They also raise key questions about the place and the powers of the cities within SA’s three spheres of government. The first story is that of Vusi Phailane, a Wits University architecture student who lives in KwaThema. He spends about four hours a day and R800 a month commuting to Wits, by foot, taxis and trains. Renting a room in Braamfontein near the university would cost R1500 a month, but he could save the transport costs and gain four to five hours of productive working time daily.
The second is about a Johannesburg northern suburbs businessman, Dr Giorgio Tomma, who has, over time, built 500 rooms for rent, with communal ablution facilities, on his upmarket suburban small-holding near a local mall. Though the rooms are small and inadequate, the monthly rent relatively high (R240 a person), and the rules tough, there is a long waiting list for the rooms. The tenants include working people who have houses in Soweto, and may even have cars, but can’t afford the time or money to drive in every day.
The anecdotes are a small part of a comprehensive report that is rich in data and debate on the dynamics and performance of the cities.
But it is also a timely intervention in the hot debate about the three spheres of government. Both the African National Congress national executive committee and the provincial and local government department have been reviewing the role of the provinces, with an eye to reducing their number, rationalising their functions, or even abolishing them. There’s concern that the system isn’t working as it should. But it’s far from clear what changes would be required or why.
Which is where the two State of the Cities stories come in. Both deal with the crucial interface between transport and housing, and highlight the need for better and more integrated urban policy. But transport and housing are two of the areas where money, functions and responsibility are dispersed between national, provincial and local government, not to mention (in the case of transport) parastatals such as Transnet.
The report steers clear of the broader debate about the three spheres of government. But it intervenes in what it calls the “devolution debate” with a call for control over housing and transport to be transferred into the hands of the cities. These are key drivers of urban development, says the report. But some of the main responsibilities linked to housing and transport are still with national and provincial government, “undermining the ability of a city to determine urban form, to target subsidies strategically and to finance key components of urban infrastructure”.
Subsidies for low-income housing come through provinces but it’s the municipalities that have to allocate the land, put in the infrastructure and services, develop the houses and make the “integrated human settlements” that SA’s housing policy wants to see, actually happen.
In practice, the report finds, big cities such as Johannesburg and eThekwini are developing their own housing policies that may depart from national policy in certain areas such as rental accommodation or informal settlements, where national policy is inadequate to address the needs of mobile, growing city populations, or respond to the specifics of local affordable housing markets.
Transport policy is even more fragmented, says the report, with money for public transport infrastructure and operators flowing through four separate and different subsidy routes, involving all three spheres of government.
SA’s cities are strange and dysfunctional creatures because of their apartheid past. Low-income housing that’s far from workplaces and high transport costs impose costs not only on the poor people who have to bear them but on the economy itself.
Addressing the problems is complex. But part of the idea would be that cities should target subsidies, for example, so higher levels of public transport subsidy would go to households far from job opportunities and from buses and trains (which are subsidised where taxis are not), while higher levels of housing subsidy would go to poor households in deteriorating inner-city buildings.
That would help the cities function more effectively and maximise the effect of subsidies on the poor. It’s not just about subsidies, though, but about planning and development. And this is where the State of the Cities report makes a bigger point — about government and its somewhat unresolved approach to cities.
SA has plenty of policy on local government. But it has no urban policy as such. The cities face challenges that many smaller local authorities do not. And cities matter, as the report emphasises. SA’s 21 key urban areas occupy only 2% of the land but contribute almost 70% of the national economy, making them core drivers of SA’s economic growth. But they are also core to development. Far from inequality being an urban-versus- rural matter, the “urbanisation of poverty” means the cities are home to more than a quarter of the total number of South Africans living below the minimum living level.
“It is precisely because cities are simultaneously the most productive sites in the national economy, as well as areas that accommodate the largest number of poor people, that cities are strategically important places for meeting the government’s growth and development agenda,” says the report.
One should, of course, take this from whence it comes — State of the Cities is a project of the SA Cities Network, which brings together the leadership of SA’s nine largest cities. But their populations, and their economies, are growing faster than the rest of the country. Yet there is an odd kind of ambivalence in government policy towards the cities. Take Asgi-SA, the accelerated and shared growth initiative, with its emphasis on investing in infrastructure to boost SA’s economic growth rate. The cities, especially in Gauteng, are already growing faster than the national average and the report points out that for SA to attain higher average levels of economic growth will require that cities grow even faster.
Government has actually allocated huge amounts of money to urban infrastructure, for housing, services and commuter rail infrastructure as well as big-ticket spending on stadiums and public transport for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The report estimates the total allocation for infrastructure supporting urban development is set to rise a staggering average of 29% over the next three years, with the national fiscus funding R68bn worth of infrastructure, largely in urban areas.
Yet the report points out that there’s hardly any reference to cities and their role in the Asgi-SA documentation, which tends to associate local authorities with “second economy” programmes. It doesn’t provide much guidance on what needs to happen at city level to generate competitiveness and share growth.
There’s still an apparent reluctance to focus policy specifically on cities, perhaps because there’s political discomfort with seeming to downplay the plight of rural areas, or even with policy thrusts that might differentiate too much between small municipalities and big ones. Some of the problems are common. But cities face challenges small towns do not, especially given their apartheid legacy and distorted patterns of urban development. Those challenges will grow as migration continues and economic growth ramps up.
Meanwhile, all this public funding for urban development is being routed through a complex system of national, provincial and local government where objectives are often fragmented — or even competing.
The State of the Cities report has intervened in the debate about the state of SA in a practical, nuanced way. But it is calling quite loudly for SA to take its cities more seriously.
