BusinessDay.gif The idea of new cities may be folly Lauren Royston and Yahia Shawkat, Business Day, 11 September 2015 Spatial transformation is on the agenda with Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu's "mega-projects", Gauteng's "new cities" and the City of Johannesburg's "corridors of freedom" initiatives. Should we welcome them? In March last year, Sisulu announced the concept of megaprojects. Last week, she addressed a workshop with developers and contractors and indicated that megaprojects would cost R298bn over five years. In April, a provincial initiative was launched in Gauteng by Premier David Makhura, extending Sisulu's vision by linking megaprojects to the creation of "new cities". Six new cities are envisaged for Gauteng by 2019. The idea is intended to signal a break from "sporadic, isolated and monolithic housing projects" and heralded a "new trajectory for human settlements", he said. With subsidised housing delivery in decline since 2008, the political advantages of big and ostensibly easy delivery ahead of local government elections next year need hardly be mentioned. However, we should avoid writing off the megaprojects idea for its political motivation and grand ambition. The likely consequences for poor and vulnerable residents of Gauteng need to be carefully examined and widely debated - especially the manner in which informal development, including informal settlements and informal trade, is likely to be treated. Recent history in SA, and Johannesburg particularly, has seen attempts to violate the right to housing through city and private sector-led evictions, and to eliminate informal trade, most notably the infamous Operation Clean Sweep in October 2013. New cities are not a new idea, and learning about experiences elsewhere is one place to start. Egypt's 40-year-old New Cities programme mixed inspiration from Europe's mid-20th century new towns planning mind-set of building small, residential satellite settlements around a big city, with grand ambitions of "invading the desert". The presumption that the Nile Valley cannot contain Egypt's population growth has been driving the policy of spending billions in public funds to build 21 new cities - now mostly vacant - and the unmaking of crowded and decaying existing cities. One problem of New Cities was the over-ambitious population targets. Sadat City was the second to be planned, in 1978. It was to house 60,000 people in five years, 150,000 in a decade and half a million in 25 years. Assuming an initial population of 12,000 people who would move into new homes in 1985, the five-year target meant that Sadat City would need to grow at a sustained rate of 100% every year for five years. Short of a disaster - natural or human-made - people do not willingly relocate at anywhere near that rate. Egypt's 2006 census shows that a mere 27,781 people, less than half the five-year target, lived in Sadat City 31 years after the first phase was completed. Overall, the New Cities reached barely a fifth of their target population. EGYPT'S New Cities have not welcomed all social classes all the time. At first only the poor moved there and they did so because they were compelled to; most of Greater Cairo's social housing of the 1980s and 1990s was built in the New Cities. People who applied for social housing or were part of a slum-clearance operation were sent to a New City. By the late 1990s, the government wanted to earn more money from the New Cities, and so enticed the middle class to move there with the dream of detached homes built on individual plots. By the mid-2000s, the government sought even bigger profits from developers of luxury gated communities, and so most new land has gone to such projects. The New Cities have made existing cities denser and less manageable as informal urban growth within and around them has absorbed much of the population increase. The government froze most formal extensions of existing cities to encourage migration to the New Cities, but the land made available there was not appropriate for balanced urban growth; it was much less than needed, expensive and located far from job opportunities and services. New Cities also accelerated the decay of existing cities as public funds have been systematically diverted away from them. In the 1980s, New Cities accounted for 10% of Egypt's water and sanitation budget, which rose to 22% in the late 1990s and today is around 40%. With a mere 2% of Egyptians living in New Cities today, this means they receive 33 times their fair share of investments in infrastructure. It is no surprise that half of Egyptian households are still without proper sanitation. In Gauteng, we ought to be wary of the new cities idea for the effect it will have on declining living conditions in and diverting investment away from the areas where most people live: existing townships, informal settlements and inner city areas. New cities fall short because they do not attract residents. Egypt's experience is clear: ignore the existing city at your peril. History, and social and economic relations, cannot simply be recreated in new places because a planning vision dictates that they should be. Far from the vibrant cityscape that Gauteng's presentation tried to sell at the launch event, new cities are more often than not deadly, unpeopled places that cost taxpayers a lot of money. They also increase decay and informal development in existing urban areas. THE greenfield approach of new cities might be appealing for the public and private sectors because existing areas make planning interventions more complicated; they are already built and inhabited. You deal with what is already there. You engage with the people who live there. Rather than being a fresh vision for spatial transformation, new cities signal separation and enclosure. Even worse, they are an admission of defeat; a retreat from in situ development and a rejection of urban informality, especially in light of the effort and money invested in the Upgrading Informal Settlements project by the National Housing Development Agency and the National Upgrading Support Programme. In Johannesburg, the new cities vision advocated by the province seems to compete with mayor Parks Tau's flagship "corridors of freedom" project. While detail is hard to find, the municipality's approach to spatial transformation is premised on transit-led development and investment, as the term "corridor" implies. While the new cities approach is about starting again, corridors of freedom appear to hold the promise of working more realistically off the existing urban fabric. What remains unclear, however, is whether Johannesburg's poorer residents will be unshackled from the conditions in which they live - insecurely, often peripherally and inaccessible to the benefits of formal development. Will the benefits of access to the corridors be reserved for developers and middle class residents that market-led development accommodates? Can we imagine spaces for traders and accommodation for residents to whom private and social housing do not deliver? Whether or not municipal and provincial tensions exist, more public debate is needed, and central to this debate must be people. Who stands to benefit from investment, whether in corridors or new cities? The renewed vigour with which spatial transformation is being approached is to be welcomed because 20 years after apartheid, cities that are more just are everyone's concern. However, an alternative vision of accessible and integrated cities would begin with well located areas in which people reside, rather than new projects where they will have to move, or be relocated. Our human settlements trajectory should focus on affordable rental accommodation in inclusive inner cities and in situ upgrading of informal settlements on well-located land. . Royston is director of research and advocacy at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of SA and Shawkat is co-founder and research coordinator at 10Tooba. From: http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2015/09/11/the-idea-of-new-cities-may-be-fol ly -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. 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