Dilemma of Cape’s homeless

Cape Town - When Nomanindia Mfeketo was Cape Town mayor she made a commitment that within a year there would be no more children sleeping on the city’s streets.

That was in 2004 and, as she later acknowledged, the problem was a lot more complex than she had originally realised.

There have been a number of efforts since then to reduce the number of homeless people on the streets.

Before the World Cup in 2010, NGOs accused the city of rounding up street children and the homeless and dumping them at Blikkiesdorp near Delft. The city denies this, though, saying Blikkiesdorp was established as a Temporary Relocation Area in 2008 to house people who were evicted after invading N2 Gateway houses.

And last year there was a talk of the establishment of “community villages” outside the city centre where people could live and have access to skills training and drug rehabilitation programmes.

Greg Andrews, convener of the Street People’s Forum, said this proposal had since been canned.

The forum is a collective of several organisations working with street people in the city.

Andrews said the city’s “community village” idea was a perennial proposal that had surfaced in many guises over the last two decades.

“Even if such a community village were established, why would people want to go there? Would they be compelled against their will?

“On the other hand, perhaps it would be a really attractive proposition which someone on the streets would love to go to, in which case why would people leave once they have entered?”

Hassan Khan, chief executive of the Haven Night Shelter, believes the streets are no place for people to live.

“The streets should be a cold place, a place where you are hungry, so people come for help.”

But he says people are given permission to be there by politicians and some encouraged by NGOs who go out and give blankets and food to the poor.

“People are pre-programmed to help. They also pay someone just to be left alone.”

Not that he believes that poverty should be policed like the CCID with their private armies who force people to the edge of the CBD.

Khan said there were an increasing number of people coming to the streets, mainly adults.

“There are guys in their 50s from Welkom who have worked their whole lives in the Post Office and are virtually unemployable now.”

There is a large gay population, people who are not accepted by their families, and youngsters lured by the bright city lights.

“The important thing is how quickly a child on the street is identified and helped. The same with adults.”

Zara Nicholson, spokeswoman for mayor Patricia de Lille, said the City of Cape Town was the first city in the country to have adopted a policy for people living on the street.

“The city’s strategy is to reduce the number of people living on the street and to place them back with their families and communities of origin.”

Part of this reintegration effort included attempts to secure employment opportunities via the Expanded Public Works Programme.

Nicholson said that street people could not, however, be forced into accepting the city’s offers of assistance.

The City of Cape Town’s Reintegration Unit, launched in December, had successfully assisted 85 street people in its first three months of operation.

The city is also in the final phase of its Street People Survey which would include conducting a headcount of street people. The last comprehensive survey conducted by the city was in 2001 and there are estimates that there are around 7 000 transient people either living or begging on the street (across the whole city).

Councillor Suzette Little, the city’s mayoral committee member for social development and early childhood development announced recently that the city had nearly doubled its budget for its winter street people programme this year. The budget for the 2014 programme was R280 000, but this year R600 000 had been allocated.

Little said they also ran a number of programmes in communities most at risk to prevent more people migrating to the streets.

“These programmes are focused on issues in the home, truancy and substance abuse and to provide support to street people who are reintegrated into their communities to prevent a return to their former life.”

But Andrews doesn’t believe the city’s Street People Policy is actually effective.

“The central aim of its current policy boils down to the removal of people from the streets, though this is couched in gentle terms like ‘reintegration’ and ‘reunification’ so it’s quite palatable.”

But he explains that reunification or reintegration only worked if it was self-determined.

“Take for instance the typical example of someone who has come to the city centre desperate for work. Precious few opportunities exist and eventually he either is begging or parking cars, scrounging a pittance any way he can.

“Even if he never makes enough money to support his family, at least he feels he is not a burden to them – another mouth to feed, a body taking up precious space.

“But sometimes, he may be able to get a bag of groceries back home, maybe for someone’s birthday or for Christmas. Now the city’s Reintegration worker finally compels this man to go home.

“Imagine the shame of being escorted home by the larney from the welfare with nothing to support your family and them being told they must look after you. This is not sustainable.”

Andrews believes reintegration was only possible once the “40 percent unemployment and intractable brutal violence” that characterises daily life in the home communities that people on the streets run away from, are addressed.

“Furthermore, we need to address the bottleneck of over-full shelters, over-stretched services and inadequate social housing. Reintegration is meaningless when we have nothing to reintegrate a person into.”

Andrews says it would be refreshing if the city were to admit that people on the streets are not the problem and they’re not going away any time soon.

“The real problem is that 20 years into freedom, poverty is worse and it’s high time we stop trying to remove the poor from our well-to-do areas just because they make us feel uncomfortable or threaten our illusion of security.”

helen.bamford@inl.co.za

- Cape Argus

Africa faces nightmare of urban sprawl

Africa’s cities are growing very rapidly. By 2050, 1.2 billion people, or 60 percent of all Africans, will live in urban areas. For the UN’s human settlements programme – known as UN-Habitat – the challenges are to help Africans to better harness the productive potential of their cities and to cope with the increased demands for municipal services and decent housing.

Joan Clos, a former mayor of Barcelona, Spain, and since 2010 the executive director of UN-Habitat, spoke to Africa Renewal’s managing editor, Ernest Harsch, at UN-Habitat’s headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.

Q: How has the exceptionally rapid growth of Africa’s cities affected general approaches to urban development?

Clos: We are seeing an unprecedented pace of urbanisation in Africa. We have seen similar movements in other continents before.

But what is different in Africa is the speed of the process. The response to that is to improve urban planning, to plan for city growth. It is necessary to introduce as soon as possible urban planning on a massive scale in Africa.

Q: In some countries in Africa, where urban planning is being attempted, it often seems slow and bureaucratic, and by the time it reaches implementation, growth has outstripped the plans. Can planning efforts really keep up?

Clos: The first step is the limitation of public space in relation to private space. This is something that has to be done by the government, because there is no other entity. The problem is that if the government is unco-ordinated, or it doesn’t have the instruments, the speed of planning is much slower than the speed of city growth.

The only solution is to speed up the planning process, because you cannot stop in-migration. If it’s complex because it involves different ministries, it needs to be simplified. And if it’s too dependent on central government, then it should be delegated to the local authorities.

When you see economies, like the African ones, growing at 6 percent to 7 percent, there’s no excuse. You cannot have such a rate of growth without at the same time putting in place urban planning instruments.

Q: In some cities in Africa, particularly major ones, there have been efforts to revitalise centre cities, to attract foreign investors and businesses. Sometimes, when this has been done in a top-down fashion, local communities have resisted. How can this be avoided?

Clos: It is a question of the maturity of the political system. In a weak system, sometimes the way they do planning is by authoritarian means, without taking into account the rights of the people. There’s no need for practices that don’t take care of the affected people.

Urban planning can help generate wealth. And when you generate wealth, there’s always the possibility of distributing it. But if someone tries to develop the city and capture all the wealth for himself, then conflict is sure to arise.

There are many examples (of good planning) in Africa, but mostly at the small scale. They are not perfect, but are advancing in a good direction, in Morocco, Mauritius, Rwanda. What we still don’t see is a pro-active approach, of national governments developing national urban policies to cope with the challenging future of African cities.

Urban planning is not something for tomorrow. It should be there today, this afternoon.

Q: How does climate change affect urban development?

Clos: The typical unplanned city, which has no streets, no drainage system, or is built on slopes, is very susceptible to climate change. It’s very prone to huge catastrophes.

The solution to the risk of climate change, again, is urban planning. This is one additional reason why governments will be pushed to do something in favour of urban planning, to protect the population against climate change disasters.

These are now typically considered to be natural disasters. But in the future they will be seen as a failure of government. In a lot of countries in the world, people at first saw them as natural disasters, but they later… looked at the government and said: “No, no. It’s wrongdoing. It’s a lack of planning, a lack of foresight by the government.”

We have seen earthquakes with very high tolls of victims, and similar… stronger, earthquakes elsewhere, with very few victims. The natural disaster, the quake, is the same. What is different is the outcome.

Q: Many urban Africans currently are obliged to live in slums. Could you talk about UN-Habitat’s approach to participatory slum upgrading?

Clos: In a sense, the slum is a failure of the state. In most slums the state doesn’t intervene. Legitimacy inside of the slum rests with the community. If you want to improve the conditions of the slum, you need to establish a dialogue with the community. They are the ones who will understand it, the ones who have the legitimacy to perform it.

When you introduce streets and latrines, and put lights in the streets, immediately you have shops that emerge, you have more economic activities. There’s a virtuous circle of self-improvement.

Q: Do upgrading slums and urban planning also involve land tenure reform?

Clos: Yes. Security of tenure is very related to urban planning. First you need to identify the plots. We are advising governments, regional authorities and local governments, through different legislation and land tools, to have a proper census of urban plots. The next step is introducing urban planning. This includes introducing public space, mainly streets. This sometimes affects existing plots, so you need to readjust land ownership. And that requires a legal instrument – which is lacking in most of Africa – by which a pool of owners can readjust their share of the property in a way that they don’t lose value.

Q: In many African countries there have been moves toward the decentralisation of government institutions. How does that relate to urban development?

Clos: I don’t like the word “decentralisation”. It doesn’t explain well what is happening. I prefer to say “local government empowerment”. The weight of central government is so weak that you cannot really talk about decentralisation.

What is new is that national constitutions and national political agreements now allow for the empowerment of local authorities. This allows more forces in society to develop. It empowers local governments to have local taxes, to create local fiscal systems. That requires some kind of inventory of businesses.

Q: What about urban governance?

Clos: This process will also bring an improvement of governance. Of course, there are going to be scandals, problems. But in general the tendency that I foresee is toward an increased complexity and completeness of institutional relationships and capacities in a more modern state. The only way to fight corruption is to improve your institutions. This is something that will be demanded by the population.

Municipal services, as any other good, also need to be financed. I would expect that with the growth of African economies, room will be created for financing urban services.

This piece was produced by the UN’s Africa Renewal Features Service. - IOL