Good governance vital to driving, facilitating urban growth
BUFFALO City Metro municipal manager Andile Sihlahla says the benefits of urbanisation cannot be assumed.
Instead, he has called for “planned and managed urbanisation” to avoid the emergence of slums for poor people.
Talking of factors driving BCM’s urbanisation success, the municipal manager said the city was currently solvent, with low levels of debt, and a large part of the budget went to subsidising services to indigent residents.
However, he confirmed that the city’s housing backlog was growing faster than the capacity to deliver and overcome the inherited backlog.
He said leadership and governance were the most important factors in driving a city’s success.
This included collaborative initiatives with the private sector and stateowned enterprises, which had been successfully undertaken in BCM.
Commitments to improved audit outcomes and fighting corruption were also critical for the city.
Sihlahla said industrial development could play a huge role in supporting urbanisation, through increasing resources available for infrastructure and services.
However, where city economies were based on the export of resources or non-tradeable services, “slum urbanism” would arise.
“We must protect and expand the rates base by attracting investment.”
Sihlahla said that many African cities had no current urbanisation plans. In this regard, South Africa was fortunate in that urbanisation was strongly entrenched in national growth plans.
He said cities must also drive and facilitate growth.
Buffalo City, for example, was an average performer in global surveys of the cost of doing business.
Cities had to facilitate investment, forge partnerships and promote preferential procurement.
“We must focus on getting the basics right – crime, grime and [the failure to] enforce by-laws were inhibitors to investment by the private sector.
“A further factor was delivery of basic services to the poor and indigent.
“Cities must integrate spatial planning, land use planning, transport network planning and human settlement planning,” Sihlahla said.
“In BCMM, this happens through the Built Environment Performance Plan, which links economic nodes [areas of employment] and marginalied residential areas [in which the majority of the poor reside] through developing strategic public transport corridors.”
The metro chief said land release and “value capture” also had to be properly managed.
“Land availability within the integration zones and urban core is key to redressing the apartheid spatial form and the location of the poor on the margins of the city.
“Here we need more assertive land acquisition – and we must be smarter in managing land value capture by speculators.
“Buffalo City Metro Municipality also owns land parcels which will be used for investment leveraging through the BCM development agency to increase the city’s rates base and for public good, such as social housing, public and recreational spaces,” Sihlahla said.
On the housing backlog, he said: “We need new approaches including informal settlement upgrading, social housing, low-cost or gap market housing with private sector involvement.”
He said that for cities like BCM to take advantage of an urbanisation dividend, it also needed new skills sets and capabilities among its own staff, rather than simply outsourcing these services to the private sector.