WHAT IS MEGA PROJECT?
- New housing delivery model that seeks to transform spatial patterns and create sustainable communities.
- Concept born out of the desire to break away from sporadic, small, isolated and monolithic housing projects.
- Aim is to deliver well planned projects, located within economically active areas linked to transport infrastructure.
- Minimum delivery target of 10,000 units (existing development cluster or as a new nodal development project).
BACKGROUND
- Mega Projects are human settlement projects that consist of more than 10 000 residential units. In the words of Gauteng Premier David Makhura:
“Mega Human settlements represent a decisive departure from uncoordinated, small scale, low impact, and sporadic as well as unsustainable housing developments. [The] goal must be to achieve diversity in human settlements by emphasizing mixed income, high density human settlements that place emphasis on social and economic inclusion, as well as promoting spatial justice.
- This is what we consider spatial transformation, wherein we transform and develop new cities” (speech made at the Gordon Business Institute of Business Science. 2015).
- The adoption of Mega Projects as a means of human settlements emerges both as a corrective measure but also as a means to redefine post-apartheid cities. As a corrective measure, it is informed by the following policy and implementation deficiencies of the post 1994 government housing programme:
- The initial response to the challenge of human settlement was disintegrated, and lacking in integration and coordination;
- Focused on the erection of housing structures, ironically, within the land that was procured and set aside by the previous apartheid regime. In a way, it legitimised apartheid patterns of human settlement;
- RDP houses were built away from the centres of economic activities. Beyond that, poorly connected to centres of employment. But then, they still reflected another version of migrant labour as people resided far away from places of economic activity and employment.
- Post ’94 early versions of human settlement focused on redress, equity, and less on economic development, social cohesion, transformation and efficiency. Essentially, the early post ’94 approaches to human settlement, were mainly “historically corrective” than forward looking and progressive. Consequently, RDP settlements, tended to mirror apartheid patterns than transformative and progressive.
- Due to ensuing capacity challenges to deliver housing units, the second decade of democracy has tended to focus on the acceleration of the delivery of housing units. Dealing with the backlogs has been the dominant preoccupation of the second decade of democracy government.
- The capacity limitations of municipal and provincial governments have been another factor that has led to the conceptualization of human settlements mega projects. Housing projects in the past have witnessed major corruption, and sloppy supply chain management. This has led to the Human settlement department return significant amounts of money back to the National Treasury.
- As indicated earlier, Mega projects emerge as a corrective measure for the challenges encountered in the first ten to fifteen years of the democratic South Africa. The initiative seeks to close the gaps identified above, whilst redefining future cities in line with the dictates of the National Development Plan, and the Gauteng City Region (GCR) strategy.