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Things really kicked into gear on Thursday night (4/10/2007) at the second session of the seminar series. The title of the session was ‘Overview of the Implications of Urbanisation and Other Ecological System Pressures’. A bold title, but the exceptional triumvirate of speakers, covered this topic brilliantly and left participants with much to digest.

First was up Dr. Guy Midgley, specialist scientist at the South African National Botanical Institute, and panellist of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Guy kicked off where Peter and Stef stopped on Tuesday by showing some graphs of continental and global temperature change over the last century. All the graphs show not only a marked temperature increase since about 1950 but also acceleration in the rate of change. Projected temperature increases (as per IPCC) from now until 2099 in South Africa is between 1° and 3,5° C. Very significantly for the Western Cape is a corresponding projected drop in rainfall of 10-20% by the end of the century. This could lead to a drop in river flow of up to 58% in Cape Town. Some of the effects of these changes on Africa are that between 75 million and 250 million people will experience greater water stress by 2020. Rain fed agricultural yield could be reduced by up to 50% and significant changes in the ecosystem and loss of biodiversity could occur with temperature increases of over 1,5° C.

Current climatic risks

Guy went on to argue that while these changes are all still projections, we might be underestimating the current climatic risks that we already face. Cape Town’s average rainfall over the last century has been about 900mm per year. For much of the period since 1980 the actual rainfall has been higher than this and the ‘droughts’ of 2003/4 were nowhere near the extended drought of almost 15 years between 1920 and 1940. Cape Town has in fact been lulled into a false sense of confidence due to the higher than average rainfall over the last decade. If rainfall were to drop below the 800mm level for a few years, Cape Town can really be left reeling.

In looking at adaptation and mitigation strategies for Cape Town, Guy said that we should already prepare for a certain amount of climate change, irrespective of future mitigation. Planners should also prepare for more extreme weather conditions and in contingency planning not look at average or median events but at the outliers, as we might start to see more and more of these events (recent freak waves in Durban should serve as warning). With warmer, dryer and windier conditions in Cape Town, especially preventing fires will become more difficult.

As far as mitigation goes, if South Africa continues along its current energy path and 6% economic growth, we are likely to quadruple greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This is while several countries are targeting 60% reductions. Two of the sectors that will require serious attention in South Africa are domestic energy consumption and transport.

Finally Guy said his definition of sustainability is maximising benefit for humans at the least cost to the ecology.

Climate change is not the problem

The evening’s second speaker was Prof Mark Swilling of the University of Stellenbosch. Besides his professorship in the School for Public Management and Planning, he is also the academic Director of the Sustainability Institute located at Lynedoch. Immediately setting the tone of his presentation, Mark started out by saying that climate change, while serious, is really not our biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is our unsustainable resource use with 60% of the ecosystem degraded, 86% of consumption done by 20% of world population and our ecological footprint exceeding the planet’s bio-capacity by about 30%.

A further main challenge is the urban challenge. 2006 saw the first time in human history that more than 50% of the population is urbanised. Current projections show that all of the 2 billion additional people in the next 25 years will be living in cities – most of them in Africa and Asia. Already a third of the urban population (1 billion people) live in slums, beckoning the question if we are becoming a planet of slums.

But, despite these gloomy statistics there is hope. And according to Mark this lies in dematerialisation or decoupling economic growth from material consumption. Between 1975 and 1994 several first world countries have managed to significantly grow their GDP per capita without using more material per capita. The USA and Germany have in fact decreased their total material requirements per capita. Things such as greater energy efficiency and lowering cost of renewable technologies holds much promise to continue this trend. But, it might require initial subsidies from governments, not unlike roads, cars and other technologies received.

Some hope

There are also already several ‘footprints of hope’ around the globe. These include:

• California’s campaign for a million solar rooftops;
• owner-built houses from local stone in Kibera, Kenya;
• sustainable transit system and preservation of green-space in Curitiba, Brazil;
• plans for the world’s first eco-city in Dongtan, China;
• eco-cycle balancing in Stockholm, Sweden;
• owner-built house from adobe brick in Malawi; and
• their own experiments at Lynedoch village just outside Stellenbosch.

Turning his eye on Cape Town today, Mark mentioned that there are currently just over 860 000 households in the city of whom 115 000 live in informal settlements or shacks. A core problem is that current plans only see about 13 000 RDP type project houses to be delivered per annum, and these are mainly on the urban peripheries of the city. In fact, peripheralisation is heavily subsidised and this has huge social consequences as people are far from their jobs and have to rely more on transport infrastructure.

Trends in urbanisation

The evening’s final speaker was Prof. Edgar Pieterse, recently appointed Director of the African Centre for Cities at UCT. He focussed a lot on the urbanisation trends world-wide and how smaller cities (below 1 million people) will develop prolifically. One of the aspects highlighted is that our notion of a city, especially the North American and European model, will be significantly challenged in the future. There will for one be a much greater amount of informalisation.

He furthermore focussed on the demographic features and trends of Cape Town and how a significant portion of the population does not have proper housing (20%), access to water on site (15%) or electricity for lighting (10%). Furthermore, more than 30% of the city’s population is unemployed. The key developmental priorities for Cape Town is thus providing jobs, safe and affordable transport, protection from crime & social violence, quality education and environmental sustainability in a context of deep poverty. He echoed Mark’s statement that the current housing provision nowhere near meeting annual household growth. Considerable developable land is available within the urban edge, but land release continues to be a major obstacle. Despite significant shifts in public expenditure to poorer areas of Cape Town, the focus of all private investment in established areas reinforces spatial inequalities in the city.

Edgar challenged the architects by saying that the unsustainable nature of current building practices and the increasing number of people excluded from building development is a very poor reflection of a professional industry that aspires to a sense of ethics.

Both Edgar and Mark made the statements that one of the best things that the poor could do in Cape Town was to start occupying undeveloped land inside the urban edge.

The Q & A session was a very lively affair and these were some of the questions raised:

Q: How do we change regulation to allow for greater densification?

Q: Isn’t there some policies or practices one could implement to curb population growth? What has been the effect of China’s population policy?
MS: People who ask this are most often affluent people concerned about the population increases of poor people.
EP: The biggest influence on population growth is the amount of education and economic opportunities that people have. These are more easily to be found in cities rather than in rural environment. As far as China is concerned, there’s was a very unique scenario that cannot be duplicated anywhere else in the world. Given the huge gender imbalances that they now face, the jury is still out on whether their policies were in fact a success.

Q: What about incentives for greater ‘ruralisation’?
EP: The reality is that it is much cheaper to develop infrastructure in an urban environment because of scale advantages. Besides that, people have a constitutional right to choose where they want to live.

Q: Is private sector prepared to ‘cut’ profits to assist poor?
MS: The reality is that a movement toward a new economy does not mean a lack of profit opportunities, just different opportunities. Several new industries have already emerged and will continue to grow in the future. That being said, we are also moving into the interesting situation where BRIC countries that will soon be the largest economic force in the world, have a lot more interventionist economies than traditional economic powers.

Some of the questions that were not addressed during the session, and which we would like people to give their inputs on are:
Would decentralisation be an alternative to urban land invasion?
Why doesn’t the government release more land for housing needs?
How do we change / review existing building regulations?

The third session of the series takes place on Tuesday 9 October 2007 and will look at New Design Parameters.