October 22, 2007
By Neil Fraser
IN 10 years' time, the inner city of Johannesburg will be unrecognisable.
Over the next five to six weeks, Citichat will look at changes that have happened over the past decade, those currently planned or under way and some possibilities for the future. The rapidly looming 2010 Fifa World Cup™, meeting the ever-increasing demand for housing, a transport system that will have a widespread and dramatic effect on the city and the changing nature of the demand for commercial premises will all put new pressures on the urban fabric.
The timeous and proactive response to these pressures will be critical. The infrastructure that will have to deal with these responses will also be crucial and, here, I am not referring to physical infrastructure, although that is clearly an aspect, but to the social and institutional infrastructure.
These have not always been particularly successful over the last decade, with progress often being made despite them rather than because of them. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that some have grossly retarded progress.
Over the past couple of months it has become clear that many aspects of the public sector, at all levels, are feeble, if they are working at all. Response times and planning are just not good enough for the age we live in; in-fighting and one-upmanship bedevils the public sector and the right words become a refrain against which a background of lack of action is palpable.
Private sector involvement
I see a quotation from a major group of property owners and managers in the recently released
Trafalgar Inner City Report 2007 to the effect that "the council continues lagging private sector improvements". Questions are being asked by the private sector of the council's ability to take cognisance of the real changes being experienced, in their planning for the future.
I thought that 2010 would be a unifying factor providing all levels and groups with a common goal, but I see continuous stratification and priority differentiation with different groups doing their own thing. Irrespective, the inner city will change, dramatically.
As I mentioned, the Trafalgar Inner City Report 2007 was published a couple of weeks ago, the sixth year it has been produced, but this year appears to be a break from its previous local analytic approach to providing broader commentaries on various aspects of inner cities locally and internationally by a range of contributors.
It makes for interesting reading, with a wealth of excellent articles from a variety of people with international exposure as well as local experience. A number of its articles are particularly pertinent and thought-provoking. Just one example among many, is from Ian Fife's Street Sadness. Fife is known as a highly competent journalist but he is also a director of and shareholder in a black-owned sectional title investor company, thus qualifying him to draw this sort of conclusion:
"When a sectional title building goes wrong, the owners need help. Cutting their electricity raises their suffering and increases the seething resentment in the city. Expropriating their building for the Better Buildings Programme - the Johannesburg Property Company initiative aimed at eradication inner city slums - destroys their lives. A careful combination of understanding, connecting and persuading is a step in the right direction. We do not have better answers. More appropriate and skilled people among the local authorities must accept this problem for what it is and find the best solutions. When they find it, many intractable inner city problems will slowly be resolved."
International issues
In his foreword to this year's report, the chairman of Trafalgar, Neville Schaeffer, makes some interesting comments about international urban issues, including the following:
"Inner cities around the world share the same problems. Each one has experienced a time in their history where the degradation and neglect has created cesspools of slum lands rife for building hijackers, greedy slum lords and yet still home to thousands of people desperately seeking a better life than the one from which they are trying to escape."
There are some who believe that cities are subject to cycles of growth and decline and it's just a question of riding out the bad times so that you can capitalise on the good. I don't subscribe to that belief, and I'm not suggesting that Schaeffer does - certainly I have found that cities internationally face very similar problems to ourselves and that cities internationally are experiencing a major upturn.
The people I recently took to various US cities were staggered by the similarities of problems being addressed. We do seem to think that our issues are unique - far from it. Whatever the reasons, and there are many, I believe in response to the threats and problems that beset "downtowns", or inner cities, it is what you do and how you do it that is critical. By "you" I mean government (local government in particular), business and the broader community, collectively.
Mayor's role
On our trip to the US, we saw the effect that mayors can have on a city - in the American system, executive mayors dictate the policies of their terms of office far more visibly than here. One of the cities we visited has an executive mayor not in the least bit interested in the "downtown" which has, as a result, regressed during his term of office and everyone is looking forward to his successor who will, it is believed, again bring balance.
Suffering from "term-of-office" disease seems to be an international phenomenon - previously city officials brought a continuity and order to city progress but that seems no longer to be the case and, locally, we certainly have the enormous problem of loss of institutional memory. Policy changes appear within an individual mayor's term not because of improvement but because the previous policy appears to have been forgotten.
The executive mayor of New York preaches a different gospel from his officials - he was commenting on his city officials' tendency to "buy" stakeholders by financially supporting new building initiatives. His policy, he stated, was "not to give tax incentives to get companies to locate here". A better policy, he said, was to "bribe employees" by making the city a better place to live.
Yes! I would have added "for everyone". We use the same terminology but our actions are not consistent with the meaning of the words.
In Portland last year, I saw a really active community, keeping a close, collective watch on what the city was doing, being properly consulted and being stridently vocal about issues that they disagreed with, and listened to. And, actually getting their hands dirty when necessary.
Divided community
Here, 13 years after 1994, we still have a community divided along class, race and economic lines. To some extent I believe that the political system must shoulder a great deal of the blame. Representative community needs far more active support than a ward councillor system where the ability and commitment of the councillor seems to be the sole determinant of "community involvement".
In the States and the UK in general, business appears to be far more broad- minded by being involved and committed to the macro picture while keeping a close watch on their own bottom lines. Here, generally, it is the latter that appears far too often to be the main motivator.
Let's face it, most people - and certainly local government and business - stood to one side for many years, decrying the city's degradation but doing virtually nothing to change it; in fact they exacerbated the decline through either doing nothing and/or not acting in the best interests of the city.
It is only since the current executive mayor's first term of office that we have experienced positive action that, together with the improved national and local economy, and the lure of 2010, has resulted in a clear upturn. This was initially fuelled by local government's own investments in key infrastructure that, in turn, attracted the private sector, but it is the private sector that has largely maintained the impetus over the past few years with the council, apart from some notable exceptions, becoming quite moribund.
I was, this week, enquiring about the resolution of a problem that first surfaced almost exactly a year ago, to be told that the two departments involved were at a "stand off" because of a disagreement on how to proceed - so no-one was dealing with the issue.
Wednesday evening's edition of The Star trumpeted "Metro cops get tough in inner city" - it's about time, crime has been with us for years. The metro police talk ad infinitum about "zero tolerance" but stand around corners to catch people talking on their cellphones while they are driving, while metres away squeegee men visibly and actively pursue their intimidatory practice and vendors badger motorists. Zero tolerance?
If I sound negative, I'm not. I still have great faith in the future of the inner city and there is still no doubt in my mind that we are going to see an extraordinarily different place emerging over the next decade or two - we'll start to look at it in depth from next week.
Cheers, Neil
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