A process to spruce up Johannesburg’s inner city is set to start bearing fruit this weekend. As the high point of a rigorous process initiated last year by Johannesburg mayor Amos Masondo, on Saturday the Inner-City Summit will gather stakeholders in support of an official plan to tackle the city’s problems.
The summit will address a wide range of issues affecting Johannesburg and publicly present a draft charter that will be open for consideration before it is officially instated a few months from now.
”It’s quite an interesting process,” said Neil Fraser, an independent consultant working with the summit. He is positive about the success of this new strategy, especially since it works on a ”time-related commitment” from the city.
”The difference is, with the charter, it’s a commitment. Previously when we’ve had summits and said, for example, informal trading is a problem, the councillors say they will deal with it. Now they will have to commit to a time; we have never had that before, so hopefully this is going to be different,” he told the Mail & Guardian Online this week.
Although the weekend summit is the central feature, it is not the end of the process. ”The Inner-City Summit is not a one day event,” the city emphasised in a statement.
”The summit is not a staged, managed conclusion to the process; it is a work in progress,” agreed one city official who has been involved with the summit and who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t allowed to speak to the media. ”It is an opportunity for people to give their input.”
”People don’t get serious about giving their input until there is something down on paper,” the official explained. He said the draft charter and this summit will garner more public debate around the city’s plans.
As part of the process, the mayor emphasised the inclusion of all stakeholders, from the government to business to civil society. They will have a chance to raise concerns that will be fully debated and possibly resolved.
In a process that has spanned the months leading up to the summit, a series of stakeholder working groups (SWG) saw interested parties engaging with the city in six key areas: economic development; social development; public spaces, arts, culture and heritage; urban management, safety and security; transportation; and residential development.
”It was a process where we agreed what we will do with stakeholder consultation; it’s not something we just invented, it involved public work,” said the city official involved with the summit. He emphasised the city’s commitment to getting input from the public.
Opposition
However, there are still parties who feel neglected by the process. ”Civil society is almost excluded … This summit just calls on us to endorse what has already been decided by the councillors, and that is flawed,” said Jo Mdhela, spokesperson for the People’s Summit Initiative (PSI), this week.
The PSI, comprising about 12 separate civil society organisations, including the South African National Traders’ Alliance, the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the Inner-City Resource Centre and the Ecumenical Service for Socio-Economic Transformation (Esset), aligned to address ”burning issues” in the inner city.
Gathering for a ”pre-summit rally” in the CBD this week, it tried ”to get input from various stakeholders so when we go to the summit, we are able to speak with one voice”, said Mdhela.
Although some individuals were invited to participate in the summit process, he said most PSI members were not consulted as representatives of various stakeholder groups. He added that the charter is not representative of all parties, and the PSI will be presenting its own document at Saturday’s summit.
”We will tell them that we were not fully involved in the processes … We are not there to be disruptive, but we want people to be consulted,” he emphasised.
Shereza Sibanda, of the Inner-City Resource Centre, which assists the poor and unemployed in the city, agreed with Mdhela. She said although other stakeholders and investors had been included, poor inner-city residents were not adequately consulted.
”As long as there is no inclusion of inner-city residents, how can [city-council members] sitting there know why people are living in the inner city’s dilapidated buildings? We have to be part and parcel of inner-city regeneration, and not left out,” she said.
Stakeholders invited
But the city official denied that people were left out of the summit process. He said the city had invited all stakeholders it had knowledge of, ”but we cannot anticipate who is going to rise up and say ‘we are stakeholders’,” he added.
Fraser said even though people were informed, it was still difficult to get the right people to come to the SWGs. ”But there was cognisance from people who live in the city,” he said. ”We took comments from the people; we have taken the issues and put it into the process.”
The summit process addresses a significant amount of concerns for the inner city, and there at least seems to be consensus about the issues that should be prioritised.
Fraser and Sibanda both agreed that residential development is still a core concern, with the sensitive subject of inner-city evictions and ”bad” buildings taking centre stage. Fraser said there needs to be an effective housing plan that comes out of the summit, and Sibanda emphasised the resource centre’s call for ”houses, not evictions, for 2010”.
The city official involved with the summit also emphasised housing, saying there is a plan under way to have 50Â 000 to 75Â 000 additional inner-city residential units built in a few years. ”That is a massive commitment,” he said.
The inner city houses 10% of people living in Johannesburg, but there are concerns as ”it doesn’t house them all that well”, the official admitted. But there also needs to be an inclusive housing solution that will see mixed-income residential spaces as opposed to turning the city into a dorm for the poor, he said.
Issues to address
As well as concerns of optimal residential development, the SWGs highlighted numerous other issues around the six key areas, most of which will be dealt with at the summit.
These include: urban management and maintenance of public space, including eliminating grime and disorder, which makes the city appear to be in decline; more visible policing in key areas, and a better arrangement of closed-circuit television cameras to cover a more comprehensive area; and dealing with bad buildings that are a health and fire risk, and that often attract criminals.
It also raised concerns about street traders, and how to balance their means of survival with a well-functioning, good-looking cityscape; support for economic ”anchors” like the banks in the city, as well as support for new economic opportunities; incentives for potential investors; and a supportive built environment to remedy the lack of adequate parking, conference and hotel facilities.
Johannesburg’s lack of a world-class transport distribution system was also discussed, as well as problems with informal taxi ranking; the area around Park station that does not function optimally at present; pedestrian and commuter safety; and a well-functioning national commuter rail service.
The SWGs also found that Johannesburg has a clear lack of parks and green spaces, and many that exist are in a bad state; streets need to be more ”walkable”, especially after dark; and ”iconic” public spaces like Constitution Hill should be completed and better used.
A more comprehensive plan for street children, the poor, abused women and refugees was also addressed, as well as support efforts to assist civil society organisations working in the city.
When asked whether the city has taken on too much, the city official said he feels most of the relevant issues are included in the summit process and will be ”addressed in a meaningful way”.
”I won’t say [we should] do less because we don’t have the capacity. We must gear up the capacity to do it, not scale it down,” he said.
The process
Stakeholder working groups (SWGs) were held over a period of six months. There were six broader areas of concern that were stipulated. Four separate rounds of SWGs for each of these subsections took place, in which issues were raised, solutions found, commitments made and time-frames decided. These were included in a draft charter.
The Inner-City Summit is a day-long process that will include the city and interested stakeholders. The draft charter will be publicly available for consideration and debate. The summit will split up into six commissions for the separate sub sections; it will regroup for a report back at the end of the day.
Further consultation and input from stakeholders will then produce the final charter.
An inner-city charter will be signed by the executive mayor and other relevant stakeholders who are in a position to make commitments to the city.
Oversight committee
Following the signing of the charter, an oversight committee will be set up to ensure that all necessary measures are implemented. Chaired by the mayor, it will meet once every quarter, with regular reports on its findings. There will also be an independent audit every June.