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There are plenty of highlights in new residential developments but lack of
progress in some areas count as lowlights for the year.
Neil Fraser
I WANTED to do a review of residential this week but I see that I covered the
subject quite fully just some months back. So let me just provide some
residential high and lowlights and then link future residential to last week's
topic transportation.
Thanks, by the way, for the many comments received in reply to last week's
Citichat, both supportive and critical. We need more debate!
Firstly, then, residential highlights. The rejuvenation of the Jeppe, Bree,
Plein Streets' middle income strip; the move eastward towards End
Street/Doornfontein; the strong recovery of Braamfontein, both in regard to
student accommodation and quality middle-income, and the higher-income
developments at the western end of Marshall and Anderson Streets. Public
environment upgrading in Hillbrow and Berea should be starting early next year,
although a great deal of building upgrading appears to be happening already,
with a great deal more needed. (I believe that the Ponte re-development is sold
out, which should act as a strong catalyst for the area. To think that ten years
ago, the previous owners were applying for rezoning to a jail!)
Lowlights are the lack of progress in residential development on City-owned
land in Newtown and Constitution Hill and a bunch of middle- to higher-income
private sector central city developments around Commissioner and Diagonal
Streets that just never seem to progress. There has been no progress this year
at all with the Better Buildings Programme, which I hear is about to undergo a
dramatic change that one can only hope is really going to be for "the better"!
But why the interminable delays?
If one then looks forward, there is the continuing huge need for solutions to
be found for integrated residential development across economic and racial
barriers and a solution to the continuing problem of so many people living in
sub-standard accommodation. Said Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago: ".......We
require that 20 percent of units be affordable in residential developments that
receive city assistance. We demolish run-down homes or apartment buildings and
turn them over to developers of affordable housing. Then we provide a subsidy
that allows the developer to reduce the purchase price and still make a profit.
We replace dangerous, unsafe high rises with mixed income communities, ending
the isolation that has trapped residents in a cycle of poverty and failure."
Hopefully the current City programme of constructing "temporary
accommodation" will allow for releasing residents similarly trapped in the not
too distant future but I worry about the apparent lack of scale.
However, the biggest influence on how the future city will look and work
relates to its transport-related residential component. One of the really
important outcomes of a decent transportation system is the impact that it will
have on the siting and massing of development. I think this has been recognised
by the powers-that-be in the opportunities that will be offered for bulk and
density but I don't think that is enough. We also have to have the guts to
implement some meaningful interventions and I'm not sure that we are brave
enough nor equipped to go that far.
Increase in inner city living
The past five years have
already witnessed a massive increase in inner-city residential living because
the market has reacted to the huge pent-up demand, skewed by decades of
apartheid planning, for decent accommodation close to employment. But this has
largely been through seizing opportunities to convert empty commercial or
degraded residential into middle-income housing.
Surely the new transportation systems must lead to transit-oriented
development on a far more imaginative and broader scale, requiring public and
private sectors to work far closer together to create mixed use environments
close to public transport. That requires developers to be working with public
transportation authorities to plan for a diversity of development, including a
wide range of housing types to suit all kinds of economic circumstances within
an environment of a greater proliferation of open space and which encourage
walking and cycling.
Several lessons of transit-oriented development have emerged from other
countries we need to learn from them.
Recently, I read an article on the "inextricable role" that planning needs to
play in the development of transit in China (41 000 kms of expressway in 2006
,which by 2020 will exceed 85 000. That's bad news as far as I'm concerned
last year China added 1 000 new cars a day to its roads!) but its railway system
will extend to 100 000 kms by the same time. Some 11 265 of those will be rapid
rail connections between provincial capitals and main cities, including a 174 km
$1.2 billion high-speed train between Shanghai and Hangzou.
The article also contained the following statement, somewhat sobering because
it's so close to the bone: "The scale and breadth of this investment in
infrastructure are unprecedented, and understanding its ramifications is
difficult for many, especially for Westerners more accustomed to Governments
that only begrudgingly support mass transit. While these figures are singularly
impressive, the official reported projections may be somewhat inflated. What
provincial governments announce and what is actually implemented is not
always the same. Statistics, reliable or otherwise, are hard to come by. Indeed,
for all its recent openness, China is still known to guard and manipulate
information it gives to the public, especially information it considers to
involve the greater good of the citizenry."
If you read last weekend's Sunday Times "Survey on the City of Johannesburg",
you will know that China is not alone in this approach. An article in the
survey, "Public Transport Revolution Planned", was dominated by a picture of
existing Metro buses (The caption read: "The present bus system will be turned
into what is known as Bus Rapid Transport". I would call that not only gross
misrepresentation but a miracle, rather than a revolution!). The City missed a
great opportunity to start building enthusiasm and a common understanding of the
BRT proposals and of the impact they will have on the city and its citizens an
impact that could make us into the really great African city of world class
status. But do we have the vision to go beyond ourselves?
This City should stop treating its citizens as dumbos and turn what is
without doubt a critical intervention into an opportunity to get everyone to buy
in and rebuild civic pride. This is the biggest single opportunity that the city
has embraced since the discovery of gold and I would have employed some of the
genius of a Jaime Lerner, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Santiago
Calatrava, maybe even a Frank Gehry, to lift everyone's sights to what could be
and to excite and motivate even the dourest and most doughty of critics.
Ciao, Neil
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