A leading town planner, Professor Philip Harrison, has left the University of the Witwatersrand for the other side of Braamfontein, where he is in charge of the City's development planning and urban management department.

Tackling 'Johannesburg's phenomenal growth': Professor Phil Harrison, executive director of development planning and urban management

(Photo: Enoch Lehung, City of Johannesburg)

FOR some 15 years, Professor Philip Harrison has been studying and commenting on the urban form of South African cities, particularly Johannesburg. He has conducted research, written articles and spoken at conferences, putting forward solutions to the challenges facing the city.

Now, as the executive director of development planning and urban management in Johannesburg, Harrison will get a chance to put his ideas into practice. Harrison, 42, has a doctorate in town and regional planning and has published extensively in the field.

He has written for national and international journals on subjects such as integrated development planning, urban change, and the history of planning; has co-edited a book on urban fragmentation in South Africa; and is awaiting the publication of a jointly written book on the lessons of post-apartheid planning. On a lighter, note he has also produced a series of specialised travel guides for South Africa.

Harrison says he has been studying the reshaping of Johannesburg from the other end of Braamfontein - at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he headed up the Urban Planning Programme. "I have read [Johannesburg's] Growth and Development Strategy, Integrated Development Plan and Spatial Development Framework."

And, for him, the City has drawn up good plans. "I'm quite impressed with the plans and strategies that have been put in place. So, I'll not be starting from scratch." The concern now is to move towards implementation.

Part of his department includes the corporate information system, which is critical for the functioning of the property value chain and City's finances. Harrison says that he is looking forward to working with this division "to develop a comprehensive system to monitor change in our rapidly transforming urban environment, and so provide the information that is urgently needed for proper decision-making".

He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his post. The challenge, he concedes, will be in translating his thoughts into reality.

Over the past five years, Harrison has undertaken a great deal of consultancy work for private and public sector institutions. His clients have included the Department of Provincial and Local Government, the Ethiopian Civil Service College, the Vulindlela-Development Bank of Southern Africa Institute, the Office of the Presidency and the Municipal Demarcations Board.

Despite this impressive list, by Harrison's own admission his job in Joburg will be daunting. "It's a huge challenge. But I feel both anxious and energised to tackle the job."

However, he is confident that he will get political support for his ideas. "The mayor is passionately committed to urban management. My political head, [councillor] Ruby Mathang, is also deeply concerned about the future of the city, and I know that we will form a strong partnership."

Harrison has set his long-term goal as contributing to changing Johannesburg from the sprawling, unequal, divided city that it is, into a better functioning and more inclusive, integrated and environmentally friendly urban metropolis.

According to Harrison, some of this growth will be driven by the Gautrain and the 2010 Fifa World Cup. "We plan to maximise benefits arising from both the Gautrain and 2010," he says.

The inner city requires intensive management

He promises to ensure that his department influences the decisions of market players such as developers and other public sector players. "There are huge development pressures on the northern edge in particular, but also in many other parts of the city. We need to manage growth and development in a way that is financially and environmentally responsible to attain our vision of a clean, safe and environmentally protected city."

In the immediate term, Harrison pledges to strengthen planning around the edges of the city and around the new areas of opportunity provided by the 2010 world cup and the Gautrain stations.

In terms of the City's new institutional structure, all regional directors will report to Harrison, which will provide an opportunity to influence urban management. In the past, regional directors performed social service functions, Harrison says now they will be actively involved in urban management.

"They will draw up regional urban management plans, or Rumps, which will identify hotspots and resources needed to manage the urban environment. They will then be tasked with co-ordinating the implementation of these plans, something which will require the active involvement of all other city departments and entities."

These Rumps will be developed on a partnership basis, explains Harrison. "We are looking to enter into agreements with various groups, including citizen groups, ratepayer associations, community groups, ward committees and the private sector, as it is not just the City government that has the responsibility to manage the environment within which we live."

Urban management will cover the whole city. "We will have 100 percent coverage of the city," Harrison says, "although urban management will be more intense in problem areas and in other areas of special priority."

A major step will be to appoint urban management officers and multi-departmental task teams to support the City's seven regional directors. These officers will patrol neighbourhoods looking for any mishaps that need attention. "They will patrol block by block to identify things like manhole covers that have been removed, illegal dumping sites and broken fire hydrants. They will report daily to all agencies in the City and then monitor the response of agencies. This system allows for rapid response."

Harrison is confident that some of the urban management officers will be in place soon.

He singles out the inner city as an area that requires intensive urban management. "In Johannesburg, the inner city has been a place of livelihood and support for newly arrived migrants. We need to ensure that the inner city is welcoming to all, at the same time ensuring that it is properly serviced and functions well."

Harrison ascribes many of the problems facing the city to apartheid planning. "The real problem is that you have 3,7 million people living in a sprawling, low-density city which is motor car dependent, with large areas still remaining separated from the rest of the city."

He, therefore, sees his function as being to reshape the city over a long period, making sure that it works efficiently to overcome the legacy of apartheid planning. "I will be guided by the City's Spatial Development Framework, which has identified areas of growth and of decline that require special interventions, but I will also work hard to ensure that the forgotten areas that have been peripheral to our planning system in the past are made visible."

Harrison attributes his passion for serving the poor to the influence of his parents, who were community workers in informal and rural areas of southern KwaZulu-Natal.

His father was the founder and principal of Sister Joan's High School in the Bhobhoyi informal settlement outside Port Shepstone, and his mother formed a community organisation called Ziphakamise (uplift yourself) to help local communities. "It made a big impression and raised my awareness of the challenges of poverty. During the drought of the early 1980s, I was struck by the lives of people queuing up to scrape muddy water from filthy puddles."

These experiences led Harrison to conduct a water quality survey when he was still in high school and to work with the community to find clean supplies of water, an experience which drew him into the field of urban planning.

He cites Orange Farm, Ivory Park and Diepsloot as examples of marginalised communities that are crying out for special attention. To overcome this disjuncture between the rich and the poor, says Harrison, the City must come up with a better connection between the north, where much of the economic growth is happening, and the south, where the majority of disadvantaged communities are located. "Living and working must be more connected. We will be working closely with the departments of transport, environment and housing over the next few years to resolve this."

Part of the solution, says Harrison, lies in providing more housing for low income earners in the inner city. "The inner city is critical for the proper functioning of the city as a whole."

He is pleased, however, with the capital injection from the public and private sectors being pumped into Soweto, and applauds the Alexandra Renewal Project as an example of what can be done to uplift poor communities. "Alexandra provides a good model for handling housing and service delivery issues in a highly creative way and we can apply many of the lessons from that experience in other areas.

"There are also good practices in places like Cosmo City that provide an example of how to create mixed income human settlements and support the goals of the government's national housing policy known as Breaking New Ground. We need to find ways to make it work."

He also speaks highly of the work done by the Johannesburg Development Agency. "There is also some extraordinary work being done by the JDA, which provides substantial guidance on how to work with the private sector to regenerate and transform the urban environment."

Harrison acknowledges that the City's planning system is sometimes seen as a constraint to development. One of the problems often cited is the long turnaround times on development applications and rezonings. But processing development applications is a mammoth task.

To put the matter in perspective, Harrison points out that his department processes about 6 000 applications annually, ranging from consent use changes, to major township developments such as Cosmo City. The department also approves about 24 000 building plans a year.

Work underway in Alexandra

"With the boom in the property sector, there has been intense pressure on us, especially on the northern edge," he explains.

However, Harrison acknowledges that his department can and must do more to accelerate these processes and facilitate development. "Over the coming year we intend to improve turnaround times by up to 25 percent, continuing the positive trend of the past year."

He adds that there has been good progress with building plan, township establishment and consent use processes. "So, our focus will be on rezonings and by the end of this financial year we hope to bring average turnaround times for the rezoning process down to 12 months, which will be considerably better than the 16 months it took six months back."

Harrison explains, however, that major developments are complex and could take longer to process. "I'll be working to find systems to process applications quicker, in conjunction with other departments such as transport and environment, to improve turnaround times."

He is also concerned about the fairly high incidence of unapproved developments going up in the city. "There is no point in having a system of approvals and development management if there is no enforcement. The message that must be sent to the public is that the City can and will act to enforce its planning and building controls. I will certainly support my officials in this area."

The building control and land use enforcement units do enjoy a measure of success. "The City does take non-compliance seriously, and does act on non-compliance," Harrison says, adding that the building control unit issues about 5 000 notices a year for violations of building regulations.

About 94 percent of individuals who receive notices comply and the matter does not need to be taken further. In the remaining 6 percent of cases (about 300) there is a referral to council attorneys.

In 2005-06, 81 court orders were obtained. There was a compliance rate of 27 percent on the court orders, leaving about 60 fines issued for non- compliance.

He adds that the land use and town planning enforcement unit investigates 3 000 complaints of non-compliance a year; these are all inspected, sometimes more than once. About 500 matters are referred to council attorneys and about 200 court orders are obtained a year. There is about 70 percent compliance on these court orders.

In 2005-06, about 70 summonses were issued and referred to the municipal court. Of these, 30 fines were paid, there were 13 warrants of arrest and 30 summonses have been subsequently withdrawn.

If his prolific writings, his extensive knowledge of urban management and his passion for his job are anything to go by, Harrison may be just the man to reshape the city's landscape, making it work for the poor, for developers and for residents at large.