City of Johannesburg (CoJ) executive mayor Dr Mpho Phalatse on April 8 detailed how the city was intent on regenerating the city by focusing on infrastructure, facilities and amenities to allow citizens to pursue the “proverbial gold” of dignified living and sustainable jobs.

Phalatse, who was speaking to built- environment industry practitioners, acknowledged the myriad problems and challenges facing Johannesburg, not least of which is insufficient maintenance and upgrading of utility infrastructure, mainly water and sanitation, and transport infrastructure.

She reiterated the city’s objective of creating an enabling environment for the private sector to create jobs, including by incentivising green construction and investigating energy supply from independent power producers. The city hopes to issue a request for proposals for independent power supply after the Energy Indaba, to be held on May 4 to 5.

Phalatse further highlighted the need for Johannesburg to become a smart city, not only through the deployment of technologies to improve the functioning of the city, but also to digitalise its administrative functions to improve and accelerate the delivery of services and permitting processes.

The city has launched its digital Construction Permit Management System (CPMS) that built environment organisations and professionals can use to submit their applications. However, the city has placed service kiosks in all its regional service centres where practitioners can submit their applications, complaints and queries.

This is a transitional measure to ensure all residents and stakeholders can easily interface with the city, although the use of these kiosks is expected to trend lower over time as digital systems see greater use.

“The role of the city is to ensure the private sector is supported and enabled to grow the economy and create jobs, and help the city and citizens to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw many people lose their jobs.ˮ

One of the CoJ’s seven priorities is to ensure that the city is business ready by improving the ease of doing business in the city, and the CoJ Development Planning department is seized with this objective.

“In future, we aim to add land-use processes and zoning to the CPMS, to reduce waiting times, improve efficiency and accuracy and assist us to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the city’s plans examination process.”

Additionally, the city is aiming to improve by-law enforcement, including in city planning. There are many infringements of planning by-laws, including dangerous and illegal buildings, illegal construction and derelict buildings, which impact on the value of city properties.

“The joint operations with the [South African Police Service] and the group forensic and investigations unit will help us to jointly clean up the city and we will be doing demolitions where needed, and we are also doing joint operations to shut down problematic spaces and reclaim those spaces for use,” she said.

The CoJ will also host an Integrated Development Planning session specifically for the construction sector on May 6 to hear about the challenges they are experiencing and to determine how best to overcome them.

“Throughout all our priorities are green strands. Johannesburg has implemented a green building policy, but will not achieve its green targets on our own and we need the private sector to also become green. We have released our spatial development framework for public comment, and I encourage you to comment on it,ˮ said Phalatse.

The city has an infrastructure backlog of R20-billion and a yearly budget of just under R10-billion, meaning the backlog cannot be addressed during a single mayoral term.

“If we want to densify the city, which is an imperative but requires underlying infrastructure and utilities to be redeveloped to serve larger populations, we must have a conversation about how the private sector can contribute to infrastructure development. ˮ

To this end, the nine-party multiparty administration of the CoJ has adopted the Golden Start policy to restore the city’s investment attractiveness to rejuvenate Johannesburg into a city of opportunities and a place where the aspirations of its citizens can shine, she said.