DAVID LEWIS: Mixed use of space is among the ways to right a lopsided Johannesburg

While future columns will traverse the range of pressing national and international issues that 2023 presents, let’s open the year with a look at the state of Johannesburg. Though an ostensibly local issue, it’s as complex and of greater consequence for the readers of this newspaper and for all of SA than many other domestic and international problems.

Where Joburg goes so goes SA. The city accounts for about 16% of the country’s GDP, while Gauteng with its barely distinguishable metropolitan agglomerations centred on the Joburg metro accounts for about 40%. Joburg sets the tone for the rest of SA. Whether crime rates or voting patterns or the quality of public services or the dynamism — or lack thereof — of the informal sector, trends in Joburg will ultimately come to characterise patterns in the rest of the country’s burgeoning metropolitan centres.

There’s a growing consensus in development thinking that it’s the state of the metropolitan centres that determine the growth prospects of the countries in which they are located. Investors — certainly in manufacturing and services — invest in cities, not countries. Among the key factors determining investment location decisions are the quality of life and work, the availability of skilled labour and the presence of tertiary educational institutions, the proximity of a large supplier and customer base and the quality of communications and logistical services.

It’s these factors, more than tax rates and location subsidies, that determine investment decisions. However, well-functioning cities not only attract the sort of formal investment referred to above, they also act as magnets for smaller and less formal traders and service providers, including entrepreneurial migrants (the Ethiopian quarter in downtown Joburg, for instance) attracted by the market constituted by large firms, the formally employed and the great mass of poor people.

Joburg city planners and residents hold a binary view of the character, the look and feel, of a city. The first is sterile Sandton with its wide boulevards and pristine, empty pavements. The second is the squalid CBD with its traffic-choked roads and people-choked pavements teeming with garbage but also every imaginable commercial activity. The implied model for the future is a city that mirrors Sandton as closely as possible.

Spatial segregation

The transformation of Joburg or any of SA’s metros won’t be easy. Arguably, the most intractable feature inherited from apartheid is the spatial segregation dominating our cities. In addition to racial segregation, apartheid spatial policy also ensured that the commercial districts emptied at the end of the working day as its employee base returned to their township homes, and the rest to the suburbs.

The Joburg CBD challenges the caricature of the apartheid city. Many of the people who work there also live there. They, as well as those who commute from the townships and suburbs to work in the CBD, constitute the customer base for the street vendors. The CBD is an outdoor-orientated part of the city — those who work in the offices and shops of the city spill out onto the streets at lunchtime and after work to buy meals, groceries and clothing.

Sandton is chronically indoor orientated. Those who work there shop and eat in the malls that are part of, or proximate to, the office blocks in which they work. After work they commute to their gated suburban areas and housing complexes, and to the townships. A street trader will not set up her stall in the streets of Sandton partly because the reception from the large firms and mall owners is likely to be distinctly hostile, but also because the prospective customer base is not on the streets.

This has to change. The city and the country cannot afford one principal commercial district of its largest, richest city, which provides an entry point for traders wanting to exploit the market there, and another that provides no entry point for informal traders and service providers who seek to provide goods and services to their more moneyed, formally employed counterparts. The apartheid city is responsible for the small scale of informal sector enterprises and the sector as a whole. It thus bears a large measure of responsibility for the seemingly intractable problem of unemployment.

But what is to be done? Those who run Joburg, and also those who live in the suburbs, should confront the entirely fallacious notion that successful cities resemble dull, pristine Sandton. The principal commercial centres of large, successful cities are characterised by their bustling commercial life, meeting places between the formally employed and the informally employed, between large enterprises and small enterprises.

Cruel truth

A rich mix of land uses also characterises them. In wealthy cities such as London small vendors are frequently housed in marketplaces (often former inner city produce markets), which provide collective services to their small business tenants, many of whom started life in informal stalls on the street. In large, developing country cities, of which Joburg is one, these small enterprises are largely informal, located on the streets.

In most dynamic developing country cities the rich and poor work and live cheek by jowl. While apartheid denied this advantage to SA cities, oddly enough Sandton may be one of the few SA commercial centres where those with some disposable income (employees in Sandton offices) and the poor (residents of Alexandra township) exist in proximity to each other. But the cruel truth is that the wealth of Sandton — often lauded as the richest square mile in Africa — generates no positive external effects for neighbouring Alex.

To attract sustainable small enterprise to the commercial districts of Joburg particular public services must also be provided. This applies as much to efforts to clean up the CBD as it does to attracting small and informal enterprises to Sandton. More efficient street cleaning and garbage collection services should be provided in the CBD (the obvious solution is to contract the cadre of waste pickers who have created a separation system to divert valuable, recyclable waste from landfills).

In both commercial districts the city must provide public toilet facilities, cleaned and protected by the city. In Sandton the large office blocks and malls must be required to provide accessible toilet and storage facilities to street traders (overnight security of their wares being a major issue). In both areas, but Sandton in particular, market facilities for small traders must be provided.

If effective public goods and services are to be provided, the governance of the city furthermore needs to be vastly improved. What incentive is there for a city manager to try new approaches and build new public infrastructure if she’s likely to be removed from office before they can be implemented, let alone bear fruit?

The most obvious source of unstable governance is unstable coalitions. Joburg will be governed by coalitions for the foreseeable future. By 2024 many of the provinces and the country itself may well be governed by multiparty arrangements. We have to formulate mechanisms for enforcing a strong degree of stability in these arrangements. Instability at the top cascades down to every institution in the governance unit. Who will take on the management of Joburg if the city governors who appoint her will not be in office when she takes up her appointment? Why are the metro police a source of insecurity for street traders, rather than a source of much-needed safety?

Future columns will look at other city institutions. They will also examine the interplay between institutional effectiveness and coalition governance. Joburg is our biggest coalition test case. It is also our most complex and most dynamic urban environment. The city requires a firm grasp on strong democratic governance — a governance that is public facing and protects and empowers the poor and vulnerable. That is the metropolitan leadership required.

• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a co-founder and director of Corruption Watch.