What will Johannesburg look like in 2040? What we do today will affect generations that must live in this city for many years to come and we have to put the building blocks of that tomorrow in place today. Hence the recent launch of the growth and development strategy for the city, an attempt to start answering this critical question. It is a question that we, as the leadership of the city, cannot answer alone but should answer with the people we serve.
This is a call to action to play together as a team as we figure out the game plan for the development and growth of this great city.
It is our firm belief that simply continuing on the same path will not bring us different results. We believe that the city’s operations should be run like a business, focusing on serving its customers and using its resources to address our priorities.
Good governance creates an environment that can help regular people to do extraordinary things — one that inspires people to work together and take responsibility for their communities.
We will be answering the question through the lens of the new growth path. The alignment of the city’s vision with this path will help us to develop liveable communities and generate much-needed jobs.
We are in the middle of a nine-week public outreach programme, engaging communities on critical issues. We need to ensure that communities have a seat at the table.
Communities should start being actively involved in charting their own course for themselves — and the youth need to be a big part of this process. The youth must paint a picture of how they see the city in years to come.
We will share with you highlights of the issues on which we would like the community to comment, outlining our vision for the city, guided by various themes that will help us to shape the vision of a future Johannesburg.
The City of Johannesburg’s first growth and development strategy was passed in 2006. It was developed as a long-term strategy that could tell a coherent story about Johannesburg’s future development path. It was important in framing the city’s five-year integrated development planning processes; the strategy is positioned alongside the integrated development plan.
The city’s strategy and its five-year plan for the 2006-2011 term of office were, for the first time, developed as single processes. This defines the City of Johannesburg’s approach to integrated long-term strategic planning with five-year operational plans. The strategy charts a long-term course and makes some of the broader, overarching decisions about what needs to be emphasised if the city is to accelerate economic growth and human development. The integrated development plan defines where we want to be after five years and how we intend, incrementally, to achieve our long-term goals.
After the conclusion of the present outreach programme, we will be one step closer to completing the first phase of a decade of consolidation that is characterised by building on a solid foundation — getting the basics right — and building a smart city. This is followed by the next phase, which is acting to make our vision of this city a reality.
There are pressing day-to-day problems about which citizens are worried. Dealing with these problems will not stop because of any focus on a bigger vision. It is, however, important that the conversation the city needs to have is linked to the issues that people are facing now, without pressing the system to produce only short-term results.
The conversation will take place under various themes:
- Economic growth and development through inclusive economy: focus on education, the youth and formalising the informal sector.
- Human development and public safety, crime: the recent spate of police killings, the ongoing notoriety of certain abodes in the city — all these require community mobilisation. Are we ready to go beyond the conversation in this regard?
- Delivery of basic services: increasing population growth creates pressure on service delivery. The issues that have been raised about the billing system are still fresh in the minds of many citizens. We need to strengthen the city’s own system to be able to track and trace complaints and monitor their resolution.
- Electricity and water: Eskom’s rate hike, over three years, has forced the city to increase its fees. Protecting poor households from energy-price shocks is important.
- Poverty: How should the pockets of poverty in our city be addressed and what mechanisms will be used to ensure we do not create a culture of dependence but create sustainable resources to empower the poor?
- Environment: cities can respond to climate change by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, which reduce the rate and magnitude of change, and by adapting to the impact.
- Businesses and organisations are reinvesting in Jo’burg. We have an economic development tool that will support job growth for large and small businesses through transportation infrastructure, building, refurbishments and so forth.
- Transport: the city has developed non-motorised transport frameworks for major areas. This includes walking, cycling, rickshaws, wheelchairs and animal-drawn carts, and recreational activities such as horse-riding, roller-blading, skating and the use of scooters. The framework was developed in 2009 and will be implemented, focusing on priority areas.
- Education and job creation: we cannot afford to send another generation of young people into the world unprepared to compete for jobs. Education is one of our key priorities and is vital in developing a workforce. This will help us build a good case in talking to the business community about reinvesting in Jo’burg.
- Labour action: we have committed ourselves to changing the way we deal with labour negotiations. We call on labour to join the conversation in the weeks ahead — we will talk seriously about how labour becomes a partner in implementing the city’s vision.
Output indicators were developed to ensure that we meet our goals by 2040. We need to track progress every five years as part of the growth development strategy review process and develop a complete picture of change across the next three decades. We need to report more stringently and openly about progress, measuring it against key milestones, and we must link more effective programme design to the 2040 strategy.
Today we are placing these things on the table and we call on all communities to investigate them and make them their own. There will be town-hall meetings every week in community halls when citizens will be given an opportunity to discuss the contents of the strategy.
We call on civil society to partake in the special round tables; we will be ready to listen to their input so we can shape the future together.
Everyone must play his or her part as a Johannesburg teammate working towards the goal of making our city a global icon for development.
The growth development strategy 2040 is out there for you to critique and add value to it. Embrace it as your own, shape it in the image of your aspirations so that it becomes our common destiny.
Parks Tau is the mayor of Johannesburg