Related Articles
Top Stories
May 23 2012 09:47
Western investors must realise SA does not need their money as it can now turn to fellow Brics members for funding, says ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe.
May 23 2012 18:03
Facebook and banks are being sued by Facebook's shareholders, who claimed the defendants hid Facebook's weakened growth forecasts ahead of its initial public offering.
May 23 2012 08:10
Several parties, including government, have launched a Constitutional Court appeal against an interdict temporarily halting the e-toll project, Outa says.
Cape Town - Guard against over-politicisation of development issues warned Tokyo Sexwale, Minister of Human Settlements, at the 10th anniversary of the Isandla Institute in Cape Town.
The institute's aim is to stimulate discussion on issues of public interest, especially with regard to equitable and democratic urban housing.
"Politics shouldn't carry greater weight in development issues than the fundamentals of specialist areas like economy, planning, philosophy and architecture," said Sexwale.
"The appropriateness of brainstorming sessions like those at Isandla is in fact determined by the degree to which they come up with ideas that can help the community with its developmental issues," Sexwale said.
He pointed out that most of the earth's population will live in cities by the end of this century. The global population has doubled over the past 30 years to more than six billion, and Africa's population is expected to double over the next 20 years.
"South Africa is experiencing a massive form of post-apartheid urbanisation, characterised by a mushrooming of informal settlements. The country can't afford to enter the 22nd century as a developing country in socio-economic terms; it must industrialise."
Innovative thinking, he believes, is needed to create integrated, holistic and sustainable settlements where housing availability is accompanied by basic access to work, relaxation and training.
The unsuccessful efforts modelled on apartheid-era development must be abandoned.
"My department realises, because of our visits, the hard reality of the mud, dirty water and excrement in the more than 2 000 informal settlements to which the poorest of the poor in the country or streaming," says Sexwale.
He reckons the biggest urbanisation concern in South Africa is not the informal settlements, but the growing trend of violent protest about issues such as service delivery.
It serves no purpose to provide people with housing if this is not accompanied by sustainable job creation.
- Sake24.com
For more business news in Afrikaans, go to Sake24.com.