Accelerate Cape Town
I have recently been appointed the CEO of a new organisation called Accelerate Cape Town (ACT). Accelerate Cape Town is an organisation started by leaders of key businesses in the Cape, who are concerned that complacency and lack of cohesive thinking make it increasingly difficult to attract and retain businesses and top talent in the Cape.
The organisation aims to mobilise strong, independent business leadership to develop and implement a bold and innovative 20-year vision and growth path for the region.
Accelerate Cape Town provides the Cape business community with the necessary voice and dedicated resources to develop and drive the growth of a sustainable and successful world city. A city with the skills, infrastructure and environment necessary to compete internationally for business and talent.
Working with city and regional issues, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about urban development. Here is something I wrote a while ago but never got around to putting on the blog.
Urban Sprawl
With the current rate of urbanisation in South Africa, local authorities are working hard to provide housing for the poor in metropolitan areas. However, they are making a mistake that will dog us for generations to come by continuously building one house per property in increasingly larger circles around the main urban centres. Not only is this a continuation of apartheid urban planning, which ensured that the poorest had the furthest to travel to get to work; it is also counter-intuitive.
Increasing sprawl puts strain on the transport infrastructure and requires much greater investment in infrastructure to provide water, sewerage, electricity, railway lines and so on because all pipes, cables and other necessities have to stretch further. We should be going for a more urban, high-rise approach, with areas closer to the CBDs being upgraded and built up. This is much more in line with the approach in Europe and much of South America than the disastrous urban sprawl we see in Los Angeles and other US cities.
Authorities will contest that they are encouraging densification, but if one looks at Johannesburg, for example, the densification is taking place in areas that are still spread very far apart. This doesn’t help alleviate the existing problem of overloaded infrastructure, it only serves to exacerbate it.