Cities are vehicles of growth but policy makers take foot off the accelerator
National priority should be higher-density, integrated urban economies that break up our apartheid legacy, writes Ann Bernstein
Getting out of SA’s low-growth, high-unemployment trap requires bold action. One priority is to take advantage of the energies unleashed by urbanisation and the productivity gains our cities can provide. The country’s future is urban and our major metropolitan areas are one of our strengths. It is time to make more effective use of them and get beyond the fragmented and discriminatory past of townships and cities. SA needs to create integrated urban economies with opportunities for all. We need to reset national priorities to place cities at the heart of growth policy. We also need to tackle the challenge of apartheid’s problematic urban spatial legacy. The structure of our cities, their layout, governance and functioning, reflect a harmful heritage of segregated land use and denial of economic opportunity that to this day obstruct their capacity to generate and sustain rapid economic growth. One manifestation of this legacy is that our cities have much lower density than those in o...
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