Toward the compact green cities of our future
(This piece first appeared in The Eastern Cape Herald on 4 May 2012)
If big private capital, has its way Nelson Mandela Bay will,
in the coming months see massive new sprawling developments beyond Motherwell
to the east and beyond Sherwood to the west. The multi-billion rand Baywest shopping
centre along the N2 toward Humansdorp, this month obtained environmental
approvals from the MEC, while the process is now well underway to obtain
approval for a new R6 Billion mixed residential development beyond Motherwell, along
the road to Addo.
The question, I suppose is: Have we, as a community, stopped
to think what it is that we are allowing to happen here? Are we happy that our
city continues its low density sprawl endlessly, like a tumour, consuming the
landscape? Government support for these two proposed developments seem strange
and confusing, especially since it has become generally understood that the
economy can no longer afford to keep building environmentally destructive
sprawling cities the way we have been building since the World War 2. Government
policy documents since "breaking new ground" to the first drafts of
the National Planning Commission documents are clear that South African cities
need to be accessible, compact and break away their divisive spatial and
physical past.
In spite good policy documents, South African cities have continued
to become massive sprawling, polluting, fossil fuel dependent, crime ridden
poverty traps. These cities, in which 50% of our population now live, are
monuments to inefficiency and environmental arrogance. To this day, our cities
remain memorials to apartheid's most visible and viscous social engineering
projects. But they are also reminders of another massive mistake of recent history!
The mistake, with which we must now rapidly come to terms, is that South
African cites have been designed under the false assumption and the lie that
cheap fossil fuels would be available in perpetuity. This is now proving to be
a colossal and expensive mistake.
The International
Energy Agency have told us that global oil production has continued to
increase year on year, since oil was first extracted from the ground in 1859,
but that production has now peaked. In fact the consensus is that oil
production peaked sometime in 2006 already. In other words, each and every year
since 1859 the world was able to meet the increased demand for fossil fuels by
simply finding new oil fields or drilling deeper in old ones. But now, supply
is rapidly declining, while demand continues to grow unchecked, most notably to
meet the needs of the growing Chinese and Indian economies.
While the implications of peak oil are now broadly understood,
what I would prefer to focus on is what this means for how we approach the
design of our cities looking forward. Firstly, I would suggest, let us concede
that we have got it all horribly wrong up until now. South African cities are
of a very low density and have sprawled very widely. The brutal truth is that
the general public are going to have to pay a very heavy price for this design
error. It is soon going to become unbearably expensive to move around in
private motor vehicles. It is going to become unbearably expensive to
distribute food and goods within our sprawling cities It is going to become
unbearably expensive for police to patrol and for municipalities to collect
refuse. Even if our cities suspend their sprawling today, it is still going to
be very tough!
Secondly I would suggest that we do not expend any energy in
trying to apportion blame for these design errors. We must understand and
forgive our Town Planner friends motivated by a fee structure that for years
encouraged hectare upon hectare of free standing sites in mundane suburbia
and featureless townships. We should understand and forgive our Civil
Engineer friends motivated by a fee structure that for years encouraged kilometre
upon kilometre of suburban roads, sewers and storm water systems. To
vilify these professions and the government departments that briefed them would
be futile. Rather let us turn these skilled and committed thinking people to
the task of imagining the new compact green cities of the future. Cities where
people can walk to work or use public transport. Cities that produce their own
food, cities that create vibrant live hoods and cultural diversity.
But thirdly, and most importantly we need to put an
immediate stop to the popular myth that profit motivated big developers “know
best” about what is good for us and our city’s future. The fact that a big JSE
listed developer has acquired cheap land of the periphery of our city and can
fill it with government subsidised housing or thousands of square meters of
retail clothing stores we don’t need, does not mean that it is good for our
city. It does not mean it is good for our economy. It does not mean that is
good for our people. In fact, all it means is that our city becomes more
sprawled, more distorted and more likely to trap ordinary citizens in an
unbearably expensive future where no one wins. We cannot afford to allow this
myth to continue any longer.
What I do know for sure is that our generation is equipped
and capacitated to change all this, but what I am not so sure of is whether we
have the courage to confront or the commitment to stay at it.
We will see.
Tim Hewitt-Coleman 20 April 2012
