South Africa

How Integral City Frameworks Develop South Africa

The Civic Managers of Ekurhuleni, South Africa set out to create a plan for Ekurhuleni 2055. The City Planner engaged professional planner Shahid Solomon they set out to imagine the future, using lenses informed by Integral City.

The City looked into the future of all the key capitals that would contributed to its wellbeing – economic, social, natural and infrastructural capital. Further impacts from global experts were researched relating to workforce, technology, energy and financing. Lying at the heart of this strategy were the rights and values of people as expressed in its governance system.

The Global Development Strategy Team brought together geo-spatial-cultural-social overviews of the city from key time periods. This revealed the waves of development that had enabled Ekurhuleni to grow from inception in 1905 to the current day. Then with the research in hand, future projections were made based on the mega-trends from the global habitat and the more local trends from the regional habitat. This gave the Civic Managers some probability scenarios for the future decades of 2020, 2030 and 2050+.

4 Voices Give Feedback on the Future Scenarios

With the future scenarios plotted out, the Civic Managers then took their research to the citizens, civil society and businesses of Ekurhuleni to obtain feedback on the most desirable future outcomes. This then allowed them to back cast activities that needed to start today in order to achieve the desired future outcomes.

Thus the Civic Managers, working as internal and external teams in Ekurhuleni, set out the conditions for nurturing the health of the habitat of the city. They offered their expert resources to explore and define wellbeing of the city in terms of both internal and external habitat. Now Civic Managers can guide and facilitate the other 3 Voices of the City to work together to create and maintain the health of the city as the habitat that nourishes all of them.

Endnote:

4 Voices of the City: Citizens, Civil Society, Civic Managers, Business