CITICHAT 8/2008 - 29 February 2008
Providing for the practical and the academic in place management.
I’m in cold London for back to back conferences of the Institute of Place Management (IPM) and the Association of Town Centre Management (ATCM). In the case of the former, it is the inaugural conference of the Institute, in the case of the latter, it is one of many conferences that the organisation holds in different parts of the country, this one being an annual Strategic Leadership Conference. So here we have a newish organisation, IPM, focusing on research and education in the urban realm and a long established organisation in city management issues, ATCM, representing a wide range of urban stakeholders and role players, meeting over a couple of days in their own disciplines, but ultimately working for the same end – making cities better places!
Over the twenty something years that I have observed the city scene here in the UK, city centre management has seen a change from the traditional local government led model to include a variety of types of city partnerships between public and private sectors as well as the emergence of town centre managers (often with a team of specialists) that are paid for through a variety of funding streams, some by business others by business and council others by various combinations “helping town and city centres realise their natural roles both as prosperous locations for business and investment, and as focal points for vibrant, inclusive communities.” ATCM members and their partnership networks add up to a national constituency of some 10,000 leading businesses, government agencies and professions. Together, they enable a uniquely comprehensive exchange of know-how and ideas spanning a range of interests and skills represented in town and city centres……………..and achieving beneficial outcomes for all the following:
Government
Building successful town and city centres contributes to the policy objectives of central government and complements the economic, social and regeneration strategies of local government and development agencies.
Retailers
Improving the quality of the public realm is synonymous with delivering a better, more popular and more profitable trading environment for businesses of all kinds.
Property owners
A better trading environment enhances the status of town centres and the demand for property, increasing both its capital worth and rentable value.
Developers
Increasing competitiveness enlarges the customer base, fuels a continuing drive for differentiation and unlocks opportunities for new facilities and attractions.
Transport providers
More attractive, accessible town centres strengthen efficient transport hubs and increases demand for higher volume, modern, integrated transport systems.
Town centre managers
Effective policy development, training and information provision enhances the status and knowledge base that underpin sustainable management structures, leading to improved services and accelerating commercial growth.
Consultants
The growth of professional management and increasing expectations drives an escalating demand for high quality information, research and specialist skills across the spectrum of environmental, physical, economic and social development.”
Over the past five years, another urban intervention that has proved to be most successful here has been the establishment of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) or what we call City Improvement Districts (CIDs). I had written some years ago about the advent of BIDs in the UK when Central Government provided funding assistance to establish some 22 pilot BIDs in various towns and cities in Britain, the local constituencies (levy payers) having the final vote. Since 2003 that appears to have grown through 67 successful ballots (only 7 that have not succeeded.) Of course, like ourselves, some cities have a number of BIDs operating within their boundaries.
Scotland introduced their enabling legislation in 2006 which came into force in 2007 with a current pilot programme supporting six BID locations.
Jacquie Reilly, ATCMs BIDs Director (‘Talking BIDs’ January 2008) says that “there is no doubt that the formal and focused process of BID development is creating far greater business engagement and producing well honed business plans in many towns large and small. ……BID projects are becoming more and more sophisticated from in-house wardens with hand-held PDA systems to innovative marketing campaigns with town vouchers and dining weeks…”
Amongst some excellent addresses at the ATCM conference I was particularly interested in a report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. This related to a sustained research programme they were commissioned to undertake over a two year period in some 21 towns, cities and areas across the country. The objective is to provide a more ambitious agenda for business engagement and Town Centre partnerships which will provide a model “universally accepted and valued by the business community” as well as increased funding sustainability, influencing local policy development contributing to success in the area and providing different models to market town, sub-regional centres, industrial areas, etc. The report will be published at the end of March and should make interesting reading.
The Institute of Place Management is very much a complementary body to ATCM. IPM is an international professional body “that supports people committed to developing, managing and making places better.” It aims to support and develop the profession of place management and to showcase the most important place management developments across the world, providing a reference point for practitioners. IPM provides place managers, academics and policy makers with access to valuable information on the topic of place management. They comment on the concept of ‘place’ as follows:
”One of the most central concepts to human existence is that of place. We spend our lives somewhere; whether we are working, relaxing or just existing - we pass our time in various locations; we may travel to a town or city centre to shop, commute to a business park to work, and return to a neighbourhood to sleep.
History tells us that successful places, or those that pass the test of time, evolve to meet the changing needs of those that use them. Increasingly, attempts are being made to manage this evolution through some type of proactive intervention process.
It may be regeneration, management, marketing, economic development or any permutation of these but the aim is the same - to improve a distinct area or destination for the benefit of its users. This is the essence of place management – the process of making places better.
Although this term is relatively new, place management has, in practice, become an established concept over the last twenty years in Europe, having existed in parts of North America for much longer. It is an emerging concept in other parts of the world such as Asia and Australia.”
There are few courses offered anywhere in the world that I know of that focus solely on the management of place. I know that the International Downtown Association (IDA) has been working on something for a number of years and is offering appropriate training in the USA, but I don’t know of anything at university level that would equip people in this rapidly emerging profession. “Two thirds of town centre managers in the UK alone have highlighted this as a problem and are keen to undertake place management specific qualifications.”
ATCM have therefore been working in partnership with the Manchester Metropolitan University to launch, through the Institute of Place Management, a range of place management specific qualifications to help people within the profession achieve their full potential. What will make the courses by IPM unique is that they will offer qualifications which reflect the true diversity of place management. Prof Cathy Parker, the Development Director of IPM says: “There is an enormous variation in what place managers actually do and how they do it. We also recognise the variety of subject disciplines that place management draws from, such as: social entrepreneurship; management; marketing; economic development; retailing; education; crime & security; planning & design; and tourism & leisure to name a few.
It is our philosophy that this diversity, merged with the experiences, opinions and beliefs of our participants, is the core strength of all the programmes we co-ordinate.”
Courses offered will include:
Introductory Diploma in Place Management
MSc in Place Management
MA Urban Regeneration
MA Place Regeneration & Marketing
IPM hopes to establish an international network of people committed to making neighbourhoods, towns, cities and retail districts the best they can possibly be. To this end they have also established a Journal of Place Management and Development which aims to provide a central repository for research into these issues pulling together theory and practice. Volume 1 2008 is due to be published shortly.
In a relatively short space of time urban management, space or place management or whatever you may call it, has come a long way.
Cheers, neil
Friday, February 29, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
Musings;UDZ;Evictions Citichat 22 February 2008
CITICHAT 7/2008 - 22 February 2008
Valentuine's Day Musings
February means Valentine’s Day, State of Nation and Province addresses and, an important Constitutional Court rulings and, Ballet!
February is quite an exciting month what with Valentine’s Day, the end of one’s financial year, national and provincial State of the Nation and State of the Province reports, national budgets et al. Added to that a milestone judgement on evictions from the Constitutional Court and it’s been quite a month.
I liked Time Magazine’s Valentine’s Day essay “The Best Way to Spend Valentine’s Day is Don’t” and, after finding that shops were charging R79.95 for six red roses I decided that they were right! But my favourite city-related story regarding Valentine’s Day is about the Mayor of an American city who was running under a particularly tight budget whilst simultaneously getting a great deal of flack for the extensive number of potholes in the city’s roads. In desperation, he devised a plan. He had the potholes surveyed for geographical position and size. Having obtained quotes for fixing different size potholes, he proceeded to sell each pothole to a citizen. They could then go out and paint a heart around ‘their’ pothole complete with the initials of their beloved. After Valentine’s Day he could afford to have all the potholes repaired. Great lateral thinking!
Not sure about great lateral thinking from province. The Premier did emphasise that, “in recognition of our position as South Africa's most urbanised area, we will continue to explore unique possibilities for us to create an integrated, globally competitive urban region in the shortest possible time.” Efforts would therefore be stepped up to build Gauteng as a competitive city region. But that’s old news and we’d like to see more concrete evidence of what exactly the rhetoric means. He did announce a new partnership between Province and the universities of the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg “as the anchor institutions in the establishment of a Gauteng City Region Observatory. The GCRO will undertake and coordinate research and benchmarking for the Gauteng City Region. This partnership will allow for an independent assessment of the GCR's impact on poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment and inequality and other key indicators. It will also enable us to more effectively harness the province's intellectual capital to help build a better Gauteng.” That’s well and good but let’s have the details of the proposed GCR. Anyway according to the media, a significant proportion of that intellectual capital may well be on the move again!
Good news was that Province will be implementing the “G-link (Gauteng link) initiative to provide affordable broadband access to 95% of Gauteng's people within the next five years.” Not sure how that all works out in relation to what each city is planning! Again some clarity is needed.
Nothing said about ‘Mashatile’s Monorail’ but I’m sure that will raise its head again. For me what was glaringly missing was a report back on the Gauteng Provincial Government Precinct (GPGP).
We’ll have to rely on a report in the Saturday Star of February 16th, with a misguided headline “Joburg CBD upgrade ready to roll” – what do you think we’ve been doing for the last fourteen years, playing marbles? - it was reported that “after a delay of almost seven years, work…..will finally get under way on Monday, when contractors move onto site.” Apparently this will consist of “stripping, dismantling partitions and clearing the buildings which have been standing empty and disintegrating since the provincial government purchased them several years ago.” Imagine if they were a private sector developer – seven years! Upgrading will then start in May with the offices being ready for occupation by December. Phase 2 of the GPGP will be “the upgrading of pavements and reshaping Beyers Naude Square and its surroundings.” Hallelujah! Flo Bird and I have a date to dance on the rubble of the demolished edge buildings on the north and south boundaries of the Square. Right Flo?
Apart from the refurbishing of the heritage buildings and the Square, a new 15-storey office block will be built on the open land on the corner of Sauer, Commissioner and Market. This R100 million building will house the office of the Premier. It will be right opposite the Avril Malan building dubbed the worst building in the CBD! Bet we now see some action there! The comment was also made that Province would seek assistance from the private sector for additional parking now that their underground parking building has been scrapped. I don’t think so, the private sector is struggling with this issue, the result of poor parking ratios introduced by the public sector itself in the ‘60s!
Not a word about the Rissik Street Post Office although that evidently falls under the Provincial Legislature but then I thought that Beyers Naude Square did as well! The City has got to use their political muscle to force the Legislature to get this building into shape before 2010 – imagine taking Pommy visitors around the city and telling them that the decayed building was once our city’s main Post Office and that under the giant condom on the clock tower were once housed miniature Big Ben bells presented to us by the City of London which have been stolen and melted down! Mind you, Pommy soccer lads are probably more interested in condoms than bells!
I see in the Premier’s address he talked about a campaign of naming and shaming those who do not change to energy efficient globes and switch off lights and appliances at night and when not in use. Time to name and shame those that are allowing our heritage assets to disappear (or callously removing them as was done by Imperial)
Cities did a bit better in the national budget.
The Minister of Finance advised that he is going to extend the urban development zone incentive (UDZ) for another five years. This is good news for the city indeed as the previous formal deadline stated that buildings approved for the tax incentive must have been brought into use by 30 March 2009 for the investor to be eligible for the incentive. That has held up things lately as time is running out. Now the cut-off date goes out to 2014 – in addition the geographic area approved previously may be altered/extended by request. I haven’t seen the City’s figues lately but I remember that well over 100 proprties were submitted for approval for the tax relief – hopefully this extension will draw plenty more investment into the inner city.
Investment in public transport will get R11 billion over the next three years – “spurred on by their 2010 FIFA World Cup commitments, our larger cities have begun to modernise public transport arrangements. These reforms go well beyond the requirements for 2010, and are central to the modernisation and sustainability of our urban environments”
Well done, Trev!
In the Premier’s State of the Province address he pointed to a continued migration into Gauteng. The massive increase in the number of people now residing in our province being reflected in the 2007 Community Survey which shows Gauteng as now having the highest population in the country, at 10,451 million people. One in four households in the country is now in Gauteng.
Of course, a large number of these, locals, migrants and immigrants still live in the inner city in unhealthy and dangerously decayed buildings, many in appalling conditions. The City has been trying hard, not always sympathetically, to deal with this situation over a number of years. In December 2005, I wrote on two blocks of flats in Hillbrow that had been raided by police (at two-thirty in the morning) to remove residents who had been illegally occupying the flats for the past four years. In doing so, the police had come under gunfire, bottles and rocks. “Some of the comments in the article were very revealing. A young mother said that she had been paying R1200-00 per month for the past four years to share a flat with her three sisters. 135 illegal immigrants had been arrested during the raid. Several firearms had been recovered, and, ready to be lit and hurled at the police, 25 litres of petrol in bottles. This sounds like Beirut at its worst!” So these building, like many others of their ilk, had extortioners, illegal immigrants and criminals as residents in addition to the extorted just looking for somewhere over their heads.
In the same year, 2005, another press report of the 13 November, stated that the council had in fact obtained 60 court interdicts for evictions in the past nine months but they had not been acted upon as yet. I suggested that the City did not in fact have a plan to deal with the urban poor!
Then, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), an international human rights NGO, published “Any Room for the Poor?”, a report that dealt with forced evictions in Johannesburg. The report quantified the extent of our problem as about 18 000 households who currently live in “bad buildings” because of the non-availability of decent low-cost housing. The report’s profile of the occupants of these buildings is that they are the poorest and most vulnerable residents in the inner city; many performing poorly paid jobs either in the formal sector or subsistence earners in the informal sector. They live in bad conditions, not by choice, but because nothing else is available. Clearly they live in the inner city so that they can be close to sources of employment and also to avoid transport costs.
My gripe had always been that evictions do not solve the housing problem in the inner city, they exacerbate it. But, at the same time, many of the buildings being occupied are a danger to the health and sometimes to the lives of the inhabitants. We had numerous deaths in the Drill Hall before something was done about that building. It is a gigantic dichotomy that has to be approached with both sensitivity and with some concrete plan in place.
In March 2006 a High Court ruling on City Council evictions and related issues was handed down. It centred around an application brought by the City Council to evict over 300 people from 6 properties in the inner city based on the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act 103 0f 1977 “which concerns the City’s ability to exercise its statutory powers and duties to prevent dangerous living conditions in its area of jurisdiction.”
Judge J. Jajbhay introduced his judgment as follows “The consequences of rendering a person homeless in the circumstances postulated in this case have a very wide reach. It affects the very quality of a person’s life, dignity and a person’s freedom and security.” He stressed that a State had a duty to “immediately address the housing needs of its respective population, if any significant number of individuals are deprived of basic shelter and housing. To do otherwise is considered a prima facie violation of the right to adequate housing.” “The Applicant’s Inner City Regeneration Strategy will affect thousands of poor occupiers in the inner city in this way.” He conceded however that “Where occupiers have been occupying the building for some time (such as in the present instance) has to be looked at with far greater sympathy than those who deliberately invade the buildings with a view to disrupting a housing regeneration programme contemplated by a municipality.” Interesting quote from another ruling – ”What is really a welfare problem gets converted into a property one.”
His judgement, that alternative accommodation had to found in the inner city itself before evictions could take place was appealed against by the City and if I remember correctly, the High Court ruling was upheld although the Appeal Court did not seem to limit the geographical location of the alternate accommodation to be offered to the people to be evicted.
. Next step, the last in the legal chain, was for the matter to go before the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court ruled that the City cannot evict unless adequate alternative accommodation has been considered and a municipality has to show that it has engaged meaningfully with the tenants before attempting to obtain eviction orders from court. Another interesting ruling from the Constitutional Court in this case related to the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act which make it a crime to remain in a building when ordered to leave – this was found to be unconstitutional and in such cases only a court could rule..
The City is already proceeding with the provision of interim emergency shelter to accommodate those who have to be moved. This includes the old Perm building, Chelsea and MBV buildings in Hillbrow, Hospital Hill, Santa Monica Court, Noverna Court, Muti Huse and BG Alexander.
The good thing about this long extended process is that clarity has finally been reached which would not have been the case if NGOs seeking to protect the rights of the poor hadn’t acted like a dog with a bone, worrying it to death. Maybe it’s time to do the same exercise with informal trading. Lately I have been getting a great deal of inflammatory newssheets from The Trader’s Crisis Committee talking of constitutional rights being ignored etc etc all of which, I believe, was lately volubly expressed on an SABC 3 programme. I received a copy of a comment from a lawyer on this issue which I found most helpful:
“Town planning, regulation of trading, traffic control, infrastructural planning and implementation in a CBD are some of the things that are considered necessary for local government to exercise meaningful control on. The services relating thereto are also the prerogative of local government. This is the context that local government's intervention and regulation should be understood, for the sake of creating orderly trade in the CBD or anywhere were else within its jurisdiction.
It is true that the constitution makes provision for people to trade freely. In terms of section 22 of the bill of rights, every person has a right to freely choose his trade, occupation or profession, but the bill of rights also provides that the practice of a trade may be regulated by law. Section 36 of the bill of rights furthermore quite clearly sets out that there may be limits to the freedom of trade. It provides that:
"The rights in the Bill of Rights may be limited only in terms of law of general application to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, taking into account all relevant factors, including—
(a) the nature of the right;
(b) the importance of the purpose of the limitation;
(c) the nature and extent of the limitation;
(d) the relation between the limitation and its purpose; and
(e) less restrictive means to achieve the purpose."
The regulation of trade by means of a permit system is not unconstitutional. The trading permit bylaw and implementation thereof would of course be required to comply with the constitutional provisions.
So let’s end on a lighter note yet one that still emphasises the huge contrasts we face in the inner city and the country as a whole!
Ever wanted to go behind the scenes of a major ballet? How about The Sleeping Beauty? This is your chance to be present at a special rehearsal for Members and guests of PARKTOWN WESTCLIFF HERITAGE TRUST to be held on SATURDAY 15 MARCH 2008 from 10h00 to13h00. This will be a sneak preview of the SA Ballet Theatre’s preparations for the upcoming season – you will watch a class followed by rehearsals for the upcoming season which will run at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre ..
Bookings and payment for this event MUST be made in advance to EDGAR MOAGI at the SA Ballet Theatre. Tel 011-877-6898. The cost is R75 members and R85 non members. Park at the National School of Arts parking ground in Hoofd Street opposite the HOOFD STREET, Braamfontein. Meet Gill Sagar and David Forrest at the Hoof Street entrance to the Civic Theatre before 10h00.
You’re not a member? Good time to join!
Ciao, neil
Valentuine's Day Musings
February means Valentine’s Day, State of Nation and Province addresses and, an important Constitutional Court rulings and, Ballet!
February is quite an exciting month what with Valentine’s Day, the end of one’s financial year, national and provincial State of the Nation and State of the Province reports, national budgets et al. Added to that a milestone judgement on evictions from the Constitutional Court and it’s been quite a month.
I liked Time Magazine’s Valentine’s Day essay “The Best Way to Spend Valentine’s Day is Don’t” and, after finding that shops were charging R79.95 for six red roses I decided that they were right! But my favourite city-related story regarding Valentine’s Day is about the Mayor of an American city who was running under a particularly tight budget whilst simultaneously getting a great deal of flack for the extensive number of potholes in the city’s roads. In desperation, he devised a plan. He had the potholes surveyed for geographical position and size. Having obtained quotes for fixing different size potholes, he proceeded to sell each pothole to a citizen. They could then go out and paint a heart around ‘their’ pothole complete with the initials of their beloved. After Valentine’s Day he could afford to have all the potholes repaired. Great lateral thinking!
Not sure about great lateral thinking from province. The Premier did emphasise that, “in recognition of our position as South Africa's most urbanised area, we will continue to explore unique possibilities for us to create an integrated, globally competitive urban region in the shortest possible time.” Efforts would therefore be stepped up to build Gauteng as a competitive city region. But that’s old news and we’d like to see more concrete evidence of what exactly the rhetoric means. He did announce a new partnership between Province and the universities of the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg “as the anchor institutions in the establishment of a Gauteng City Region Observatory. The GCRO will undertake and coordinate research and benchmarking for the Gauteng City Region. This partnership will allow for an independent assessment of the GCR's impact on poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment and inequality and other key indicators. It will also enable us to more effectively harness the province's intellectual capital to help build a better Gauteng.” That’s well and good but let’s have the details of the proposed GCR. Anyway according to the media, a significant proportion of that intellectual capital may well be on the move again!
Good news was that Province will be implementing the “G-link (Gauteng link) initiative to provide affordable broadband access to 95% of Gauteng's people within the next five years.” Not sure how that all works out in relation to what each city is planning! Again some clarity is needed.
Nothing said about ‘Mashatile’s Monorail’ but I’m sure that will raise its head again. For me what was glaringly missing was a report back on the Gauteng Provincial Government Precinct (GPGP).
We’ll have to rely on a report in the Saturday Star of February 16th, with a misguided headline “Joburg CBD upgrade ready to roll” – what do you think we’ve been doing for the last fourteen years, playing marbles? - it was reported that “after a delay of almost seven years, work…..will finally get under way on Monday, when contractors move onto site.” Apparently this will consist of “stripping, dismantling partitions and clearing the buildings which have been standing empty and disintegrating since the provincial government purchased them several years ago.” Imagine if they were a private sector developer – seven years! Upgrading will then start in May with the offices being ready for occupation by December. Phase 2 of the GPGP will be “the upgrading of pavements and reshaping Beyers Naude Square and its surroundings.” Hallelujah! Flo Bird and I have a date to dance on the rubble of the demolished edge buildings on the north and south boundaries of the Square. Right Flo?
Apart from the refurbishing of the heritage buildings and the Square, a new 15-storey office block will be built on the open land on the corner of Sauer, Commissioner and Market. This R100 million building will house the office of the Premier. It will be right opposite the Avril Malan building dubbed the worst building in the CBD! Bet we now see some action there! The comment was also made that Province would seek assistance from the private sector for additional parking now that their underground parking building has been scrapped. I don’t think so, the private sector is struggling with this issue, the result of poor parking ratios introduced by the public sector itself in the ‘60s!
Not a word about the Rissik Street Post Office although that evidently falls under the Provincial Legislature but then I thought that Beyers Naude Square did as well! The City has got to use their political muscle to force the Legislature to get this building into shape before 2010 – imagine taking Pommy visitors around the city and telling them that the decayed building was once our city’s main Post Office and that under the giant condom on the clock tower were once housed miniature Big Ben bells presented to us by the City of London which have been stolen and melted down! Mind you, Pommy soccer lads are probably more interested in condoms than bells!
I see in the Premier’s address he talked about a campaign of naming and shaming those who do not change to energy efficient globes and switch off lights and appliances at night and when not in use. Time to name and shame those that are allowing our heritage assets to disappear (or callously removing them as was done by Imperial)
Cities did a bit better in the national budget.
The Minister of Finance advised that he is going to extend the urban development zone incentive (UDZ) for another five years. This is good news for the city indeed as the previous formal deadline stated that buildings approved for the tax incentive must have been brought into use by 30 March 2009 for the investor to be eligible for the incentive. That has held up things lately as time is running out. Now the cut-off date goes out to 2014 – in addition the geographic area approved previously may be altered/extended by request. I haven’t seen the City’s figues lately but I remember that well over 100 proprties were submitted for approval for the tax relief – hopefully this extension will draw plenty more investment into the inner city.
Investment in public transport will get R11 billion over the next three years – “spurred on by their 2010 FIFA World Cup commitments, our larger cities have begun to modernise public transport arrangements. These reforms go well beyond the requirements for 2010, and are central to the modernisation and sustainability of our urban environments”
Well done, Trev!
In the Premier’s State of the Province address he pointed to a continued migration into Gauteng. The massive increase in the number of people now residing in our province being reflected in the 2007 Community Survey which shows Gauteng as now having the highest population in the country, at 10,451 million people. One in four households in the country is now in Gauteng.
Of course, a large number of these, locals, migrants and immigrants still live in the inner city in unhealthy and dangerously decayed buildings, many in appalling conditions. The City has been trying hard, not always sympathetically, to deal with this situation over a number of years. In December 2005, I wrote on two blocks of flats in Hillbrow that had been raided by police (at two-thirty in the morning) to remove residents who had been illegally occupying the flats for the past four years. In doing so, the police had come under gunfire, bottles and rocks. “Some of the comments in the article were very revealing. A young mother said that she had been paying R1200-00 per month for the past four years to share a flat with her three sisters. 135 illegal immigrants had been arrested during the raid. Several firearms had been recovered, and, ready to be lit and hurled at the police, 25 litres of petrol in bottles. This sounds like Beirut at its worst!” So these building, like many others of their ilk, had extortioners, illegal immigrants and criminals as residents in addition to the extorted just looking for somewhere over their heads.
In the same year, 2005, another press report of the 13 November, stated that the council had in fact obtained 60 court interdicts for evictions in the past nine months but they had not been acted upon as yet. I suggested that the City did not in fact have a plan to deal with the urban poor!
Then, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), an international human rights NGO, published “Any Room for the Poor?”, a report that dealt with forced evictions in Johannesburg. The report quantified the extent of our problem as about 18 000 households who currently live in “bad buildings” because of the non-availability of decent low-cost housing. The report’s profile of the occupants of these buildings is that they are the poorest and most vulnerable residents in the inner city; many performing poorly paid jobs either in the formal sector or subsistence earners in the informal sector. They live in bad conditions, not by choice, but because nothing else is available. Clearly they live in the inner city so that they can be close to sources of employment and also to avoid transport costs.
My gripe had always been that evictions do not solve the housing problem in the inner city, they exacerbate it. But, at the same time, many of the buildings being occupied are a danger to the health and sometimes to the lives of the inhabitants. We had numerous deaths in the Drill Hall before something was done about that building. It is a gigantic dichotomy that has to be approached with both sensitivity and with some concrete plan in place.
In March 2006 a High Court ruling on City Council evictions and related issues was handed down. It centred around an application brought by the City Council to evict over 300 people from 6 properties in the inner city based on the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act 103 0f 1977 “which concerns the City’s ability to exercise its statutory powers and duties to prevent dangerous living conditions in its area of jurisdiction.”
Judge J. Jajbhay introduced his judgment as follows “The consequences of rendering a person homeless in the circumstances postulated in this case have a very wide reach. It affects the very quality of a person’s life, dignity and a person’s freedom and security.” He stressed that a State had a duty to “immediately address the housing needs of its respective population, if any significant number of individuals are deprived of basic shelter and housing. To do otherwise is considered a prima facie violation of the right to adequate housing.” “The Applicant’s Inner City Regeneration Strategy will affect thousands of poor occupiers in the inner city in this way.” He conceded however that “Where occupiers have been occupying the building for some time (such as in the present instance) has to be looked at with far greater sympathy than those who deliberately invade the buildings with a view to disrupting a housing regeneration programme contemplated by a municipality.” Interesting quote from another ruling – ”What is really a welfare problem gets converted into a property one.”
His judgement, that alternative accommodation had to found in the inner city itself before evictions could take place was appealed against by the City and if I remember correctly, the High Court ruling was upheld although the Appeal Court did not seem to limit the geographical location of the alternate accommodation to be offered to the people to be evicted.
. Next step, the last in the legal chain, was for the matter to go before the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court ruled that the City cannot evict unless adequate alternative accommodation has been considered and a municipality has to show that it has engaged meaningfully with the tenants before attempting to obtain eviction orders from court. Another interesting ruling from the Constitutional Court in this case related to the National Building Regulations and Building Standards Act which make it a crime to remain in a building when ordered to leave – this was found to be unconstitutional and in such cases only a court could rule..
The City is already proceeding with the provision of interim emergency shelter to accommodate those who have to be moved. This includes the old Perm building, Chelsea and MBV buildings in Hillbrow, Hospital Hill, Santa Monica Court, Noverna Court, Muti Huse and BG Alexander.
The good thing about this long extended process is that clarity has finally been reached which would not have been the case if NGOs seeking to protect the rights of the poor hadn’t acted like a dog with a bone, worrying it to death. Maybe it’s time to do the same exercise with informal trading. Lately I have been getting a great deal of inflammatory newssheets from The Trader’s Crisis Committee talking of constitutional rights being ignored etc etc all of which, I believe, was lately volubly expressed on an SABC 3 programme. I received a copy of a comment from a lawyer on this issue which I found most helpful:
“Town planning, regulation of trading, traffic control, infrastructural planning and implementation in a CBD are some of the things that are considered necessary for local government to exercise meaningful control on. The services relating thereto are also the prerogative of local government. This is the context that local government's intervention and regulation should be understood, for the sake of creating orderly trade in the CBD or anywhere were else within its jurisdiction.
It is true that the constitution makes provision for people to trade freely. In terms of section 22 of the bill of rights, every person has a right to freely choose his trade, occupation or profession, but the bill of rights also provides that the practice of a trade may be regulated by law. Section 36 of the bill of rights furthermore quite clearly sets out that there may be limits to the freedom of trade. It provides that:
"The rights in the Bill of Rights may be limited only in terms of law of general application to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, taking into account all relevant factors, including—
(a) the nature of the right;
(b) the importance of the purpose of the limitation;
(c) the nature and extent of the limitation;
(d) the relation between the limitation and its purpose; and
(e) less restrictive means to achieve the purpose."
The regulation of trade by means of a permit system is not unconstitutional. The trading permit bylaw and implementation thereof would of course be required to comply with the constitutional provisions.
So let’s end on a lighter note yet one that still emphasises the huge contrasts we face in the inner city and the country as a whole!
Ever wanted to go behind the scenes of a major ballet? How about The Sleeping Beauty? This is your chance to be present at a special rehearsal for Members and guests of PARKTOWN WESTCLIFF HERITAGE TRUST to be held on SATURDAY 15 MARCH 2008 from 10h00 to13h00. This will be a sneak preview of the SA Ballet Theatre’s preparations for the upcoming season – you will watch a class followed by rehearsals for the upcoming season which will run at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre ..
Bookings and payment for this event MUST be made in advance to EDGAR MOAGI at the SA Ballet Theatre. Tel 011-877-6898. The cost is R75 members and R85 non members. Park at the National School of Arts parking ground in Hoofd Street opposite the HOOFD STREET, Braamfontein. Meet Gill Sagar and David Forrest at the Hoof Street entrance to the Civic Theatre before 10h00.
You’re not a member? Good time to join!
Ciao, neil
Friday, February 15, 2008
Fashion District Citichat 15 February 2008
CITICHAT 6/2008 - 15 February 2008
The Fashion District 2.
I’ve just looked up previous Citichats in which I wrote about the Fashion District – the first time was in November 2000 then November 2001; February 2003 and March 2004..In between I have given short reports on progress, or the lack thereof! I can’t believe that so much time has passed, in fact it’s nine years since the proposal to develop a fashion district was first formally mooted in the 1999 Inner City Economic Study by Professors Tomlinson and Rogerson.
In one of those previous Citichats I wrote that the Fashion District was “an area whose grittiness belies its incredible potential.” Well, some of that potential is sloooowly starting to emerge from the grittiness that still characterises the precinct – I mentioned last week that investments in the area over the recent past are evidently nearly at the half-a-billion rand mark.
Other comments I made previously also still apply! “The pavements still double as extended showrooms for the shops as well as serving as open-air ‘factories’ for hundreds of informal seamstresses. The whole area (Kerk to Market and von Wielligh to End) is a bustling somewhat chaotic scene vaguely reminiscent of yet totally different to the golden era of South Africa’s rag trade. Then it was the country’s manufacturing centre for women’s clothing - trolleys hung with dresses energetically pushed from factory to shop by young designer hopefuls, streets clogged with railway delivery trucks and construction equipment as developers tried to keep pace with the demand for manufacturing space. But by the late 80s formal clothing manufacture in the area’s many sweatshops had disappeared as the South African industry virtually collapsed. Now, over the past few years, the district has again acted as a magnet attracting largely informal manufacturers and seamstresses. Many of the manufacturers are from other parts of Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d’ Ivoire – all adding to the cosmopolitan flavour of the area, all adding to “Africa-chic” in clothing design and manufacture. Rees Mann, the visionary ‘architect’ of the District who is leading the metamorphosis of the area and its community, likens the Fashion District today to London of 1948, “poised to explode with energy and creativity”.
Rees would know, for his father, a bespoke tailor, arrived from London in that year, 1948. Father and son witnessed the rise and fall of the fashion industry over the next 34 years. But, even after the demise of the industry, Rees had a belief in the potential of the area. He opened a business, at 109 Pritchard Street, SEWAFRICA”, that would support and enable SMME's access to the industry, “by keeping stock available at prices which only wholesalers could offer, by allowing SMME's to buy goods in small quantities, by pleating individual garments when other manufacturers would only take large quantities and even by making patterns available in six different languages enabling people of different cultures to sew” Later he added training facilities to enable individuals in the informal clothing manufacturing sector to obtain national qualifications plus facilities for holding fashion shows without having to pay the exorbitant costs of hiring formal establishments.
In early 2004, Rees launched AFSEW Centre also in Pritchard Street, in fact diagonally opposite his earlier project. Comprising six 500 square metre floors plus ground floor and basement, the building was built in 1966 specifically for the clothing industry. It was later used as a diamond cutting works but stood unoccupied for probably ten years. The refurbished building now provides facilities for emerging and established fashion designers and provides offices for the Fashion Institute, a non-profit organisation established to oversee the development of the Fashion District.
A few years back the City, through the Johannesburg Property Company (JPC), expropriated a site that faces onto both Pritchard and President Streets between Troye and Polly. The previous structures were partly demolished and the site redeveloped by the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) as a Fashion Square to be known as the Fashion Kapitol. The development will offer retail space to a number of designers, provide restaurant facilities, offices for the Fashion Institute and, most important, an outdoor fashion ramp with seating as well as indoor exhibition space. The project has been beset by all kinds of problems that have seriously delayed progress but it will open, hopefully, in a few months time.
On the north-eastern corner of Pritchard and Polly Streets, the Affordable Housing Company, AFHCO, a major private sector developer of mainly residential accommodation in the inner city, has refurbished an apartment building whilst one block west, City Prop are busy refurbishing a commercial building with retail on the ground floor. The Gallo building on the corner of Troye and President backs onto the new Fashion Kapitol and was bought for refurbishment a while back. This Art Deco building was built in 1936 and “conceived in its entirety as an advertisement for a record company. Gramophone records in relief, a sculptured crowing cock and stars were strewn all over the façade, while attention was focused on the corner section by convex and concave planes” (From Mining Camp to Metropolis, G-M van der Waal.). Many of the buildings in the precinct have historic significance and provide an architectural-style smorgasbord.
Now, a number of other developers have started investing in the area and we should see it really start to blossom to its full potential over the next year or so.
In 2000, I concluded my Citichat regarding the Fashion District, with these words: “It’s all about people, about the clashing and merging of cultures and history resulting in economic regeneration, in products that are relevant for today made by people who were denied the opportunity to do so yesterday. It’s all about visionaries who have the ability to turn dreams into on-the-ground realities.”
Although progress has been slow, I still believe that
Cheers, neil
The Fashion District 2.
I’ve just looked up previous Citichats in which I wrote about the Fashion District – the first time was in November 2000 then November 2001; February 2003 and March 2004..In between I have given short reports on progress, or the lack thereof! I can’t believe that so much time has passed, in fact it’s nine years since the proposal to develop a fashion district was first formally mooted in the 1999 Inner City Economic Study by Professors Tomlinson and Rogerson.
In one of those previous Citichats I wrote that the Fashion District was “an area whose grittiness belies its incredible potential.” Well, some of that potential is sloooowly starting to emerge from the grittiness that still characterises the precinct – I mentioned last week that investments in the area over the recent past are evidently nearly at the half-a-billion rand mark.
Other comments I made previously also still apply! “The pavements still double as extended showrooms for the shops as well as serving as open-air ‘factories’ for hundreds of informal seamstresses. The whole area (Kerk to Market and von Wielligh to End) is a bustling somewhat chaotic scene vaguely reminiscent of yet totally different to the golden era of South Africa’s rag trade. Then it was the country’s manufacturing centre for women’s clothing - trolleys hung with dresses energetically pushed from factory to shop by young designer hopefuls, streets clogged with railway delivery trucks and construction equipment as developers tried to keep pace with the demand for manufacturing space. But by the late 80s formal clothing manufacture in the area’s many sweatshops had disappeared as the South African industry virtually collapsed. Now, over the past few years, the district has again acted as a magnet attracting largely informal manufacturers and seamstresses. Many of the manufacturers are from other parts of Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d’ Ivoire – all adding to the cosmopolitan flavour of the area, all adding to “Africa-chic” in clothing design and manufacture. Rees Mann, the visionary ‘architect’ of the District who is leading the metamorphosis of the area and its community, likens the Fashion District today to London of 1948, “poised to explode with energy and creativity”.
Rees would know, for his father, a bespoke tailor, arrived from London in that year, 1948. Father and son witnessed the rise and fall of the fashion industry over the next 34 years. But, even after the demise of the industry, Rees had a belief in the potential of the area. He opened a business, at 109 Pritchard Street, SEWAFRICA”, that would support and enable SMME's access to the industry, “by keeping stock available at prices which only wholesalers could offer, by allowing SMME's to buy goods in small quantities, by pleating individual garments when other manufacturers would only take large quantities and even by making patterns available in six different languages enabling people of different cultures to sew” Later he added training facilities to enable individuals in the informal clothing manufacturing sector to obtain national qualifications plus facilities for holding fashion shows without having to pay the exorbitant costs of hiring formal establishments.
In early 2004, Rees launched AFSEW Centre also in Pritchard Street, in fact diagonally opposite his earlier project. Comprising six 500 square metre floors plus ground floor and basement, the building was built in 1966 specifically for the clothing industry. It was later used as a diamond cutting works but stood unoccupied for probably ten years. The refurbished building now provides facilities for emerging and established fashion designers and provides offices for the Fashion Institute, a non-profit organisation established to oversee the development of the Fashion District.
A few years back the City, through the Johannesburg Property Company (JPC), expropriated a site that faces onto both Pritchard and President Streets between Troye and Polly. The previous structures were partly demolished and the site redeveloped by the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) as a Fashion Square to be known as the Fashion Kapitol. The development will offer retail space to a number of designers, provide restaurant facilities, offices for the Fashion Institute and, most important, an outdoor fashion ramp with seating as well as indoor exhibition space. The project has been beset by all kinds of problems that have seriously delayed progress but it will open, hopefully, in a few months time.
On the north-eastern corner of Pritchard and Polly Streets, the Affordable Housing Company, AFHCO, a major private sector developer of mainly residential accommodation in the inner city, has refurbished an apartment building whilst one block west, City Prop are busy refurbishing a commercial building with retail on the ground floor. The Gallo building on the corner of Troye and President backs onto the new Fashion Kapitol and was bought for refurbishment a while back. This Art Deco building was built in 1936 and “conceived in its entirety as an advertisement for a record company. Gramophone records in relief, a sculptured crowing cock and stars were strewn all over the façade, while attention was focused on the corner section by convex and concave planes” (From Mining Camp to Metropolis, G-M van der Waal.). Many of the buildings in the precinct have historic significance and provide an architectural-style smorgasbord.
Now, a number of other developers have started investing in the area and we should see it really start to blossom to its full potential over the next year or so.
In 2000, I concluded my Citichat regarding the Fashion District, with these words: “It’s all about people, about the clashing and merging of cultures and history resulting in economic regeneration, in products that are relevant for today made by people who were denied the opportunity to do so yesterday. It’s all about visionaries who have the ability to turn dreams into on-the-ground realities.”
Although progress has been slow, I still believe that
Cheers, neil
Friday, February 8, 2008
Fashion District Citichat 8 February 2008
CITICHAT 5/2008 - 8 February 2008
The Fashion District 1. The Seeds
I received an excited e-mail on Wednesday from Rees Mann, the doyen of Johannesburg’s inner city Fashion District, with the news that investment in the Fashion District was approaching half a billion rand! We’ll have a look at the detail of that next week as also the huge part that Rees himself has played, but I thought this week to look back at the beginnings of the concept because we tend to lose that knowledge over time so next week we’ll look at how far it’s come. But it is so gratifying to see much of the planning and strategising that was set in place a decade ago now falling into place. Ten years may seem like a long time, but not in the life of a city being re-created! Then again, Rees, with the highs and lows of the past decade, wouldn’t use the words ‘falling into place’ because the road has not exactly been easy and there is a long way to go!
It was in fact exactly ten years ago when we started to undertake the “vision for the inner city”. This was done by the now extinct Johannesburg Inner City Development Forum which consisted of representatives of business and community, local and provincial government and labour. I always comment on the outcome of this process as being something of a miracle as it started with a great deal of mistrust between the parties, this was 1996 after all. This mistrust or suspicion resulted in four sectors (ie all except labour) each producing their own vision. At a critical time the four visions were coalesced into a single final agreed vision. With hindsight, that coalescing proved to be quite smooth when it was found that the aspirations and values of each sector were so similar if not identical. The vision was launched by Thabo Mbeki in July of 1997. Visions are useless however if one can’t find methods of turning what amounts to dreams into reality. To a large extent that responsibility fell on what was in those days known as the Inner City Office, headed up by Graeme Reid, subsequently CEO of the Johannesburg Development Agency - now consulting. The Inner City Office used the vision to provide a framework for the formulation of a strategy and a programme of activities to kick-start the process of urban renewal in the inner city. The strategy revolved around six aspects – economic; cultural and sporting activities; residential; education; quality of life; and transportation. But what the vision and strategy lacked was a more specific spatial and economic framework to guide the programme into implementation.
Two further exercises were therefore undertaken in 1993. Architects and Urban Designers, GAPP, were entrusted with the spatial framework and Professors Tomlinson and Rogerson with the economic. The frameworks were ultimately endorsed through a City Consultation session with over 100 stakeholders. The Economic Development Strategy opened with a paradigm shift in thinking about the city:
“The Johannesburg inner city is increasingly an African city, but not in the sense of Dar es Salaam or Nairobi. Its Africaness arises from its being a dual point of integration, between Johannesburg’s rich north (with essentially American and European values) and poor south (with essentially African values, but often with an American cultural veneer); as well as its being a key trading and migrant centre for sub-Saharan Africa. Due to Johannesburg’s location in South Africa, the city’s level of economic development surpasses that of other African cities, as does the standard of infrastructure and management. But the city also has social systems and survival networks that operate outside of formal management systems, and whose continuation depends on bending the rules.
We do not fully understand what this overlay of African and Western cultural, economic, infrastructure, management, social and values systems means for the inner city, but we do know that the inner city has irrevocably changed. This also means that the economic potentials of the inner city have to be perceived and understood in a different and more complex light. It means as well that there has to be a paradigm shift in who we value and where we see economic potential, in such a way that we think in inclusive terms. Finally, instead of casting the inner city as in competition with Sandton (the northern suburbs), we should seek out niches such as cultural tourism where the inner city economy is complementary to the northern suburbs economy”.
Graeme Reid commented on the framework: “The approach to developing the Framework was also informed by an understanding of a critical new role that the centre-city had to accommodate. Given the poly-nodal nature of the metropolitan area and the fact that it had been created both by the economic forces that drove decentralisation to the north and apartheid planning that separated the city from its underdeveloped and primarily black south, the city centre was the place where integration – racial and social – could happen. In light of this, the development of the Framework was underpinned by a set of ideas which, it was believed, would promote and foster this opportunity and thus promote urban renewal.”
The first related to public space, the second to urban amenity, the third to the needs of the majority users of the inner city, the fourth to transportation and finally the need to “include and stimulate the informal sector in the urban renewal process.”
The Economic Report itself highlighted the inner-city clothing economy: “It is clear that the early 1990s have seen a period of considerable change and restructuring in the inner-city clothing economy of Johannesburg. Key features of this restructuring have been the progressive emasculation of the formal clothing economy, particularly in the wake of competitive imports, and the parallel rise of a burgeoning small-enterprise clothing economy, dominated by black South African entrepreneurs (the majority, women entrepreneurs) and yet with an increasingly important segment of production from immigrant-run businesses.
In a policy context, it is useful to locate the inner city Johannesburg clothing economy in the national context. The national situation is of the beginnings of concerted attempts to reshape a new South African clothing industry that would be globally, or at least, regionally competitive. In general, it is expected that the industry as a whole will undertake a conscious move out of the lower end of the market and become more export-oriented, focussing on value added products and niche markets. In addition, through the adoption of what were earlier referred to as dynamic adjustment strategies the clothing sector would reduce its dependence on government by improving industry productivity through enhanced human resource development, work organisation and improved technology.
It is within this overall vision of change that interventions to support the inner-city Johannesburg clothing economy might be most appropriately considered. It is suggested that inner-city Johannesburg contains the makings of an incipient clothing cluster or industrial district……………. A set of interventions is recommended to strengthen the competitiveness of this cluster as a whole and to seek to shift the industry away from a trajectory of mere survival to one of long-term growth. The proposed garment district draws upon what might be described as the best practice concerning sectoral interventions, particularly as regards clothing.”
The consultants then went on to recommend the following objectives
• Create a hub institution that will stimulate, guide and monitor interventions to promote the garment industry
• Through the hub institution and other related research facilities, obtain a better understanding what is needed to enhance the incomes and productivity of clothing enterprises in the inner city (such as regulations, fashion information, business and financial services and support, regulations and physical infrastructure)
• The hub institution should aim to develop a network of linked service providers, public and private, that serve the garment industry and aim to address low productivity, encourage new technologies and products, and enhance the competitiveness of clothing producers in the Johannesburg inner city
• Create a garment district for marketing and tourism purposes
• The hub institution should motivate a sister city programme with other cities that have garment districts and that can provide necessary services and marketing outlets.
• The hub institution should seek to move from a two-year project financed with donor funds to an ongoing self-financing institution that has the flexibility to adapt to and to continue to serve a changing garment industry
They suggested that the garment district could, inter alia, provide:
• a design and fashion centre where entrepreneurs can learn of the latest fashions and materials;
• a young designers’ workshop where designers can hold fashion shows and retail their products;
• a production centre that provides access to equipment unavailable to informal enterprises;
• skills training;
• business training;
• exchange visits to other enterprises to enable entrepreneurs to view better technology, management practices or marketing; and
• a sister cities programme with other cities that have garment districts.
Both the Economic and the Spatial Framework had emphasised that specific ‘precincts’ or districts where new uses had already begun to emerge should be fostered An area on the east of the inner city bounded roughly by Delvers and End Streets; Market and President that had previously housed large scale garment manufacturing in the ‘50s and ‘60s was identified as such a precinct. It had developed into home to ‘pavement seamstresses’ and micro and small garment industry related businesses with an emerging emphasis on African urban fashion. So the skeleton of a precinct existed but what would be key would be to determine the interventions that would be required and also how to drive the initiative. Clearly someone who shared the vision and the passion was needed. We’ll pick that up next week together with an update as to where we are now.
Ciao, neil
P.S. Update on the Rand Laundry Issue
Yesterday the Parktown & Westcliff Heritage Trust led a public protest against the actions of the Imperial Group that had resulted in the annihilation of the Rand Laundry heritage buildings in Richmond. I, unfortunately, was in Potchefstroom attending a hearing whose date had been preset last year so missed the opportunity to take part but I understand that it was well supported and resulted in over a hundred more signatures for the petition. Watch this space!
The Fashion District 1. The Seeds
I received an excited e-mail on Wednesday from Rees Mann, the doyen of Johannesburg’s inner city Fashion District, with the news that investment in the Fashion District was approaching half a billion rand! We’ll have a look at the detail of that next week as also the huge part that Rees himself has played, but I thought this week to look back at the beginnings of the concept because we tend to lose that knowledge over time so next week we’ll look at how far it’s come. But it is so gratifying to see much of the planning and strategising that was set in place a decade ago now falling into place. Ten years may seem like a long time, but not in the life of a city being re-created! Then again, Rees, with the highs and lows of the past decade, wouldn’t use the words ‘falling into place’ because the road has not exactly been easy and there is a long way to go!
It was in fact exactly ten years ago when we started to undertake the “vision for the inner city”. This was done by the now extinct Johannesburg Inner City Development Forum which consisted of representatives of business and community, local and provincial government and labour. I always comment on the outcome of this process as being something of a miracle as it started with a great deal of mistrust between the parties, this was 1996 after all. This mistrust or suspicion resulted in four sectors (ie all except labour) each producing their own vision. At a critical time the four visions were coalesced into a single final agreed vision. With hindsight, that coalescing proved to be quite smooth when it was found that the aspirations and values of each sector were so similar if not identical. The vision was launched by Thabo Mbeki in July of 1997. Visions are useless however if one can’t find methods of turning what amounts to dreams into reality. To a large extent that responsibility fell on what was in those days known as the Inner City Office, headed up by Graeme Reid, subsequently CEO of the Johannesburg Development Agency - now consulting. The Inner City Office used the vision to provide a framework for the formulation of a strategy and a programme of activities to kick-start the process of urban renewal in the inner city. The strategy revolved around six aspects – economic; cultural and sporting activities; residential; education; quality of life; and transportation. But what the vision and strategy lacked was a more specific spatial and economic framework to guide the programme into implementation.
Two further exercises were therefore undertaken in 1993. Architects and Urban Designers, GAPP, were entrusted with the spatial framework and Professors Tomlinson and Rogerson with the economic. The frameworks were ultimately endorsed through a City Consultation session with over 100 stakeholders. The Economic Development Strategy opened with a paradigm shift in thinking about the city:
“The Johannesburg inner city is increasingly an African city, but not in the sense of Dar es Salaam or Nairobi. Its Africaness arises from its being a dual point of integration, between Johannesburg’s rich north (with essentially American and European values) and poor south (with essentially African values, but often with an American cultural veneer); as well as its being a key trading and migrant centre for sub-Saharan Africa. Due to Johannesburg’s location in South Africa, the city’s level of economic development surpasses that of other African cities, as does the standard of infrastructure and management. But the city also has social systems and survival networks that operate outside of formal management systems, and whose continuation depends on bending the rules.
We do not fully understand what this overlay of African and Western cultural, economic, infrastructure, management, social and values systems means for the inner city, but we do know that the inner city has irrevocably changed. This also means that the economic potentials of the inner city have to be perceived and understood in a different and more complex light. It means as well that there has to be a paradigm shift in who we value and where we see economic potential, in such a way that we think in inclusive terms. Finally, instead of casting the inner city as in competition with Sandton (the northern suburbs), we should seek out niches such as cultural tourism where the inner city economy is complementary to the northern suburbs economy”.
Graeme Reid commented on the framework: “The approach to developing the Framework was also informed by an understanding of a critical new role that the centre-city had to accommodate. Given the poly-nodal nature of the metropolitan area and the fact that it had been created both by the economic forces that drove decentralisation to the north and apartheid planning that separated the city from its underdeveloped and primarily black south, the city centre was the place where integration – racial and social – could happen. In light of this, the development of the Framework was underpinned by a set of ideas which, it was believed, would promote and foster this opportunity and thus promote urban renewal.”
The first related to public space, the second to urban amenity, the third to the needs of the majority users of the inner city, the fourth to transportation and finally the need to “include and stimulate the informal sector in the urban renewal process.”
The Economic Report itself highlighted the inner-city clothing economy: “It is clear that the early 1990s have seen a period of considerable change and restructuring in the inner-city clothing economy of Johannesburg. Key features of this restructuring have been the progressive emasculation of the formal clothing economy, particularly in the wake of competitive imports, and the parallel rise of a burgeoning small-enterprise clothing economy, dominated by black South African entrepreneurs (the majority, women entrepreneurs) and yet with an increasingly important segment of production from immigrant-run businesses.
In a policy context, it is useful to locate the inner city Johannesburg clothing economy in the national context. The national situation is of the beginnings of concerted attempts to reshape a new South African clothing industry that would be globally, or at least, regionally competitive. In general, it is expected that the industry as a whole will undertake a conscious move out of the lower end of the market and become more export-oriented, focussing on value added products and niche markets. In addition, through the adoption of what were earlier referred to as dynamic adjustment strategies the clothing sector would reduce its dependence on government by improving industry productivity through enhanced human resource development, work organisation and improved technology.
It is within this overall vision of change that interventions to support the inner-city Johannesburg clothing economy might be most appropriately considered. It is suggested that inner-city Johannesburg contains the makings of an incipient clothing cluster or industrial district……………. A set of interventions is recommended to strengthen the competitiveness of this cluster as a whole and to seek to shift the industry away from a trajectory of mere survival to one of long-term growth. The proposed garment district draws upon what might be described as the best practice concerning sectoral interventions, particularly as regards clothing.”
The consultants then went on to recommend the following objectives
• Create a hub institution that will stimulate, guide and monitor interventions to promote the garment industry
• Through the hub institution and other related research facilities, obtain a better understanding what is needed to enhance the incomes and productivity of clothing enterprises in the inner city (such as regulations, fashion information, business and financial services and support, regulations and physical infrastructure)
• The hub institution should aim to develop a network of linked service providers, public and private, that serve the garment industry and aim to address low productivity, encourage new technologies and products, and enhance the competitiveness of clothing producers in the Johannesburg inner city
• Create a garment district for marketing and tourism purposes
• The hub institution should motivate a sister city programme with other cities that have garment districts and that can provide necessary services and marketing outlets.
• The hub institution should seek to move from a two-year project financed with donor funds to an ongoing self-financing institution that has the flexibility to adapt to and to continue to serve a changing garment industry
They suggested that the garment district could, inter alia, provide:
• a design and fashion centre where entrepreneurs can learn of the latest fashions and materials;
• a young designers’ workshop where designers can hold fashion shows and retail their products;
• a production centre that provides access to equipment unavailable to informal enterprises;
• skills training;
• business training;
• exchange visits to other enterprises to enable entrepreneurs to view better technology, management practices or marketing; and
• a sister cities programme with other cities that have garment districts.
Both the Economic and the Spatial Framework had emphasised that specific ‘precincts’ or districts where new uses had already begun to emerge should be fostered An area on the east of the inner city bounded roughly by Delvers and End Streets; Market and President that had previously housed large scale garment manufacturing in the ‘50s and ‘60s was identified as such a precinct. It had developed into home to ‘pavement seamstresses’ and micro and small garment industry related businesses with an emerging emphasis on African urban fashion. So the skeleton of a precinct existed but what would be key would be to determine the interventions that would be required and also how to drive the initiative. Clearly someone who shared the vision and the passion was needed. We’ll pick that up next week together with an update as to where we are now.
Ciao, neil
P.S. Update on the Rand Laundry Issue
Yesterday the Parktown & Westcliff Heritage Trust led a public protest against the actions of the Imperial Group that had resulted in the annihilation of the Rand Laundry heritage buildings in Richmond. I, unfortunately, was in Potchefstroom attending a hearing whose date had been preset last year so missed the opportunity to take part but I understand that it was well supported and resulted in over a hundred more signatures for the petition. Watch this space!
Friday, February 1, 2008
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
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
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