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People move from their rural agricultural existence or small-town life to cities, drawn by the allure of financial freedom and a better life – who doesn’tdream of living better, safer, and, dare I say it, financially more secure?
This has resulted in rampant urban sprawl, some organised but most often haphazard, segregating and sometimes downright ugly. Which in turn has city planners and developers scrambling for a solution that satisfies all aspects of Maslow’s hierarchy – the innate need for wellbeing.
Historically, these areas of low-density urban sprawl, such as the suburbs of old, the RDP government-funded social housing projects and apartheid-era townships, have been of little social and economic value and reek of inefficiency with their reliance on lengthy transport routes – both to work and to play. Roll on a new era of doing things where progressive developers, along with city planners, look at things through a new lens – that of densification and multi-use developments, and the creation of polynuclear ‘precincts’. In a nutshell, these precincts are ‘new’ towns and development areas that operate holistically, providing places to live, work and play.
Rory Wilkinson, Planning Director of Durban’s Tongaat Hulett Developments, says:
“A mixed-use environment provides opportunities, not only for the people living in the new development, but equally for the people surrounding it, the broader population. And you can only do that through higher intensity of use and by providing a more varied mix of uses in a small, compact space, which at the same time starts to enable and facilitate the utilisation of public transport.
Integral to these new development areas is transportation. And it’s not a case of ‘just build new roads’. On the contrary, it entails joint planning with local municipalities around the development of public transport routes. In Tongaat Hulett’s case, they work closely with the eThekwini Municipality, ensuring that, as land stewards, they know the needs of the City when it comes to integrating with the GO!Durban Integrated Rapid Public Transport Network (IRPTN). For example, Bridge City was developed between the key nodes of Pinetown and uMhlanga Ridge specifically to take advantage of the Bridge City railway station, which is linked to the Durban CBD by 22 daily trains to and from the CBD and its position as a node for the three bus rapid transport corridors, including the IRPTN. When that’s complete, Bridge City will be the second busiest commuter exchange in Durban. And it’s all located beneath the new Bridge City Shopping Mall, which adds an efficient retail function to the mix.
In Midrand, the property boom following the construction of the Mall of Africa in Gauteng’s new Waterfall precinct has seen traffic becoming increasingly heavy, so much so that developers are strongly recommending the use of public transport, including the use of Gautrain buses to get to and from the Midrand Gautrain Station. The driving force behind Midrand becoming a key growth point in Gauteng is its rapid commercial and residential development coupled with its central location between Johannesburg and Pretoria. The residential development caters for all sectors, from the lower end of the market to the high-end estates, with many businesses and even large-scale industries, such as textiles and motor vehicles, relocating to Midrand.
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Cape Town is everyone’s darling, and why wouldn’t it be, with Table Mountain, miles of accessible ocean and world-class wining and dining? Historically, the CBD was Cape Town, shadowed by its mountain and hugged by the shoreline. But as populations grew the inevitable urban sprawl beyond the mountain happened … and along with it long commutes, horrendous traffic jams and higher blood pressure as residents made their way into the city to work. In an attempt to ‘fix’ this, the City has earmarked a number of projects to breathe life into ‘old’ areas.
The most obvious is the V&A Waterfront development, which quite rightly has become a benchmark for its reinvention and efficiency as a mixed-use environment. From its days as the historic docklands around the Victoria and Alfred basins to its redevelopment as a residential and commercial area comprising hotels, extensive retail, dining and entertainment facilities, it’s not just been a case of ‘out with the old’. Great care has been taken to restore – for example, the conversion of the historic grain silo that now houses the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), the Kings Warehouse into retail space, and the Radisson Red Hotel, which is housed in No. 6 Silo.
Then there’s Woodstock, one of the oldest suburbs in Cape Town that is reinventing itself as an edgy, hip neighbourhood bustling with a blend of food, fashion, art and design – many old factory walls now sport vivid street art. Its renovated Old Biscuit Mill is now home to weekly markets, cool design stores, designer fashion, African handicrafts and street food stalls. Here on the Upper East Side is the DoubleTree by Hilton, where one moment you’re a conference delegate and the next you’re sipping coffee at one of the local cafés – with the locals, as they take a break from the surrounding textile factories. And there’s Salt River, an area earmarked for residential developments with its easy access to the CBD. From a transport perspective, Cape Town’s CBD has the well-functioning MyCiTi Integrated Rapid Transport system, which ensures that residents, visitors and commuters alike are able to access these ‘new’ precincts with relative ease.
It is crucial for property developers, whether they be in Durban, Cape Town or Johannesburg, to work closely with their local municipalities, to be part of the joint planning process so as to plan around, and help facilitate, infrastructure development – to help ‘work towards a joint vision where public transport, or nonmotorised transport, is dominant, and where it’s possible to walk to work,’ as Wilkinson says.
But it’s not all about work and how to get there. For any new development area to be a success, there needs to be space for human recreation, be it restaurants and food markets, open spaces for walking and jogging, or planned events. There need to be greenery, trees and relatively ‘wild’ places – it is said that earthing (walking barefoot on grass, soil, sand or any other natural surface) has several health benefits. Whether that’s true physically or not is moot, but anyone who has ever walked barefoot on a beach can vouch for its psychological efficacy. Cape Town and Durban have their extensive beaches and promenades, hiking trails and nature reserves. Johannesburg has … parks – lots of them, and nature reserves too.
The other benefit of new developments and precincts is the ease with which services can be provided. No more long distance journeys from suburb to waste dump site when the economies of scale make recycling more viable and wasteto-energy production an option to consider. Which leads to other environmental initiatives, from renewable energy to water recycling. Which brings us back to Durban where Tongaat Hulett Development’s proposed urban development project, Ntshongweni, is set to challenge the paradigm of urban development by seamlessly combining logistics, industrial, regional retail, commercial and residential opportunities in line with government’s Strategic Integrated Project initiative. This is likely to be the first of many such projects countrywide. Maslow’s hierarchy might have started purely as psychological observation, but as each one of us would know, the basic human need for physiological wellbeing, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation is very real. Smart city planners and developers know this, plan around this and ultimately deliver spaces for us to work, live and play in an environment that meets our needs. After all, what more do we need in life?
