Speaking notes for Deputy Minister Zou Kota- Fredericks at the BRICS Urbanisation Forum, Visakhapatnam, India
Topic: Urban Renaissance: New Reform Agenda
Thank you Programme Director
The BRICS Urbanisation Forum occurs at an important time in the international debate on housing and urban development. Last year, at the United Nations, we adopted the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, including the Sustainable Development Goals.
Sustainable Development Goal 11: “Make Cities and Human Settlements integrated, safe, resilient and sustainable” and for the first time spells out concrete global targets on ensuring slums and informal settlements are upgraded, urban development takes place sustainably, cities and human settlements adapt and mitigate for climate change, and disaster risk is managed and reduced.
As South African, the Department of Human Settlements hosted the UN Habitat thematic III in preparation for the UN Habitat Conference in Quito, Ecuador.
I take the BRICS inputs as part of on-going intensive consultation in preparation for the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, Habitat III. Habitat III will produce a New Urban Agenda that will guide our approach to human settlements and urbanisation for at least the next twenty years. Habitat III will secure a renewed global commitment to addressing housing and sustainable urbanisation.
Cities are the principal centres of economic activity and employment, and continue to attract the most foreign investment, but they are not performing to their potential or reaping the benefits thereof. There are still gaps in acquiring requisite skills and capacities.
My colleague, Deputy Minister Nel, when introducing our Integrated Urban Development Framework to Cabinet in May last year, remarked that between 1996 and 2012‚ South African metropolitan municipalities accounted for 75% of all net jobs created in South Africa. Despite this‚ the ‘urbanisation of poverty’ is increasing‚ especially in townships‚ informal settlements and in inner cities.
South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP) is an important milestone in taking a more positive stance towards urbanisation and making a strong case for spatial transformation in cities.
The NDP also stimulated further policy further policy work on Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF). Our Integrated Urban Development Framework proposes an urban growth and management model premised on social on social compact and connected cities and towns. It is aimed at reversing the inefficient and exclusionary urban forms inherited from apartheid, through processes of urban intergration, compaction and densification.
In order to give effect to South Africa’s Vision 2030 as articulated by the NDP, South Africa is embarking on a process of formulating the National Spatial Development Framework (NSDF), as mandated by the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act of 2013 (SPLUMA). The Human Settlement Departments input to the NSDF is a human settlements plan based on a spatial targeting approach, underpinned by a dynamic land acquisition strategy.
Integrated development needs all partners to work together in the provision of sustainable human settlements.
Programme Director please allow me to showcase an example of integrated human settlement development in Durban, Ethekwini Municipality which we have developed.
Thank you
