‘Future’ of towns and cities depends on new act

SEISMIC activity is not limited to the San Andreas Fault. On July 1, 2015, in sunny South Africa, the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act (Spluma) comes into operation. As with many earthquakes the legislation, while long overdue, has arrived largely unannounced, but its ramifications will be seismic.

Spluma defines where and how we live now, and how we might live in the future. It lays down the process by which businesses and homes are built, and what towns and cities will look like. It is fundamental in creating a desirable place to grow and be oneself. Its chief tools are land use management schemes, and the future defining spatial development framework.

The act is what you would use if you wanted permission to build that granny flat on your property. It would also be the legislation which you would use to object to the five storey granny flat with the swimming pool on top that the neighbour built. The act defines how and where suburbs should become more dense and what land uses should be permitted. It defines how and where our towns and cities should grow and what that development should be. It also lays down the process for dealing with undesirable or illegal land uses.

The act replaces a slew of contradictory policies such as the provincial town planning ordinances and the Development Facilitation Act that have directed and confused the development of our towns and cities. Responsibility for making decisions on the land uses that will be permitted now sits with municipalities.

Second guess

Provinces and sector departments can no longer second guess the decisions of a municipality relating to the change of land use. The act reinforces and protects the spatial plans of a municipality that must align with the provincial and national development intent. It also clarifies and strengthens development control processes, as well as streamlining existing planning process and responsibilities.

Efficient and effective planning is critical for social and economic development. The creation of certainty through well- considered, rapid decision making on development applications is a priority in order to ensure that construction can meet demand, and to ensure that our towns and cities can become better places to live, work and play in. Active engagement with communities, by municipalities in order to address planning challenges will be critical.

Municipalities need to take their elevated role in relation to planning, and ensure that they effectively leverage this legislation to achieve much-sought spatial transformation.

There will be difficulties in the roll out of the act. Municipalities have been criticised for delaying new development, being inconsistent in the decisions made on development applications and for replicating the spatial form of apartheid, where the poor are dumped on the periphery of settlements. There is also criticism that past plans have entrenched our dependence on private vehicles and contributed to the gridlock that is a feature of our cities, and through the expansion of the road network allowed the urban to orbit into our agricultural and conservation areas.

Without a comprehensive quality public transport supported by required intensities of residential and business development the bumper to bumper reality will remain. We need more sustainable urban forms.

Teething problems

The implementation of the act is bound to bring about teething problems for municipalities and for users of the spatial planning and land use tools. Some of the challenges that face the municipalities include the lack of planning capacity and staff to implement the act.

Especially in cases where municipalities would be faced with the additional challenge of having to implement the various aspects of land use planning functions for the first time. In certain provinces, such as the Free State, local government has not been responsible for planning.

Developers, architects, town planners who deal with development application will need to learn the new processes. Provinces such as KZN, Eastern Cape, North West and Limpopo have to incorporate the input of traditional leadership as part of the implementation of the act and this in itself requires appropriate engagement.

Given the challenges municipalities cannot implement Spluma alone.

The far ranging implications of the act from defining what the neighbour puts up next door, to how we get to our jobs and how various types of developments interlink to create sustainable living spaces requires for business and civil society to engage robustly with municipalities during its roll-out.

Given that South Africans are a resilient nation and not afraid to express a view, especially on matters affecting our daily lives, and our need to integrate and create a future that we can all be proud of, the robust engagements will indeed lay a solid foundation to build places where we want to live and are proud of.

Municipalities must facilitate this discussion, and realise that they cannot deliver on their intended development outcomes without the active participation and co-operation of other key stakeholders.

The future of our towns and cities depends on our engagement in the implementation of this act. Lekgolo Mayatula is the Planning and Development Manager at South African Property Owners Association (Sapoa). Peter Magni is a researcher at the South African Cities Network (SACN). But these latest moves could come at a price for Zhou and his boss, President Xi Jinping. At some point, all equity rallies hit a wall, and so will China’s. From Tokyo to Seoul to New York, the history of the last 30 years is littered with examples of how it ends badly when stock manias run ahead of economic reforms. The speed and the scale of China’s run-up (Shenzhen shares are up 131 percent in 12 months) endangers the global economy as much as, if not more than, each of those episodes. And as the “Zhou put” makes clear, Beijing’s strategy is to generate even more froth.

Surging stocks are now Beijing’s favoured stimulus tool. All those ghost cities, massive factory overcapacity and excessive debt have Xi’s men looking to boost confidence via share prices. Beijing is loosening fiscal policy, too, to prevent a hard landing. It doubled the size of a debt swap programme, offering local governments cheaper financing to alleviate a credit crunch. But China’s other giant bubble – debt – limits its ability to support growth conventionally. It hopes rising shares will help companies raise capital to pay down debt, while enlivening consumers to spend more.

Savings

Households across the 1.3 billion-person nation are sitting on $21 trillion (R24.3bn) of savings. Xi figures that channeling more of that money into shares will unleash a virtuous cycle: greater wealth, increased consumption and a return to 8 percent-plus growth. But as history shows again and again, it’s an unsustainable gambit in the long run.

China needs to let more air out of its bubble, not keep pumping it up. In the days ahead, markets will revel in the Zhou put’s perfect timing in stemming a panic in Shanghai ( where shares tumbled 7.4 percent on Friday alone). But in the years ahead, it may be remembered as the moment the Communist Party was subsumed by the same irrational exuberance coursing through equity bourses. – Bloomberg