Pretoria – Major clean-up campaigns, combating of crime and eradicating drug peddling will be crucial in improving socio-economic conditions in the Pretoria inner city.
And Gene Lohrentz of Geocentric, which assisted the City of Cape Town with the establishment of the Central City Improvement District (CCID) in the 1990s, said partnerships with different stakeholders would be key in revamping the heart of the capital.
Lohrentz was speaking to property owners, businesses people and City of Tshwane officials at the Southern Sun Hotel in Pretoria on Thursday.
The meeting was organised by City Property in light of the collapse of the Kerk Street CID late last year, its marketing specialist Lize Nel said.
Lohrentz used the example of the Cape Town suburb of Maitland, which was previously troubled by crime, illegal advertising and dumping.
He said a partnership was forged with members of the community, the Cape Town municipality and the police to fight crime in the area. In two years, it had been reduced by 40%, he said.
Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana and Gene Lohrentz at a meeting where property owners and businesses in the Pretoria CBD met with their Cape Town counterparts to discuss inner city rejuvenation.
Picture: Jacques Naude
“We believe in partnership because that’s the only way to get things done,” he said.
The homeless were recruited into the clean-up campaigns and housed in places of safety.
“Because of the safe and clean environment, property developers flocked into the area and some offered to be part of the public safety projects,” he said.
Outreach programmes were conducted at local schools to educate youth about the danger of doing crime.
The plans were embraced by Randall Williams, Tshwane MMC for economic development and spatial planning.
Williams said: “The Pretoria inner city is in total decay because of crime, grime and congestion. We can learn more from Cape Town, especially the fact that you can’t do it on your own as a local government.”
Williams said the inner city regeneration could only be achieved through partnerships with the private sector. “That is the way we are going and that is why we want to relaunch all the the CIDs in the city. We want to make sure they are functioning properly,” he said.
He said the CID in Hatfield worked fairly well but the CBD one didn’t function at all.
“It is our priority that we should revitalise the CBD and make it attractive for business, because we want to create jobs,” he said.
He said the intention was to expand the CID programmes to the other seven regions of Tshwane.
“We need to start somewhere and we are looking at the areas that are the most challenging and one of the most challenging area is Marabastad. You don’t only have total decay there, but also issues like prostitution, drugs and crime. If we make a success of Marabastad, we can make a success anywhere in the seven regions of Tshwane,” he said.
Williams said the city had recently launched a programme called Tswelopele to regenerate Marabastad.
“We have already started with the clean-up campaigns in the area. We will soon be announcing some projects for the development of the inner city,” he said.
Executive assistant at City Property Leora Osrin-Karp said: “We look at Cape Town as a model in terms of its successful CBD operation in conjunction with property owners and business. And we are hoping to replicate that model in the City of Tshwane.”
She said the fact that CID in the CBD had failed represented an opportunity to put a new structure in place.
“We all want the same basic things: we want a safe CBD, we want a beautiful area to walk around in and relax (in),” she said.
She said the fundamental lesson to be drawn from Cape Town was that without proper partnerships, no CID could succeed.
“There need to be formal partnerships between the local authority the council, between the property owners and business. Our interests have to be aligned, because if working against each other, we will go anywhere,” she said.
Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana, a town planner in Cape Town, said the intention of revitalising the inner city was to promote the central city as a place for all and a leading centre for commercial, retail, residential, tourism, educational, entertainment and leisure activities.
In the 1990s, she said the traffic volume in Cape Town was unbearable. “Our pavements were constructed in such as a way that blind people and cyclists could not use them. But now things have changed,” she said.
She advised that developers should take into consideration the strong heritage aspect in the inner city during the development.
“The squares are the assets that can be used to turn the situation in the CBD around,” she said.
She said the city should ensure there was accessible wifi around the squares to attract more people.
Last month, mayor Solly Msimanga announced plans to rejuvenate the inner city, saying a clean and well-functioning inner city would go a long way to restoring confidence in its ability to attract investment, both domestically and internationally.
“As such, the city has installed an inner-city depot which will occupy itself with ensuring that we rejuvenate and revitalise the inner city, which in recent times has become a victim to littering and a general state of uncleanliness due to a multitude of reasons We want to attract investment. We want this city to be a place where people can play, live and work.”