March 27, 2006
By Neil Fraser
I AM glad to see that Amos Masondo is back at the mayoral helm; I think that continuity is all-important at this stage of the city's development. But who would want his job, really?
The 2010 Soccer World Cup kick-off is now only 53 months away and there is a huge amount of work to be done in the city just related to that event. The infrastructural and other needs around its two core World Cup venues - Nasrec and Ellis Park - are massive and, the latter certainly complex.
Add to their requirements for manpower those of Gautrain and we can expect a skills shortage second to none. I remember when the Carlton Centre was being built - how that project denuded the rest of the country's construction skills and that was nothing in comparison to what we face today.
And major construction won't be restricted to Joburg. I see that Cape Town is planning a brand-new, multi-million rand stadium. It is still to be designed, let alone built. A friend of mine who lives in Mouille Point, in Cape Town, tells me that that City council is proposing that this new stadium be built on the Metropolitan Golf Course.
The philosophy apparently is that as golf is considered an elitist sport it should make way for the game of the people. The fact that the people who would mostly use the stadium live on the other side of the peninsula is unimportant as we continue to pursue idealism rather than sanity.
But beyond the physical needs for 2010, Joburg's mayor will still have to deal with services whose functioning is essential to the everyday running of our city, services that have clearly been mismanaged during the past council term.
Two that stand out like the proverbial sore thumb are Metro Bus and the inappropriately named Pikitup. Starting with the latter, the central city areas where there are no city improvement districts are generally filthy. I'm not sure what cleaning programme is adopted in these areas but whether I drive through first thing in the morning or early in the evening, the pavements and gutters are strewn with litter.
Litter
Some areas clearly are never visited by the refuse company - go through parts of Jeppestown, Greater Ellis Park, Hillbrow and even parts of Newtown and there are huge piles of waste just dumped and ignored. There are a couple of places that I drive past daily where piles of rubbish are never removed.
It appears as if refuse is cleared from those properties that pay for removal and all else is simply left behind. But surely the job of a municipal refuse removal service is to remove all refuse, not just selectively from where it receives payment?
After a meeting in Milpark on Wednesday afternoon, I drove back into the city past the Braamfontein Cemetery and the University of the Witwatersrand West Campus. From the corner of Owl and Annet streets in Milpark, the first rubbish bin on the northern pavement was 300 metres away and the next was outside Wits's Senate House - a further one-and-a-half kilometres.
This pavement handles a large pedestrian flow, particularly of students walking between the University of Johannesburg campus, Braamfontein and the city. How do you expect to even start keeping a city clean if you do not provide sufficient rubbish bins?
I remember being lectured some years ago by my good friend Rich Bradley, the chief executive of the Washington DC Business Improvement District in the United States, on the "secrets of refuse bin success". His district, as in most North American cities, maintains its own refuse bins in its operational area.
Some years ago, when it had to decide on the type of refuse bin to use, the district bought a number of every available design and tested them on the streets for weeks before making a final choice. The first secret, Bradley said, was to find bins into which refuse was easily deposited. It was far more important than designing bins so that the deposited refuse could be easily extracted. They must be welcoming, tempting depositories.
So the district employed dozens of people to test "refuse bin friendliness" - the tall and the short, mothers pushing prams, people in wheelchairs and kids of various heights.
The second secret was to place so many bins on the pavements that people have no excuse not to use them - there must always be a bin close enough to deposit your rubbish. Neither 300 metres nor 1,5 kilometres qualifies.
A hawker, who also lives in the inner city, put his finger on an additional problem: "I have seen a lot of people throwing their rubbish next to the bin and not into it. What do you do then? We seem to have a culture of dirtiness. Another problem is that during the day the city is full of people who do not live here. They don't care because it is not their home."
Magic eyes
A culture of dirtiness - what a sad branding for a city that is seeking world-class status. But he is right, isn't he? Yet other cities have licked just such problems. In Bangkok the local authority introduced an anti-litter campaign called The Magic Eyes Campaign. It was based on educating school kids on why one should not litter and used a cartoon figure and a jingle,
Magic Eyes are Watching You that led children to admonish their elders, politely, for littering.
The same campaign was adopted in Rio de Janeiro with adaptations to local culture. The Magic Eyes figure, a green character with little black frowning eyes, was transformed into an extraterrestrial with antennae. It worked as well as the Bangkok approach. A commentator said, "The underlying core of the innovation and the magic that makes it work is not in the particular figure, but is in the approach of using shame and making grown-ups feel embarrassed when they litter."
In Cairo, a city of 14 million to 16 million people producing 7 000 tons of garbage a day, 60 percent is collected by the Zabbaleen, literally the "garbage people". Aided by private sector groups and Western foundations, they have developed such initiatives as an informal textile mill where girls are taught to recycle rags into everything from bags to quilts.
They produce 300 products a week generating more than R400 000 a year. They have a composting plant for animal waste that earns half-a-million dollars a year and a recycling micro-enterprise project that processes and re-manufactures solid waste. The Zabbaleen approach has been exported successfully to Bombay and Manila.
The underlying premise is that waste is not a problem, it is a resource. We aren't even out of the starting blocks when it comes to innovative ideas to capitalise on the resource.
As an aside, 7 000 tons of garbage a day equates to 2 555 000 tons a year which; taking a population of 15 million, this equates to 0,17 tons of garbage per person a year. According to published statistics, Johannesburg collects 1,4 million tons of rubbish a year (of which 244 200 tons is illegally dumped and 1 779 tons is litter from the streets). But, if the overall figure is correct, then with a population of just 2,3 million, Joburgers produce 0,78 tons of garbage per person a year - 5 times what a Cairoan produces. As they say in the classics, sies.
Metrobus
On the Metrobus front, I received the following e-mail from a senior executive at a major city corporation, who has received consistent complaints from his staff about the bus service:
- It appears that if a bus driver is on leave or sick, his or her bus does not run at all;
- Drivers do not stop at bus stops even when people are waiting for the bus;
- Buses drive in the right-hand lane, bus stops are on the left;
- Breakdowns and the unreliability of buses raises questions about road-worthiness;
- Diesel fumes emanate from some buses;
- Drivers do not stick to official routes, jump red robots and block intersections;
- Drivers are negative and display aggressive attitudes towards their passengers;
- There is clear ticket fraud - buyers of R5 fares are issued with R3,60 tickets; and
- The inside of buses are dirty.
A friend of mine who catches a bus to work from time to time also commented on the speed at which buses are driven - quite terrifying, he says. Maybe bus drivers are actually defrocked mini-bus taxi drivers; they certainly appear to have the same attitude to road use.
Can a mayor make a difference? There are numerous success stories but probably the most appropriate is that of Curitiba, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Paraná. It is most appropriate because, like Johannesburg, it is not a first world city, it has no sea, mountain or major river, it is situated on a plateau over 3 000 feet above sea level and has a metropolitan population almost exactly the same as Joburg.
Founded as a village in 1693, it became a "town" in 1842 but was something of a backwater town - merely a stopover for those going to and from Sao Paulo. In 1940 there were just 125 000 residents, but the population grew rapidly and by 1960 the figure had reached 430 000. Then a population explosion occurred and by 2005 it was home to approximately 1 750 000 people.
Curitiba
Curitiba's metropolitan area comprises 26 municipalities with a total population of 3,2 million (2005 census) - again much like ourselves. It has its fair share of squatter settlements but they are clean because of their garbage policy. I spent 10 days there five or six years ago and it remains for me a model of what can be accomplished through excellent leadership.
When Jaime Lerner, an architect and planner, was elected mayor he was only 33 years old - after 12 years as mayor his approval rating was 92 percent. That surely says a great deal. Prior to becoming the mayor, he had worked on the city's master plan and now had the responsibility of implementing it.
He was determined that the city should be re-engineered for people and not cars. However, because of the city's economic challenges, Lerner had to think small, cheap and participatory. For instance, when the city wanted to plant trees, it wasn't done by the parks department. The mayor made 1,5 million tree seedlings available to the citizens to plant and care for. He developed an innovative plan for dealing with street children and hawkers. His Lighthouse plan of dozens of small libraries (they are actually built like lighthouses) providing internet services throughout the city, revolutionised numeracy and literacy levels.
Today Curitiba is one of the world's best models for all forms of development - how to integrate sustainable transport into business development, road infrastructure development and local community development. Core to the city's unique transport system is the bus service: 1 100 buses make 12 500 trips a day serving 1,3 million passengers.
The buses are express buses that operate on dedicated busways; rapid buses that operate on the busways and other city streets; bi-articulated buses also for rapid transport but using high-capacity lanes; inter-district buses and feeder buses. They are privately owned through 10 companies that are managed by a quasi-public company.
This provides a mix of public sector concerns such as safety, accessibilty and efficiency, with private sector goals of low maintenance and operating costs. The bus companies receive no subsidies; instead all mass transit money goes into a fund and companies are paid on a distance travelled basis.
Apart from having the world's most efficient and effective transport system, a stringent planning policy shows just what can be done with land use controls.
Trash system
The refuse or "trash" system that was introduced has resulted in a clean city. Citizens separate their trash into two categories, organic and non-organic, which is collected by two sets of trucks so that there is no mixing. Poor families in squatter settlements, unreachable by trucks, bring their trash bags to a neighbourhood centre where they can exchange the trash for bus tickets or food.
The trash goes to a re-cycling plant built of recycled materials and people are employed to separate bottles from cans from plastic. The workers are handicapped people, alcoholics and recent immigrants. The recovered materials are sold to local industries. Curitiba recycles nearly 70 percent of its waste; Joburg purportedly recycles just 13 percent of its waste.
New city projects have historically been chosen by referendums to ensure that they meet real needs. Voters are informed of relative costs and then choose between projects. All levels of our current government have clearly forgotten the imposition of projects by the previous regime.
And the result? Writing in The Impossible will take a little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, author Bill McKibben says: "Maybe an effort to convince myself that decay in public life was not inevitable was why I went back to Curitiba to spend some real time, to see if its charms extended beyond the lovely downtown … After a month … we decided with great delight, that Curitiba is among the world's great cities. Not for its physical location; there are no beaches, no broad spanned rivers. Not in terms of culture and glamour; it's a fairly provincial place.
"But measured for liveability I have never been any place like it. In a recent survey, 60 percent of New Yorkers wanted to leave their rich and cosmopolitan city; 99 percent of Curitibans told pollsters they were happy with their town and 70 percent of the residents of Sao Paulo said they thought life would be better in Curitiba."
I reserve the last word for Lerner. "There is no endeavour more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream. When a city accepts as a mandate its quality of life; when it respects the people who live in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for future generations, the people share the responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the only way to achieve that collective dream."
Now that's a challenge for any mayor.
Have a great week, Neil
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