Recreational land must be preserved

THE continual nibbling away of zoned recreational land and public open space in Harare and its conversion to commercial, industrial and residential land is a scandal that needs to be halted, promptly and effectively.

The latest attempt is a fairly small area in Belvedere that was set aside as a recreation area, probably a little park, when that suburb was laid out shortly before and after the Second World War. Now it has been leased out and there are several developers circling, with backing from council officials, to take it over and convert it to commercial use. The person leasing the land wants to build offices, but there are others who may have a different use for the concrete they want to pour.

Residents are battling to keep it as part of their heritage as they realise that they need some open space now and will probably need a lot more in the future as population densities rise.

This is not to say that remnants of the old commonage lands, that were always assumed to one day be zoned and planned for development, cannot still be sold, or that new State land incorporated into the city and the surrounding towns cannot be developed, in the same way blocks of private land are developed.

These undeveloped areas fall under a different set of regulations, but when they are developed, then the planning laws require land set aside within the development for recreation, education and other public use. Generally speaking, a developer has to assign around 20 percent of the land for these public purposes and, depending on the amount of wetland, it could even be more.

The percentages arose from the near disasters of private development around the outskirts of the old central Harare early last century as the surrounding farm owners just went ahead without plans, and without needing anyone’s authority. Much of our planning law, upgraded and extensively modified as it is, dates from those early days when there was a determination to prevent future foul-ups.

What we are seeing now is that within the developed areas, where the planners ensured that adequate land was reserved for schools, recreation, future parks and other public functions, there are determined efforts by some private developers, backed by officials and often councillors, to take over the public lands for private commercial purposes.

In many of the new suburbs created by land barons, the minimum areas that should have been set aside for all the public purposes were simply grabbed, subdivided and sold, to enhance the illegal profits the barons were making, and the lack of that public land is going to cause some distress in future decades.

We would agree that some of the land set aside for recreation and future public parkland and even wilderness areas is at the moment an eyesore and even the future small parks are just fields of weeds. But that does not mean they should be built over. One day they will be desperately needed and then will be upgraded and properly maintained.

In several suburbs chunks of the public recreation space have been leased out, at very low rents set simply to ensure that city ownership is recognised, to sports clubs and golf clubs. This arose from an enlightened policy many years ago, when such policies were on the low side, to have the recreational facilities developed without cost to ratepayers, the developing clubs being non-commercial, that is making no profits but also no losses.

We have seen attempts to sell off at least two of these golf clubs for subdivision and commercial and residential development. The attempts were blocked, and in one case there were jail sentences for the involved municipal officials, but it does show the sort of continual effort that is needed.

A third golf club was sold, but this time transparently and after adequate debate, and as the proposed use is a higher grade golf course there were no major objections and the original planning provisions have been maintained. It is still open recreational land with the developer buying some adjacent parcels of land zoned for development for the proposed commercial and residential development that will surround the golf course. Both the letter and the spirit of the original planning and zoning has been maintained.

The modern protection of wetlands was often anticipated in the original zoning of recreational land and even the land for school sports fields. Developers, public and private, tended to assign the land unsuitable for building because it was too wet to fill their quotas for public-use land, which is why all but the oldest golf course have streams running through them and why even Harare Gardens missed development because it was the source of a group of springs.

But these days there are councillors and council officials who see no reason why a wetland cannot be sold off and covered in buildings. Old small farm dams were once kept as private amenities, bird sanctuaries and the like and the centre of future parks. Now the same group wants these drained, sold and built over.

Residents’ associations have been leading the battle to preserve their public open spaces and often using the wetland laws, as more effective than the planning laws, to do this, with some success. There remain continual efforts by those who would prefer Harare was sold concrete from border to border to keep nibbling into the wetlands and zoned open spaces.

Court cases and the land baron investigations tend to show that corrupt councillors and corrupt officials can be at the centre of these efforts, and even where they are not corrupt they tend to have a vision of a future urban hell with no public amenities at all.

This is why the provisions of the planning laws need to be strictly enforced and, where they have been allowed to be weakened, to be restored so that future as well as present generations of Harare can have a city that is liveable, and can have the public open space needed for recreation, neighbourhood parks and the green lungs the city needs.