Progress Review; Grumpy Old Men Citichat 1 February 2008

CITICHAT 4/2008 - 1 February 2008


Grumpy old men!

A couple of weeks ago I attended a two-day session for directors, executive and non-executive, of all the Municipally Owned Entities (MOEs); Joburg Power, Water, Pikitup, Metrobus, Tourism, Property, Roads, etc. etc The session was handled as the AGM of every City MOE, some 15 in all, and the Chair of each entity had to report to The Executive Mayor and the Mayoral Committee on the results of the previous financial year, successes and failures over the past year, their plans for the future and the challenges they anticipate. I remember coming away with a couple of major impressions, not all new, but some a reinforcement of previous opinions. First and foremost was, WOW, this is a BIG city to manage and few people actually understand the complexities that it presents. So many citizens are fixated on the pothole outside their house that they miss the essential big picture. Secondly, was the extent of what was being done, the incredibly broad endeavours by lots of people dedicated to their particular passion, the hurdles that have to be overcome and the quality of the various independent Chairpersons.

Thought about that again when I was hit by the headline in last week’s Dispatches section of the Sunday Independent “Jo’Burg’s world-city dreams dashed” with an horrific (for umlungus anyway!) picture of a meat vendor on a pavement in Jeppe (5 columns wide by about 17 cms high – do you know how much an ad that size would cost?) and another of gridlock on the corner of Sauer and Pritchard Streets – quite conveniently taken from the newspaper’s offices!. Had the headline and pics appeared in its more sensation-seeking Sunday competitor it would have been somehow more in keeping with the genre! However………!

Keith Beavon, for whom I have great admiration, is undoubtedly someone whom, as James Clark puts it, has “more knowledge of the anatomy of Johannesburg” than most. His book “Johannesburg, the Making and the Shaping of the City” is factual and fascinating rather than the emotive, personal diatribes about the city that have been in vogue over the past number of years. It is a must for anyone wanting to understand where this city comes from and what the forces were that shaped it. It is not strong on the future but that wasn’t its object. James Clark is a wonderful and much admired journalist who also was involved in, and actually worked in, the inner city for many, many years. Amongst other works, he edited, “Like it was – The Star – 100 years in Johannesburg 1887 – 1987” which provides a rich history seen through that newspaper’s pages. By its nature, not exactly looking into the future of the city! So here we have two eminently qualified individuals, experts in the city’s past, of which both of them have had many, many decades of experience, ruminating about the future of a city that has undergone cataclysmic changes in just the last decade. The physical change undoubtedly colours their bi-focals as they peer into the future.

But the real change we have undergone has far less to do with the physical. Only fourteen years ago, what is now Johannesburg, consisted of thirteen local authorities which were defined along racial lines, not just “Johannesburg, Sandton, Randburg and Midrand” the umlungustans of a past period as mentioned in the article! Those thirteen local authorities have been restructured into the current Metropolitan complex which is spread over some 2 300 sq kms and home to probably some 4 million people (2001 census 3.2 million). A metropolis, for the first time in over one hundred years, the responsibility of a single, democratically elected local government. Sure there have been many mistakes in getting to where we are, but considering the sheer complexity of what has had to be dealt with, that we have structures in place and that most of them work reasonably well, is in my mind quite miraculous. And the City and all its MOEs bar one got clean audits! That alone is quite an achievement.

Keith raises a lot of weaknesses, some inherent in the layout of the city such as our tight grid of roads and small street blocks; others being historical issues that have largely been inherited such as poor planning; bad public transport; lack of law enforcement (which started with the last council in the previous regime) leading to thousands of hawkers on the pavements today; the shopping malls to the north, aging infrastructure (the lack of maintenance of which for decades was attributable to councils in the previous regime) and then the modern issues of shanties, the Gautrain project, minibus taxis and, of course, Eskom’s “rolling power shedding.”

Many of these, not all, particularly the last one where the finger must be pointed at central government, are hardly the fault of the regime from 1994 onwards. For instance the huge “shopping malls that sprang up in the white northern suburbs, rapidly drawing the wealthier people from shopping in the city” can hardly be placed at the door of the current council. They were due to the greed of both previous city councils for the rates income they offered and the greater greed of the developers who effectively incestuously raped the inner city retail - (many of the ‘northern’ developers were the same institutions that held property in the inner city.) As my friend Graeme Reid wrote (Reframing Johannesburg) “In significant ways the development of Johannesburg’s metropolitan area has followed the route of many cities in North America. The Johannesburg city centre of old was the “capital city” – certainly in economic terms – and the Central Business District, often referred to as “New York on the Highveld”. But the preconditions for decentralization were laid in the 1960s when government copied the American car centred freeway system, providing convenient mobility for a wealthy minority to the north of the Johannesburg city centre. The establishment in 1969 of Sandton north of Johannesburg as a separate white local authority laid the basis for the development of Johannesburg’s first “edge city” which competed with Johannesburg by offering lower rates and favourable zoning for commercial and retail developments. Other factors drove the process of decentralization to the north of the city centre. Land values and rentals were high in the city centre. It suffered from its own particular problems of being too big: shaped by poor planning and location decisions of planners and investors alike, the city became spread out, with office workers “needing a car or public transport to make a meeting” (Inner City Economic Development Strategy). But there was no internal public transport system, and the problem was compounded in the 1970s by city planners who, in an attempt to address traffic congestion, severely limited the number of parking bays allowed and available……The second and more rapid phase of decentralization in the 1990s was driven by other and mostly non-economic factors, related to the fundamental changes that occurred in South Africa beginning in the early 1990s. ……During this period an hiatus in decision making occurred in the white Johannesburg City Council, which led by the liberal democratic party, was keenly conscious of the fact that it was the last whites-only local government. Faced with a new constituency which had not voted for it, it struggled to deal with and respond to the changes facing the city and to develop systems of management that were not reliant on the exclusionary laws of apartheid.”

120 years of colonial and apartheid government, between 30 and 40 years of urban decline and everyone expects the ‘new’ government to wave a magic wand and ‘return’ the city to regain ‘the status of a world city’ literally overnight. Firstly urban decline is a fairly rapid phenomenon, like a disease, it spreads rapidly when untreated which was the case until probably 1996. Like a disease that has been allowed to invade every aspect of the city, recovery is slow, medicines take time to work through the system. From 1996 to 2000 the focus was on restructuring the apartheid-based local government structures – a period of “political paralysis”, when urban management was off the agenda. But then the previous five years had also been a period of political paralysis for reasons enunciated by Graeme in the earlier extract. From 2000 on the focus swung back to urban renewal but not on the basis that many whites wanted – the ability to sit on Stuttafords’ or John Orr’s balconies sipping tea in absolute safety after window shopping as they had done in days of yore. It was clearly recognized that the inner city was no longer the centre of growth in the metropolitan area but that it was positioned in a pivotal location with regard to the consolidating formal economic hub stretching from the inner city to Midrand and Pretoria in the north and OR Tambo International Airport in the east “as such it is able to provide marginalized communities from the south of the inner city an entry point into the formal economy.” What was needed was to address for the first time in its history the needs of the majority of users of the city. And that has happened and is happening despite the accompanying pains.

Let’s list just some of the accomplishments since 2000/2001 that the article ignores in order to sensationalise the woes:

The first major public transport facility in the city centre, the Park Central Jack Mincer development – whilst some may view it as chaotic, it works and has been instrumental in producing new efficiencies that has resulted in the time taken on some routes to be reduced by 45 minutes as well as increased business for taxi operators. Followed by the massive Metro-Mall taxi rank and trading market and the Faraday Taxi rank and muti market.

The Civic Theatre returned from a financial disaster to one of the top performing theatres in the country, internationally recognized and with one of the highest attendance rates imaginable.

The Nelson Mandela Bridge and M2 on-and-off ramps that connects north and south to Newtown which has resulted in huge public and private investment – Mary Fitzgerald Square; No 1 Central Place; the Sci Bono technology centre; the refurbishment of the Turbine Hall into A plus grade offices (rentals on a par with Sandton); the refurbished Premier office block; Quinn Street high income residential, Brickfields middle income residential; the refurbishment of the Newtown Hotel and numerous projects in the pipeline due to start over the next 12 months.

The filling of vacant office space in Life Centre and Edura House with BPO tenants and the commencement of construction of the city’s first new office tower in over twenty years with another central city tower in an advanced stage of planning; the conversion of commercial space in Diagonal Street to high grade institutional; the redevelopment of Main Street and Gandhi Square attracting top names in coffee shops and restaurants; the huge increased investment in the Standard Bank ‘super precinct’; the R1.1 billion new building that ABSA are currently constructing to complement their already massive investment in the ABSA campus.

The focus of new multi-million rand investment on precincts such as Constitution Hill, the Fashion District, Jewel City, the Hillbrow Health precinct, the New Doornfontein and Bertrams areas. The public environment upgrading in Braamfontein, Fashion District, Jewel City, Ellis Park, the High Court precinct and now Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville.

And residential accommodation! About 5 000 ‘new’ residential units provided in the inner city between 2001 and 2006 from refurbishments and conversions of commercial space to residential – at least another 5 000 units currently being constructed and the city aiming to increase the number of inner city units by a further 75 000 to 100 000 over the next ten to fifteen years. The inner city population has grown from 120 000 people in 1992/3 to over 200 000 by 1996, 257 000 by 2001 and is currently (2007) estimated at 343 000. And you want that to happen with no pain!

On the transportation front, I also am not a Gautrain fan, but it is happening and is already attracting major new investment around each of its planned stops however few they may be in comparison to London. Keith points out that the London underground started in the 1860s – Johannesburg was not even a dot on a map at that stage nor for another quarter century! Whilst metropolitan London and Johannesburg have roughly the same area (London is in fact smaller) we have a population of around 4 million and metropolitan London between 12 and 14 million. And construction has also started on the Bus Rapid Transport System – given another five to ten years and we will have a transportation system that can compete with any other emerging city.

My personal tracking of investment, which I’m sure is not all-inclusive, shows that between 2001 and 2006 some R7.5 billion was invested in the inner city and that known projects over the next five year period, 2007 to 2012, will be at least double that. In 1998 the value of new investment in the inner city was R23 million, in 2005 it was R351 million.

Joburg’s world-city dreams have not been dashed – not even load shedding will do that – although it may take slightly longer to get where we are aiming! Joburg is a city in transformation, albeit slow and steady, albeit beset by the many problems enumerated in the article, and more, but there is an intense desire and a political will for it to happen and a band of people determined to make sure it does. What is taking place and has taken place on the ground over the last seven years makes a nonsense of the talk of grumpy old men. Eish!

See you in the city! neil