New urban agenda must address new patterns
SOUTH Africa must guard against urban development that happens at the expense of rural areas.
Deputy minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs Andries Nel – who is leading the local delegation at the Brics cities, urbanisation and local development forum in East London – said yesterday that the country must ensure that its industrial policy is aligned with urban development. However, he added, urban and rural development were not mutually exclusive and the country could not afford to ignore the need for development in rural areas.
The state recognised that urban centres were potential areas of growth as a result of the conglomeration of people and resources in concrete spaces, and the national budget expressed this intention. However, “there is an inextricable link between our urban and rural areas because of migration and circulatory patterns”, said Nel.
Remittances from economically active people in urban areas were significant contributors to rural income.
Rural areas had also seen rapid densification which could not be ignored.
Nel said that historically, urbanisation had happened alongside industrial development and there were clear current examples – for example in China – that industrialisation still underpinned urban development.
But, in recent decades, many developing countries had seen massive urbanisation without concomitant industrialisation.
The deputy minister said one of the biggest challenges in South Africa was how to avoid replicating apartheid-era spatial planning and practices.
“We need deliberate steps to break out of that mould, which is unsustainable and has huge social and economic costs for our country.”
The deputy director-general in the department of human settlements, Ahmedi Vawda, said spatial justice was at the core of decisions around human settlements investment.
The new urban agenda must recognise the individual household’s constitutional right to access housing, the right to choose where the housing is located and the type of housing made available.
He said that government was required to intervene in the housing finance market because of the failure of the market. But government funding models now also needed to take account of changing family patterns. For example, half the households in informal settlements in the country comprise only one or two individuals, and funding policies had to meet this reality.
Housing in urban centres was core to government policy to address poverty, inequality and social exclusion, said human settlements deputy minister Zoliswa Kota-Fredericks.
Speaking of the Brazilian experience, the director of that country’s urbanisation programme, Alessandra d’Avila Vieira, said a government had to build more than just houses. “We had to think of sanitation, mobility, security of land, social interaction.”