Integrated Urban Development & effects of migration and climate change on municipalities

Meeting report

Briefing by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA)
Mr Pali Lehohla, Statistician–General, Stats SA, said that he wanted to raise three points in the presentation -- what South Africa’s poverty reduction strategy was, the need to review the quality of the strategy, and what could be learnt from the strategy and how it was implemented.

Stats SA had looked at the strategy which was focused on nodal development. It had looked at rural and urban nodes and at the changing demographics in municipalities. It had considered a number of dimensions and applied multi-poverty indicators like child mortality, years at school, school attendance, standard of living, what kind of fuels were used in the household and access to water and sanitation.

Between 2001 and 2011, poverty in South Africa had been reduced from 18.2% to 8%. In rural areas, the reduction was from 29% to 14.2%. But what had driven that reduction -- was it grants or housing? What were the key drivers in halving poverty? Were nodes the key drivers? Was there a need to name anything a node, because there was little difference between nodes and non-node places of poverty reduction, with percentages of 29.9% and 29.1% respectively?
 
To know how a node worked, one needed to know the content of the node. He asked rhetorically whether South Africa had remained steadfast in implementing the nodal approach. In Thaba Mofutsanyana municipality area there had been poverty reduction, yet at the moment it could be called the centre of death of the country, with high HIV rates and deaths from parasitic diseases. The roads from the Free State and Gauteng all converged at this town.

If one looked at South Africa and excluded rural nodes, one saw that the poverty of workers had been reduced. When the nodes were included, one saw a big reduction in poverty because the wealth of farmers offset the poverty of farm workers. The driver of poverty was unemployment, which needed to be dealt with. In urban areas, poverty had been reduced from 11.9% to 5%, and in urban nodes from 17.4% to 6%. The most significant areas experiencing poverty reduction were Inanda, moving from 13.9 % to 8%, and Mitchells Plain, moving from 11.5% to 0.6%.

The method for choosing the nodes appeared to be uninformed. Poverty was reduced in the same way in nodes and in areas that were not nodes, so the key question remained whether the node strategy was steadfastly applied. He doubted that was the case. There had not been enough data in 2002 to inform decisions around the choice of nodes, because the 2001 census figures had not yet been available. Better targeting was important, because the country might face a fiscal cliff.

Between 2001 and 2011, poverty had been reduced drastically but there were areas that were still vulnerable, like Alfred Nzo municipality and Buffalo City. Stats SA had also looked at capital expenditure and wanted to look at how the demographics had changed over time in South Africa and by what magnitude populations had grown in the same time period between  2001 and 2011. Johannesburg had increased by 1.2m people and Cape Town by 827 000. Urbanisation was a reality.  

Referring to wards, he said wards had no names. Ward 6 had lost 10 000 between 1996 and 2011 and ward 113 had gained 74 000, and this had had an impact on service supply. Wards needed a clearer political management strategy.

There had been a shift in the composition of the population, not because of more children being born, but because the age group of five to19 years had migrated.

In conclusion, he said there was now enough data to chart a better course. There was a need to discuss climate change at a macro scale. Stats SA had not discussed climate change in the presentation because the change needed to be discussed at a high level. Natural capital like water etc. would be an important measurement.

Discussion
Mr E Mthethwa (ANC) referred to a ward that had lost 42 000. Which area was this, and what had caused the loss? Was the Municipal Demarcation Board (MDB) consulting the Statistician-General with regard to the increases and decreases in populations at the municipal level? For example, Meraphong (GT484) had been proposed for inclusion into a metro, yet it was losing people and was not an area of high growth.

Mr K Mileham (DA) said he did not know of a ward with 90 000 people. The biggest was between 15 000 and 20 000. Was Stats SA looking at the same wards in 2011 as was the case in 2001? Had ward boundary changes been factored in when looking at migration population statistics?

Mr Carl Nel, Deputy Minister of COGTA, asked if the Statistician-General could be invited back, as the ward statistics deserved further interrogation. The guidelines that the MDB worked on would not permit a ward size of 90 000 legally. The presentation suggested that the exclusive driver in urban areas was growth in population through migration. What was the intrinsic growth of urban areas, other than migration? A presentation on the racialised nature of space would be interesting.

Mr Lehohla said there had been a lot of movement of people into the big wards, and the current sitting of the MDB would ensure that wards were of reasonable size. There had been consultation with the MDB on the figures. The figures could be as they were because the voting population was approximately 40% of the total population of a ward. An area that had 50 000 in a ward could have doubled over the period 1996 to 2011. The fertility rate for South Africa was 2.6, where a fertility rate of 2.1 would replace South Africa’s population.

Regarding the ward Mr Mthethwa had referred to, it was in KwaZulu-Natal.

The Chairperson said he would invite the Statistician General again.

Intercities Network
Mr Sithole Mbanga, CEO of SA Cities Network (SACN), said South Africa’s population was 52m in 2011 and was 60% urbanised, with a Gini coefficient – a measure of differences in income -- of 70% and increasing. Urbanisation was a reality which needed to be managed, because it continued to increase.

High growth cities urbanised between 1996 and 2011 showed a 2.8% annual increase, which was above the SA growth rate of 1.8%, because of the notion that cities offered a better life. These cities were located in Gauteng, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Mangaung. The metro areas had growth rates in population of 3.6% for Gauteng and 3.1% for Cape Town.

He said there was a misperception that population movement trends were rural to urban migration. In some areas, it was movement from urban to urban or from small town to big town. Poverty was not only in rural areas, but in urban areas too. Populations were highly mobile and attracted to the bright lights and opportunities of the city. The national trends were inter-provincial movements, which saw the Western Cape and Gauteng record big gains. The North West had a small gain, while the rest had losses in population. People moved to a specific place for a diverse range of reasons, including new opportunities like mining, for example, or for a job.

Tshwane, the Western Cape, Rustenburg, Overstrand, George, Kouga and Midvaal saw the biggest gains in inter-municipality movement. Areas losing people were the homelands, Emfuleni, Matjhabeng, Buffalo City and Stellenbosch, which showed the greatest losses. For the period 2001 to 2011, the big flows were between the big cities.  The States of Cities report would be published at the end of March 2016. Young people in rural areas were very mobile, with major flows among high school students and young job seekers. In Gauteng the youth had increased in number by 100% over 15 years, while the over 50s had decreased in number.

Regarding the increase in urban poverty, SACN had analysed finances and had found that cities were becoming unaffordable to the average person who, for example, could not afford to pay rates. The houses were becoming smaller in size, meaning that the increased population resulted in increased households. This led to increased demand for land for houses and for basic services. Poverty in Gauteng had tripled.  The big fluctuation in population sizes meant services had increased and decreased widely, with towns either doubling in size or losing three-quarters of their populations, thereby impacting on the towns’ service delivery ability and/or viability.

Mr Mbanga then spoke about value chains and migrations in cities and patterns of migration. In a study of the social value chain, three types of rural people had been identified -- those committed to rural areas, those who were mobile and moved between rural and urban areas both ways, and those who were migrants to metros. The positive effects of migration were on the labour market, the public purse and economic growth, but migration also had an impact on the environment. Youth unemployment remained the biggest challenge to the cities, so possible interventions were the promotion of youth enterprises and the teaching of small business skills.

Discussion
Mr A Masondo (ANC) said there were questions around the strain and tension that migration caused, such as xenophobia. Regarding climate change he asked whether there were any positive things arising from climate change interventions. He raised the issue of how to address youth unemployment. Teaching children small business skills was good, but there were many young people out of school.

Mr Mthethwa asked who the migrants were according to race classification. Did the study tell from which countries they came to South Africa?

Mr Mileham said that in rural provinces like the Northern Cape and Eastern Cape, growth was at nodal points where transport lines intersected, while the rest of the area declined or stagnated. This should be highlighted so that it could be factored into small town planning. Mention had been made of spatial proximity and unemployment, where proximity reduced unemployment, but elsewhere in the presentation it had been said that economic outcomes were better for shack dwellers on the outskirts of cities, rather than at the core zones, so the two did not quite link up. The results appeared to be based on qualitative rather than quantitative data. Had quantitative statistical measurements been carried out to determine these issues? Could one therefore really say that spatial proximity reduced unemployment?

Mr Mbanga said the point that was being made was that the further from their places of income, the more people had to spend on transport and the less they had to spend on their essentials. The argument SACN was making was that the closer people were to their work, the better it was for them financially.

There was no discrimination around the movement of people -- on whether they were black or white – the study just described the movement, but a general assumption could be made that African blacks were making most of the movement. He did not have information on which countries outside SA migrants were coming from.

Dealing with climate change was an expensive exercise, because it was about changing the entire base of an economy away from fossil fuels to a cleaner technology. The change was quite slow, but SA was committed to the resolutions to reduce carbon emissions. Stakeholders should therefore be mobilised, including business, to respond to the issue of climate change. The issue was always who was going to provide the financial resources.

SACN was aware of the need to deal with the unemployed youth and the question of xenophobia, and had not shied away from it.  In the State of Cities report, there was a chapter on good governance which dealt with economically driven social tensions.

Ms Elsona van Huyssteen, Urban and Regional Planner: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), replied to Mr Mileham’s on quantitative statistical measurements, and said the data came from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC).

Department of Cooperative Governance
Mr Carl Nel, Deputy Minister of COGTA, said urbanisation was one of the big issues affecting the country. The previous day, South Africa had celebrated Africa Day, and one-third of Africa lived in urban areas. By 2030, it would be half. Some cities would swell by 85% and by 2030 Cairo would grow by 23% to 13.5m people. It was currently the biggest city, but would be overtaken by Lagos and Kinshasa by 2025, with 15m people. Africa was urbanising extremely rapidly. Africa had a rich history of great cities, like Timbuktu. Despite phenomenal gains in reducing poverty, spatial transformation remained stubbornly resistant to change. SA was urbanising rapidly, with 66% living in towns and cities. The UN believed that by 2030, 71% would be urbanised and 80% by 2050. The urban population was growing larger and younger, with two-thirds of the youth living in urban areas.

Cities and large towns produced over 80% of the national gross domestic product. Metros were growing twice as fast as other cities. Employment had grown twice as fast in metros. Between 1996 and 2012, metros had accounted for 75% of net jobs created in South Africa, yet despite this there was the phenomenon of the urbanisation of poverty, especially in townships and inner cities. Urban areas were dynamically linked to rural areas. This interdependence of rural and urban spaces needed an integrated approach and they should not be seen as being in opposition to one another.

The point of the Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) was the need to reap the urban dividend. The IUDF marked a new deal for cities and towns. The IUDF built on the National Development Plan (NDP) vision. By 2030 one should be seeing the revival of rural areas, but one needed to pursue a vision for spatial development and sharpen instruments to attain this. The IUDF had four core goals -- access, growth, governance and social transformation. These goals could be achieved through the eight policy levers. Spatial planning was the basis of achieving integrated urban development. Integrated transport informed targeted investment and integrated human settlements, underpinned by integrated infrastructure systems and efficient land governance which could trigger economic diversification. The IUDF document was widely consulted and the Committee itself should workshop the document.

Urbanisation was happening as he spoke and already cities, provinces and departments had initiated action.
The Treasury was starting to align budgets through modifying infrastructure grants and restructuring the Neighbourhood Development Programme. Ultimately it had huge economic and social ramifications, and the issues should unite and not divide.

Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF)
Ms Thandeka Kabeni, Deputy Director General: Sustainable Urban Neighbourhoods, COGTA, said consultations with the IUDF had started in 2012 through a discussion document. The consultation process had started in November 2014 and was scheduled to end in March 2015, but had been extended to June because of public demand.

The IUDF goals were to reverse inefficient and exclusionary practices through spatial transformation, to improve access and inclusion of the marginalised of society, to improve the productive capacity in cities and address income poverty, to establish proper governance systems and strengthen inter-governmental collaboration.

The transformation of cities was a key challenge. The country was not reaping the rewards of urbanisation by maximizing urban potential. There were eight policy levers: integrated spatial planning; integrated transport; integrated human settlements; integrated Infrastructure network systems; efficient land governance; economic diversification and inclusion; empowered communities and deep governance reform. Cross-cutting issues were rural-urban linkages, urban safety and disaster risk management and climate change. The Department was making use of an outside team of consultants and had conducted two independent peer reviews. The IUDF policy was widely accepted.

Key issues emerging from the consultations was the need to finalise the National Spatial Development Framework (NSDF); the fact that spatial transformation was a key objective and must guide all initiatives; the need to ensure the IUDF was enforceable; the need to clarify the role of the private sector and civil society; assessing how finances affected cities’ ability to restructure their spaces and the need to indicate more clearly how levers were integrated. The review of the IUDF final report was scheduled for July/August 2015.

National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC)
Mr Ken Terry, DDG of the NDMC, Department of Cooperative Governance, said the presentation would cover the effects of climate change and migration on municipalities. Climate-related disasters mostly arose from natural disasters. There was a need for comprehensive risk management because of the increased climate change disaster risks. The NDMC participated in the Department of Environmental Affairs’ forums and aligned its work with their work.

SA was experiencing a drying trend in summer rainfall areas and a wetting trend in winter rainfall areas. The biggest risk in the future was a water shortage because of the increased influx of people. Sea levels were rising and there was future warming, which was projected to be greater in inland areas. The impact of these climate changes were that the weather would become more extreme, which posed a threat to sustainable development. Disaster risk management would strain public resources because of the need to support disaster areas and the long term recovery of these areas.

The biggest sectoral impact was in water, in terms of water shortages and in terms of flooding. In agriculture, field crops were under the biggest threat and this impacted on food security. Climate change called for an increase in investment and resources. Strategies were in place to adapt to climate change. The NMDC was continuously strengthening institutional arrangements, reviewing disaster management legislation, had memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) and the SA Weather Service (SAWS), and monitored compliance. Its support initiatives included a response kit for municipalities and the Clean Community initiative. Its advocacy messages were that climate change had consequences for the community; communities could build resilience to climate change, and climate change adaptation needed investment in disaster management.

He said climate change and disaster risk management issues had gained prominence, especially the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the UN Framework Conception for Climate Change.
The recently adopted Senai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction acknowledged that disasters impeded progress towards sustainable dev. And spoke to the impact of migration. The impact of urbanisation on infrastructures had not been taken into consideration

Ms Van Huyssteen said the focus on urbanisation was a focus on South Africa‘s future, as 80% of the population lived in urban South Africa. There were places that struggled with urban issues. A rural area like Thohoyandou was big, and would be regarded as a city in Europe. These places needed assurance because they were not rural -- they were urban areas. 20% of the population stayed in regional centres which did not have an economy. SACN had done scenario planning for areas in the Northern Cape, should mining collapse there. Where would the population move to? This raised serious questions for a place like Kimberly.

The challenges were sometimes beyond the scope of urban governance or cities. A lot of IUDF content was around governance, while there was a need for more strategy on urban development in a range of places. The population was highly mobile and so sometimes one saw hollow towns, where the rich migrated to on a daily basis. There were places where vulnerability was serious. The question was what kind of spaces gave rise to what kind of activities and livelihoods, so there was a need for different solutions. In terms of the Gini coefficient, the places that were growing the most were the worst as far the coefficient was concerned. On the issue of financial viability of towns, she said that if a town doubled in size over five years there was no way a municipality could be financially viable in terms of service delivery. The impacts on municipalities were huge.

Regarding climate change projections done for the Southern African Development Community (SADC), these confirmed that the temperature would rise, that there would be 2-3% extreme weather events and a decrease in rainfall. The implications were an energy crunch, a reduced availability of water and contentious use of land in urban areas, which would impact on service delivery through issues of water availability and quality.

Discussion
Mr Mileham said the presentation had focused on migration patterns and urban growth, but he had expected more on climate change. He had not seen the scope of risk and the knock-on effects of climate change or the implications for the provision of basic services.

Mr P Mapulane (ANC) said there was a movement of people around the world and government needed to plan for it -- not only for migration, but also for immigration and emigration.

Mr Mbanga said South Africa was hosting the Africities summit conference, which would feature a peer review of a sample of South Africa municipalities and policies.

Mr Nel said the Department had on previous occasions raised the Africities conference, which would be a landmark event.  Even as they were engaged in development policy for the IUDF, the Department should be engaging on the matter and getting their hands dirty. The Department had done detailed work in selecting potential pilot sites and testing IUDF policy work there.

The meeting was adjourned