(This piece first appeared in my column in the Herald on 20 September 2013)
My wife and I missed our evening walk on Tuesday. I decided
rather to attend a critical evening meeting at the PE St Georges club. I
usually prefer to avoid evening meetings to do important family work and to”
veg out” on the couch with my dogs, but this meeting was different. It was one
in a sequence of meetings that report back on the work of an exciting grouping
of business leaders volunteering their time to what they call “Project NMB”.
Under the direction of volunteers like Kobus Gerber, Michelle Brown and Andrew
Barton, the project has in very little time, identified a clear list of
“doable” projects that would turn this region around. They speak about plans
for public access high speed Wi Fi, they speak about a clean, Green City, they
speak about the freedom precinct and they speak about a full calendar events
strategy. Great ideas, great clarity and an impressive commitment that comes
from the sincere passion of people that know that Nelson Mandela Bay is yet to
live its finest hour.
Sitting through the presentations in the Club’s grand and
ornate colonial dining hall, I was remind again that this city is not faced
with a shortage of great ideas. It is not faced with a shortage of great
individuals. It has great weather. It has no malaria. It is not in a warzone
nor is it a viable target for multi-national terrorists. So what are the obstacles? To be honest, I am not exactly sure, but with
your permission I would like to try out an argument on you to see if it
resonates.
My argument to you is that the most significant obstacle to
meaningful spatial transformation of South African cities lies not in a
shortage of academic “know how”, not in a shortage on public sector investment,
not in a shortage of private sector mobilisation, but rather in the entrenched dysfunctional
relationship between the public, private and academic sectors.
Each of these sectors operates increasingly as a “silo”,
separate from the next with no mechanisms available for true collaboration. The
public sector has become driven by a number of imperatives that require it to
“procure” the “services” offered by the private sector in a standardised procedure
designed to “procure” anything from light bulbs to toilet cleaning contractors.
The obvious fact that public and private sectors can best serve the urban
crisis by contributing the best and brightest from their ranks to collaborate
in providing, vision, leadership and direction, is of no concern to the
faceless authors of our public sector’s “supply chain management” procedure. The
unavoidable net result of this strategy is a contested, completely unproductive
standoff between the public sector “urban silo” and the private sector “urban
silo”. No vision emerges from this standoff;
no leadership emerges from this standoff.
In a similar way urbanists in the “academic silo” come under
increasing pressure to focus not on the South African urban crisis, but rather
on “purer” academic pursuits. A 23 year old with a Phd that deals with some
arcane branch of architectural theory is much more likely to assume a
professorship in Architecture that a practitioner with 20 years’ experience in
city building. This trend seems unstoppable with a momentum developed from very
high up in our higher education community.
Architects who teach are now actively discouraged from participating in
private practice. Those from private practice who give on their time and share
their experience do so as volunteers. Academics offering to serve the public sectors
are treated the same as their private sector counterparts, as a commodity to be
bought through a “procurement system” with the same resultant frustration.
In this way the silos grow more and more isolated and
positions within them become more and more entrenched, urbanists of otherwise
impeccable credentials begin to withdraw into cynicism and isolation. Great
ideas are shelved, big visions parked and energy diverted.
The sorry fact is that no workable protocol exists that enables
top urbanists from the public, private and academic sectors to collaborate and
share thinking on the spatial transformation. Instead we have developed the
unsubstantiated and unscientific belief that a formalised, project level
“public participation” process will magically and miraculously manifest the big
ideas we know are waiting to turn our cities around. Well, it hasn’t and it won’t.
In the world of city building I am afraid “public
participation” amounts to no more than a
series of noisy meetings in stuffy halls where the housewife’s, car guards and
estate agents clamber for the microphone drowning out the voice of any academic
or private sector urbanist with real value to add. Yes, its democratic.
Everyone gets a say. But that does not mean that we are harvesting the best
ideas from the minds of the few that are excellently placed to take us forward.
There is no meaningful collaboration, so we stay where we are.
Is there any solution? Is there any alternative to these
dysfunctional relationships? Is there any way out of this urban crisis? Of
course there is. These challenges were made by people like you and me and the
can be overcome by people like you and me. It’s up to us to develop new protocols and to
have the courage as activists, in whichever silo we sit, to do whatever it
takes to push them through, to confront our management, to put ourselves at
risk.
The re-shaped cities of the future depend on our action.
Tim Hewitt-Coleman 18
09 2013
