City of Johannesburg infrastructure plan to tackle housing, services backlog

1st October 2015

By: Megan van Wyngaardt

Creamer Media Contributing Editor Online

  

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The City of Johannesburg has appointed consulting firm Aurecon to create a consolidated infrastructure plan (CIP) aimed at clearing the city’s current infrastructure backlogs and to meet future growth needs.

The CIP would enable the city to integrate and prioritise its infrastructure spending over the next ten years, including new infrastructure development that will accommodate growth, as well as the maintenance of existing infrastructure.

The City of Johannesburg was currently working on the third phase of the CIP.

While the first two phases focused on strategic socioeconomic planning and sector master planning to establish a strong baseline for infrastructure investment requirements, the third phase would tackle the need for improved management decision-making information.

Aurecon strategic and integrated planner Johan van den Berg noted that Johannesburg was currently facing two significant challenges – uncoordinated spending on infrastructure and ineffectiveness in accommodating the rising population. He added that this would likely continue without a CIP.

“In 2011, it was determined that the city, cognisant of its ageing infrastructure, capacity constraints and backlogs, would need to spend in excess of R10-billion on the provision of infrastructure over a ten-year period. Adding to this complexity is a rapidly growing population,” Van den Berg noted.

It was estimated that Johannesburg’s population would increase by almost 12 000 people each month. To add to the problem, over 80% of these people were economically disadvantaged, without jobs and an income.

“According to The Economist’s [book] Megachange: The world in 2050, a quickly rising population in Africa is going to put strain on a number of economies on the continent.

“The research has shown that ten new cities will sprawl in Africa over the next 50 years to accommodate the influx of people to urban areas. In Southern Africa, people are drawn to the bright lights and the promise of financial security and jobs that Johannesburg has to offer, but infrastructure such as water and sanitation, electricity and roads, is struggling to keep up.

“Besides the shortage of houses, there are also challenges related to the distance that people need to travel from where they stay to where they work. People living in informal settlements on the periphery of the city often spend over 40% of their income on transport to get to work, which doesn’t leave much for living costs such as food. This is a problem that the City of Johannesburg is addressing through its spatial strategy, the Corridors of Freedom, which is supported by the CIP,” Van den Berg commented.

He added that the CIP was far more than a plan to tackle infrastructure maintenance and upgrades over the next decade and encompassed population growth and housing location, programme and project identification and prioritisation, infrastructure capacity requirements and investment.

“Instead of only addressing issues such as supplying houses and updating water and electricity lines, the City of Johannesburg has a long-term vision with this plan. Sustainability is a key principle in the CIP, so we’re investing a lot of resources in developing a strategy that will ensure people are able to live well, work well and move well in a prosperous, vibrant city,” he said.

CITY PLANNING
The CIP was being developed differently to how city planning had been done in the past, where the traditional approach entailed planning the infrastructure needs of various sectors in isolation, without looking at the development of the region and its people as a whole.

“Aurecon developed a socioeconomic model that projects population growth, available land space, the density of suburbs and settlements, as well as the movement of people within the municipal boundary.

“This approach allowed us to create a baseline of what is available, how the needs of the city and the people will change and how each sector’s plans need to be updated to accommodate the growth and planned expansions,” Van den Berg explained.

The CIP enabled all types of information to be spatially aggregated and disaggregated according to each sector’s reporting requirements. This also assisted with sector funding consolidation to create an investment cash flow forecast for the various types of infrastructure that would be needed over the next decade.

Edited by Chanel de Bruyn
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor Online

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