Cities are the economic and creative hubs that keep a country connected to the world, and the sense of permanence that they create allow us to embark on long-term projects. Equally, cities frame and channel the currents of change that take our society forward as we achieve improved livelihoods and realise more of our dreams.
A recent KPMG report, The Role of Cities in Africa’s Rise, identifies the shift from rural to urban centres as the largest migration in human history. This strong urbanisation trend will see more than 50% of Africa’s population living in cities by 2030. This will take Africa from having three “megacities” – Lagos, Cairo and Kinshasa – to nine spread across the continent, and Johannesburg will be one of them. A megacity is defined as a metropolitan area that is home to 10-million people or more.
Urbanisation is often associated with rising incomes and better living standards, but a lack of resources and inadequate infrastructure alongside poor planning and management pose enormous challenges to prosperity. Seventy-two percent of urban dwellers in Africa live in slums, and this figure will continue to rise as city governments contend with burgeoning organic growth and as they have to make provisions for the influx of migrants seeking a better life.
Services, access and economic participation
Urban dwellers’ access to infrastructure, services, information and opportunities provided by cities has a direct and measurable economic impact on per capita income.
If things continue unchanged, this will lead to the majority of South Africans being confined to urban settings such as informal settlements, backyard shacks and bad buildings. This will also mean that these people will remain without security of tenure or access to basic infrastructure, nor will they have any opportunity to contribute to economic growth.
Current urban planning trends are focused on addressing the liveability and sustainability of cities, and on addressing basic human needs. South African cities are tangled up in overcoming basic developmental challenges, which includes effective collaboration between local, provincial and national stakeholders to ensure delivery and development.
A new study from the Equality of Opportunity Project, led by economists at Harvard and Berkeley, has found a correlation between residential segregation, or different social classes living far apart, and the ability of the poor to achieve upward social mobility. This is measured by the extent to which children are able to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents. This study confirms a South African reality – sprawling cities mean that job opportunities are out of reach for people in the “wrong” neighbourhoods.
The lasting impact of South Africa’s past segregationist policies and spatial challenges means that the estimated three million homes built under the government’s reconstruction and development programme have in many instances been criticised for reinforcing apartheid-era city structures.
The Breaking New Ground programme is one policy departure seeking to address this. It is focused on achieving integrated sustainable human settlements by building sustainable communities close to where economic opportunities are located, as well as integrating previously excluded communities into the city.
However, though plans for sustainable urban development are part of the overall policy agenda, community protests over service delivery, disputes surrounding councillor selection, mismanagement of municipal budgets and recurring billing problems remain fundamental public concerns.
The realisation is that working in public entities and municipalities involves complex legislation that can hamstring implementation. But this must be qualified by the revelation that the required power and authority don’t always sit at the local level where implementation is expected to occur. The immediate challenges mentioned above constrain economic participation in the local economies around South Africa.
Cities lead the realisation of our futures
Transforming local government remains at the core of South Africa’s achievement of a developmental democratic agenda. Municipalities and the cities and towns they administer remain the locations for making our post-1994 policies and dreams a reality. They remain the most compelling and immediate way of making democracy real for most of the country’s citizens.
Municipalities are where the bold visions for the future of South Africa’s cities are created and the places where these policies are implemented.
However, a large proportion of South Africa’s people looking for assistance from legislation, policies and programmes to improve their living conditions live in parts of our cities that are invisible to data and analysis. They exist in undocumented, ever-changing and rarely quantified communities that move and thrive without many of us even knowing. An added challenge is that many officials working in the government have little sense of the urgency or the extent of the experiences of poor people in our cities.
It bears stating that people generally come to cities to look for jobs and social support, such as improved access to services such as healthcare, education and public amenities. But on arrival, it becomes apparent that these services aren’t always available, or that the state is not able to deliver them effectively in the places where they are most required.
This reality is a problem because large portions of the urban population remain underserved. However, the same crisis in turn creates an opportunity for informal economies.
Informal settlements and informal trading represent a sophistication that is not yet reflected in our legislation or policies. And, though informality is often equated with illegality, this is not always the case.
In order to meet their constitutional obligations and realise their original vision for communities, local governments have a growing awareness that connectivity, responsiveness and community involvement are key enablers. Some municipalities are exploring different methods to improve public participation to inform policy. Others are adopting a more deliberate emphasis on implementation and integrating cities and communities in attempts to make visions for improvement a reality.
City development strategies have been the tools of choice in rallying attention and development focus for the next 20 to 30 years by placing municipalities in a position to plan for growth, build partnerships and attract financial support. City development strategies are used as much to resolve current crises as to prioritise resources so that they can deliver on the future.
Communities can take the lead
Municipalities are unable to address all development needs for all communities. City improvement districts are one example of how nonprofit companies, formed by groups of property owners, pay additional rates for added security and cleaning in their areas.
These privately managed precincts represent the appreciation that municipalities can only do so much, and are examples of how communities can shape their areas through active involvement.
Many variations of active and organised communities of interest contributing to the development of our cities and towns are yet to be explored in our poorer and informal communities. These can only be facilitated by responsive local governments. Effectiveness in dealing with the tension between the basic challenges facing local government and the need to adopt longer-term, sustainable developmental policies will be the determining factor regarding the future of our cities.
As African planners, our task is different depending on which lens we use to view the cities of the future. For as long as there is the burden of providing for the unemployed masses, our national figure of 53% unemployed youth should be regarded as an untapped resource.
The shiftting changes in our informal sector should be regarded as pointers to urban opportunities that must be understood. And the survival strategies of the poor must guide the principles and practicalities of our developmental policies. As much as we have challenges, there is much we can focus our energies on to drive us towards the future we want.
Andile Skosana holds an MBA from the Gordon Institute of Business Science and is an associate director of Government Advisory Services – Cities Centre of Excellence at KPMG
Street trade seen as a blot on the 'global' city
African cities are almost automatically associated with the informal. Informality is presented as a natural dimension of the economic and social dynamics of African cities. In this sense, informality is recognised as a useful notion to account for the problems of the African city and the African urban 'crisis' in general. It is also used in a metaphorical sense to define an attempt from the bottom to compensate for all the failures of public action.
So, two distinct approaches prevail: informality is either used as a concept to analyse urban dynamics, in terms of the 'informal sector', or it has a normative and prescriptive sense and is used to attack the failure of the ideal, properly planned city, or to promote informality as a palliative option for the poor.
The contradictory injunction – encouraging so-called 'pro-poor policies' through support of informal activities while promoting a modernist agenda – is not new, but it is exacerbated in today’s cities by the shift towards entrepreneurial practices in public spheres that fuel neomodernist projects in many African cities. Urban policies are conceived to foster neat, globally acceptable cities in order to attract investment and raise the cities to international standing.
They try to formalise street trading and erase informality from public spaces. Boosterism, promoting economic growth, reactivates the debate about informality and its place in the city, especially in city centres as emblematic spaces for shop-window strategies.
The difficulty of accommodating informal activities is linked to a certain conception of modernity, an ideal many African states have striven to achieve since independence, and which has a direct impact on capital cities.
The search for modernity took a nationalistic turn in socialist capital cities. Describing the negative perception of street trading among local-government officials in Dar es Salaam in the mid-1990s, Anne Lewinson (writing in the journal City & Society) argues that street trading conveys a negative idea of the “state of the nation’s economy” and the failure of “Tanzanian visions of modernity”.
Migrants
In Dar es Salaam, the negative perception of street trade also relates to a certain conception of the migration 'problem'. Street traders are understood to be migrants. They are still called wamachinga, a Kiswahili word that refers to populations from northern Mozambique.
A similar reaction was encountered in socialist Ouagadougou (in Burkina Faso) in the 1980s. In Abidjan, the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, informal traders are seen either as migrants from another country or from the north of the country and were targeted in the xenophobic riots of 2002 to 2005.
Today’s discourse on modernisation differs from the post-independence modernisation project in both socialist and capitalist contexts.
Far from the Keynesian conception of a corps of public servants that would uphold the modernisation of the country, complete with nation-building and Africanisation of assets, modernisation is no longer the product of a state-driven momentum. It is reshaped by globalisation: urban-regeneration projects still have a political-nationalist dimension, especially in capital cities such as Nairobi, but they are primarily aimed at implementing the so-called world-class city agenda.
Street trading has ceased to be an African, indigenous or national problem; it is viewed from a global perspective and managed in an entrepreneurial manner by would-be entrepreneurial cities that struggle to accommodate street traders within the fantasy of the global African city. This shift in emphasis is tied to democratisation and the new-found ability of local governments to position themselves in the competition between 'global' city and region.
This is especially the case in South African cities and, to a lesser extent and on another scale, in Abidjan. By promoting shop-window types of development in the inner city, these cities focus on potentially growth-generating areas, such as CBDs, airports or harbours, where powerful private actors can interact with the public authorities.
Regeneration
Strings of converging regeneration initiatives have become visible in the centres of all five cities we studied (Abidjan, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lomé and Nairobi) since the late 1990s and early 2000s. City improvement districts or 'CIDs' (a South African version of the North American business-improvement district) have been developed in Cape Town and Johannesburg to enhance security and cleanliness, and have involved a drastic form of regeneration directed against street trading.
In 2009, Nairobi’s metropolitan authorities put in place a “vision for Nairobi” that was typical of the “world-class city” agenda. Within such frameworks, there is very little, if any, room at all for street trading, as exemplified by Cape Town’s preparations for the 2010 Fifa World Cup.
In all five cities, local governments gradually shifted towards a discourse of the global city at various times during the 1990s. In Cape Town and Johannesburg, the efforts of local government were articulated around the ambition to become world-class cities, respectively “for all” and “African”, which did not deter local growth coalitions from focusing solely on a growth agenda.
The formalisation of informal trading – that is, its various degrees of erasure from certain spaces in African cities – seems to reactivate an old colonial order. From a spatial point of view, this process can be seen as a form of neocolonialism. The same spaces are targeted, the same boundaries redrawn, the same tools (such as by-laws) reactivated, the same hygiene fears and desire for order apply, and the same classification of neighbourhoods (as suitable or not for trading) is made.
Yet this spatial reordering takes place within a globalised context.
What blurs the picture is that this neoliberal spatial order is implemented by public authorities, not the private sector directly. This is linked to a sharing of responsibilities within growth coalitions and is probably a reaction against the inertia of old formulas of management.
After all, informal trading remains a planning affair and urban planning remains a public prerogative.
This is an edited extract from Governing Cities in Africa: Politics and Policies, edited by Simon Bekker and Laurent Fouchard and published by HSRC Press.