Gauteng has to plan now for population growth of five million to an estimated 14,5-million people by 2015, Premier Mbhazima Shilowa warned on Wednesday.
”Or we can allow ourselves to become like São Paulo, with its favelas [slums],” he told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday about a campaign to make Gauteng a globally competitive city region.
The Brazilian megacity provides an example of how not to plan. ”You can become a global region by working towards it or just ‘letting it happen’.”
Shilowa said Johannesburg and its surrounds could be the world’s 12th-largest urban region by 2015.
Although it is debatable whether Gauteng’s population will actually reach 14,5-million because of the HIV/Aids factor, ”let’s assume that things will happen in this way”, he said.
He stressed that immediate intervention is needed to avert future crises. ”If we have this congestion with 9,5-million people, how will it be if there are 14,5-million?”
A long-term strategy is needed to develop Gauteng for 2030.
In the meantime, 2010 can be used as a milestone and developments around hosting the Soccer World Cup should ”strengthen opportunities for lasting legacy and city-region development”.
The campaign to make Gauteng a globally competitive city region will seek to use modern ”knowledge economics”, which considers cities and their functional boundaries rather than traditional geographic boundaries, Shilowa said.
Among the considerations for future city management is the idea of creating not just city provinces but also a metro system of government, Shilowa said.
”We’d be better off with a strong metro … hopefully they will find objective conditions exist to add one more metro. Or maybe a metro can be made out of merging with others.”
The campaign is to be launched on August 29 in the Gauteng provincial legislature. — Sapa