‘New Towns’ - The S.M.A.R.T. alternative to city slums: lessons to be learned from Soweto to Cosmo City

Abstract

Paper presented at the XXXIII IAHS World Congress on Housing, 27-30 September 2005,"Transforming Housing Environments through Design", University of Pretoria.

ABSTRACT: The vital issues of land resettlement, tenure, hunger, poverty, housing, unemployment, crime, land re-settlement, commercial and emergent farming cannot be resolved in isolation. In consequence the Millennium Development Goals are unlikely to be reached economically or effectively with the current incoherent and obsolete assumptions regarding town and regional planning. For it has to be stated that the profession of ‘town planning’ has not progressed in the 20th century in which standard references books are mostly concerned with the provision of services rather than on human social and economic considerations. They omit to take account of the many major human, social, technological and economic changes that have taken place in society, such as : 1. Rural-Urban migration and sprawl 2. Metropolitization 3. Ever-expanding city slums 4. The change from an industrial to an information era 5. The looming energy crisis 6. Land re-distribution and re-settlement 7. Crime, safety and security 8. African social life 9. Community and financial management