S. African city planner Shipalana speaks on xenophobia, post-apartheid planning

Nkateko Shipalana is the assistant director of Metro Planning for South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, and he’s been in Nairobi for the UN Habitat session of the Governing Council. He made a presentation on urban planning, but it was his heartfelt apology for the xenophobic attacks in his country that took all the attention in the room.

I catch up with him the next afternoon, and we have a freewheeling discussion on xenophobia, post-apartheid planning, collapsing buildings and municipal outsourcing.

Let’s start with recent events in your country. When you were making your presentation, you apologised to everybody there on behalf of your countrymen. Why were you moved to do that?

Well, I work in a very metropolitan setup and I think it’s important that as South Africa, we need to demonstrate that it’s not all of us who are xenophobic. But I think it’s also important to give our point of view, to say that xenophobia signifies an opportunity to continue working together to fight our challenges.

So what do you think the xenophobia is a symptom of? What’s the real cause?

Jobs! Access to economic opportunities. I think it’s a problem Africa-wide, where we have very limited access to opportunities.

In Kenya this generated heated debate. People were saying a lot of people in African countries helped South Africa’s freedom struggle, and this represents a slap in the face.

I understand our veterans, our military veterans, definitely appreciate the reception they receive in Africa. But not everyone in South Africa is a military veteran.

You know, when you look at the people who have access to information, who have access to education, who have access to the world in the sense that they interact with people from outside, from within Africa, they are not happy [with xenophobia].But the biggest problem is that, it’s one thing to speak to someone who does not support xenophobia, but it's another to have a conversation with someone who is xenophobic, you know.

And where do you have that conversation with those people, because they are fighting for access to economic opportunity. Do they have access to Facebook? Do they have access to these new-age technologies where these conversations are going on?

And I think that is the change, because that is where you make change. The nice thing about, for example, the city of Joburg is, it's really gone all out in terms of not supporting xenophobia by saying we want a conversion with foreigners in terms of how are they affected. They set up, you know when you SMS your experience to a short number for a small fee, and there was a hotline that was set up everywhere.

Our mayor went out to the communities and said 'We really do not support xenophobia because what makes the city is its diversity. What sort of gives it its richness and its constant growth is the migrants that come into the city'.

What was your reception like when you travelled? 

You know I was very nervous when I came; I have to say, because the attacks were sort of coming thick and fast. I remember just before I left there was an attack in Johannesburg. The xenophobic violence had just moved into Johannesburg, in Jeppestown, and a hostel in Alexandra where Mr Sithole was attacked and stabbed. 

My family was very worried that going to Kenya, I may find a very bad reception in that 'You are South African, so go back to your country because you don't want us there'. But surprisingly I got here from the airport to the hotel to the UN event; people actually want to talk about 'why is there violence?’

Maybe the reasons why there is violence is because there is a lack of economic empowerment for the very poor in the country, and how can we start a conversation on how we can start empowering people to know that they can start a business, they can find employment and competition is good? To get people from outside is actually a form of sharing skills, a form of imparting skills and knowledge and experiences, so I think I was more nervous coming here than I am here.

Like now, I have been walking around the Village Market, and I am not even afraid to say I am from South Africa because people are like, 'You are from South Africa? What's going on in South Africa? Do you know if you people do this and this it might actually help?’ The reception has been really great.

Let's shift the conversation to planning. You're planning for Johannesburg, of which a large part is post-apartheid urban planning. What do you see as your major challenges in terms of that reality? 

I don't think we've had a conversation about apartheid. Apartheid designed spaces, institutions and legal frameworks of how to do things and overall societal systems that were meant to disadvantage a large proportion of South Africans. Where a large proportion of people live, there are still service delivery issues. I mean, they've been separate for so long, the introduction of anything that is not their tribe, their ethnic group, their nationality is a shock to them. 

So because of the way they were separated spatially and otherwise, maybe I think needs to be looked at as a very big problem of designing spaces that limit access to the rest of the world and therefore that's all they know, and the only way that we can get them to a more enlightened space is if they can gain better access to all sorts of amenities and opportunities.

What strikes you about how Nairobi is planned? What do you think of it, as a planner? 

From my hotel to here, I get the sense that I am still in a bubble. I haven't seen what Nairobi is, or what Kenya is about. But I am worried that if this bubble, where there are a lot of embassies, a lot of institutions is the best, then what does the rest of Kenya look like? What does the rest of Nairobi look like? If you look at the roads, they're not clearly demarcated, there's not a stop sign, pedestrians find it very difficult to navigate the street, and if that is it, when what is happening in the rest of Nairobi?

I understand that there are resource limitations, but we need to get into a space as Africans where we start somewhere, we start with ‘So how do we make our spaces right? How do we make the efficiency of our spaces, so that the people on the ground can take advantage of the opportunity that spaces create, but then not in a haphazard manner?

How often do buildings in South Africa collapse?

They rarely collapse, especially in cities. It happens, you know, that buildings collapse because of dodgy contractors. We had a recent collapse of a shopping centre as it was being built in Durban. There's a very high-income estate where a building collapsed, where you know, a guy was building a very expensive residential house and then it collapsed, and it killed a couple of people. So there are instances, but they are far and few in between. We try as far as possible to make sure that you get approved plans, we have a law enforcement unit that sort of looks after those things. So there's really great effort put into trying to make sure we safeguard the interests of those who do not know, but sometimes there are cracks in the system.

Talk about your enforcement regime. How do you make sure that people are adhering to the regulations?

We have a unit that looks after the adherence to town planning schemes; it’s called the town planning enforcement unit. But there’s also a law enforcement unit that looks after building codes.  So if you are going to build, we have building inspectors that look after your building and then sign off at various steps to make sure you adhere to the town planning scheme and the building codes.

How many inspectors would you say are there in enforcement?

You know, with enforcement I think it’s a worldwide problem [Laughs]. You can never have enough. I can tell you that their department is severely under-capacitated from a human resources point of view as well as from a finances point of view.

Is there any technology used for enforcement?

Well, we have a Land Information System, where if you click on a property, it can give you the zoning of that property, whether there are any applications to change the use of that property, whether they are any approvals from a town planning point of view as well as from a building point of view and you can  get as much information about that property as possible so that as a land use or a town planning law enforcement officer you can know whether whatever land uses happening there are illegal or whether the building happening there is premature or illegal.

And this is open to all citizens?

This is open to all citizens. You can get information up to a certain point, but beyond that point there is a subscription fee.

Talk about your approach to transparency. How does Johannesburg make itself open to citizens?

You know, nationwide, there’s what we call a PAIA Act, which is an access-to-information Act which requires government to be transparent. Our council building is being upgraded. The building is actually going on now, where we are trying to create an air of transparency around our council building with the ability to see council meetings from outside. We are increasing the public seating within the council building to around 219 seats, I think currently they’re around 29 or something, and we're also increasing the visibility of the building. To even further the transparency, we are busy developing a mixed-use precinct  about that building, with restaurants, with residential, with all sorts of land uses to make sure that that space is active.

When you apply for approvals, are decisions made privately or publicly?

Obviously we cannot open a process so much so that whenever anyone feels like objecting they can object. The Town Planning Department evaluates the application and writes a report. If it is in line with the spatial policy of the city, it is approved under delegated authority. If not, it is refused under delegated authority. When a decision is made, we have to publish it in the Provincial Gazette where you can see the decision.

What if there are objections?

If there are objections, it goes to a Planning committee. That committee sits, invites objectors, invites applicants and there’s a panel of specialists as well as a legal specialist to discuss the application. If you had objected originally to the application, you have the right to appeal that application. You can come in, and there’s a part at which you can voice your opinion. But then if you haven’t objected, you can still come in as an observer. That information [the time and venue] is very public.

A decision is made and a letter is sent to whatever interested party there is. The names of the committee members are public, the decisions are public. If town planning processes do not allow resolution, you take it to the courts, where the final decision is made.

What is the approach of Johannesburg to outsourcing? Are there any operations you outsource?

That’s a very tricky question. What we’ve done is most of our service delivery is done by public companies – we call them municipal entities – that essentially manage the delivery of services, so from waste to water to road infrastructure to power, everything. So those companies have their own boards, etc., but they ultimately have to report back to council, because we want to make the system more efficient.

Would you outsource building inspection?

No (looks incredulous). We need to be very realistic about what there is that you can outsource. I am sure someone can come and be very creative about that sort of tender, but at the end of it all I think we need to be very careful about how we own our information and how we own our own decision-making, because if we don’t own our own decision-making then we are going to be in very big trouble.

We need to be very clear that the decisions that we take (knocks on table) are taken by people who are competent to make those decisions and don’t have any ulterior motive behind that, you know, if I make any sense…that’s my opinion.

Let’s all try as much as possible to be objective about how we do our business, so that we give confidence to communities, we give confidence to the private sector, and we give confidence to other government departments and institutions what it is we are trying to achieve. Without that, why are we trying to help people? Why are we in government?

I think government is about trying to give confidence to everyone, so that they know exactly how decisions get made and those decisions get made in a fair way, so that when you are sitting there and you want to invest in Joburg, you know what the rules are. You are very clear in your head that those are the rules and that’s it.