established in 2001 and, whilst they are more of a by-law and traffic enforcement agency, they are another layer in the anti-crime initiatives in the inner city that are focused on reducing criminal activity. To date, their impact on by-law enforcement has been disappointing, but 2004 has seen some improvement in their visibility and hopefully they will start to play a more meaningful role in the future.
Finally, the numbers of SAPS officers deployed in the inner city has dramatically increased over the past two years and they have become more and more effective.
I don't believe that one single initiative has been responsible for the very definite reduction in crime that the inner city has experienced over these past 10/12 years. Rather, it is the combined effect of all these and other initiatives. Thus, whilst crime was the No.1 concern in 1994, the combined efforts of the public and private sectors over the past decade have taken the edge off this perception. Although there are admittedly still some no-go areas in the inner city, they are becoming more and more limited. The public sector's contribution has been through increased SAPS presence and effectiveness, the establishment of the Metro Police and major funding support for CCTV. The private sector has contributed through CIDs and the CCTV initiative. Had Metro Policing achieved the levels of enforcement that they should be capable of, I would have marked the overall 10-year improvement at seven out of 10, but I think six is a more realistic score with an eight/nine target for 2010.
Certainly there is room for improvement and hopefully, this will happen through strategies, greater co-ordination and focus that should be achieved through the City Safety Strategy announced earlier this year by the Council's Economic Development Unit.
Informal Trading
Informal street trading has been a part of Johannesburg literally since the city's founding in 1886. And so, it would appear, have been the attempts to control it! Professor Keith Beavon in the 1989 publication 'Informal Ways', recorded what the approach was up to just a decade ago - action can legally be taken against the hawkers if they do not move a certain distance in a certain amount of time, or if they are trading without a licence or without having the licence with them. Action can also be taken if the hawkers are seen to be blocking either the road or pavement on, or alongside which, they operate. It is also possible for action to be instituted on the basis of a complaint received from an unidentified member of the public or from a shopkeeper who believes hawkers are competing unfairly with his shop. Actions can vary from spot fines to arrest and confiscation, to the destruction of the hawker's commodities. All of this applied right up to the beginning of the '90s. The pendulum was heavily weighted against informal trading!
In the early '90s, with pending democratic changes clearly in the offing, all the country's offensive legislation came under scrutiny. In May 1991, all restrictions which had denied disadvantaged communities opportunities to start businesses were removed, but, rather like throwing the baby out with the bath water, so were all protective measures. The City Council of the time decided that it would not repeal its regulations, but would also not enforce them. Unfortunately, it also chose not to manage the resultant chaos. Informal trading mushroomed in the city - I seem to remember figures of 250 licensed traders in the early '80s which in the early '90s now rose to a reported 12000. The pendulum had swung back in the favour of the hawkers, with a vengeance!
The streets became more and more unmanaged and a great many formal retailers lost faith in the Council, perceiving there to be a lack of political will to enforce the by-laws. They packed up and left the city. The quality of formal retail declined, and the City began to count the cost of their laissez-faire management approach of the past few years. An added complication appeared in the form of illegal immigrants who cornered a part of the market generally selling cheap imported goods of every description, whilst more and more street traders were clearly just fronts for formal shopkeepers. The deterioration in the public environment became pronounced. It was clear that action had to be taken.
Certain areas of the city where informal trading was considered to be inappropriate were declared no-trading areas, other areas were declared restricted trading areas. Construction started on providing alternative accommodation for traders and the current Council established the Metropolitan Trading Company focusing on informal trading and taxis. The Yeoville Market was the pilot project followed by Metro Mall on the west of the CBD, then the Quartz Street linear market in Hillbrow and more recently the Faraday Muti Market on the southern edge of the CBD. Together, they have succeeded in providing far better trading conditions for hundreds of informal traders. But little or no enforcement has been provided at street level. Where there has, corruption seems to have become part and parcel of the system. Confiscated goods are reported as disappearing between the place of confiscation and the storage facility. A new plan but no enforcement - the pendulum was yo-yoing!
The Joburg 2030 economic vision recognised that during the past decade the economy of the city had been shrinking and, therefore, the city had neither become a better city nor provided a better quality of life for its citizens. Whilst this obviously could not be laid solely at the door of informal trading, it was recognised that the uncontrolled and unmanaged approach was very much part of the problem, and part of the decline. A new policy has now been developed - it continues to seek to remove traders off the pavements over a period of time into buildings or markets designed for their specific use, but also to address the pavement chaos created by the balance by providing pavement trading stalls. Between now and the end of September, the city will be providing some 500 trading stalls in areas of the city where trading off pavements will be allowed and this will be followed with more later in the year. But, longer term, the aim is to dramatically reduce the number of street traders.
From 1994 to 2004, we have thus seen an advance from a totally laissez faire attitude to informal trading to a strategy that has started to be implemented and which, when eventually completed, should impact positively on the city. We have made advances in the provision of trading markets (I would score that aspect seven out of 10), but much of the city still looks like a pig sty (which scores that aspect one out of 10) - so the overall ten-year improvement is probably about four out of 10. The key to improving the score to a reasonable level by 2010 is enforcement. Without that, all efforts will be negated.
Government that allows unmanaged informal trading is doing neither the towns/cities nor the informal traders a favour. The economic results of unbridled informal trade make it clear that the city is the loser. On the other hand, informal traders deserve better than they are getting - they must be given every opportunity to develop and grow their skills and their income but they have little chance of doing this on the streets in current conditions. Why should thousands of people be condemned to operating on pavements with no proper shelter, no storage or toilet facilities, exposed to the high degree of pollution that our cities generate? Why should hundreds of thousands of city users have to endure pavements that are difficult to navigate and filthy and that impact negatively on the city's ambience? Some have suggested to me that the current situation demonstrates our Africanness, but surely it is not what we mean when we talk of striving to become an African World Class City? Are markets the answer?
We will do far better for the city and all its stakeholders, which clearly includes informal traders, if we adopt a pragmatic rather than an emotional approach to solving the problem. I believe that the current strategy is just such a pragmatic approach, but it comes with some ifs. If corruption can be eliminated (which I don't believe is limited to just one party) and if implementation can take place in the best interests of the city and of informal traders, and if there is proper enforcement, we can get that pendulum to come to rest plumb in the centre. Then everyone will win!
