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International data organisation Statista recently revealed that in the latest analysis, it found that almost 68% of SA’s population now lives in urban areas and cities.
Ten years ago, it was at 62%.
Further, the population density in the nation has risen, reaching 46 inhabitants per square kilometre.
This rapid growth in urbanisation is often problematised, with anxiety over resources and failing infrastructure rising, leading to service delivery protests, and in some echelons of society, a higher rate of emigration (with three times as many people emigrating between 2015 and 2020 than between 2010 and 2015, according to the UN).
But an expert at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) has urged South Africans to reframe how they think about rapid urbanisation and see it as a world of opportunity.
Speaking at Wits University on Wednesday, urban data scientist Graeme Gotz said: “Growth-related challenges seem very big and scary, and our inclination is to ask, ‘how do we stop it?’”
He said that by 1950, 30% of the world’s population was urban, whereas by 2030, it would be in the region of 60% (amounting to more than five billion people).
Migration to urban areas had placed major strain on the housing backlog, with the country seeing more than a million shacks in at least 2,600 informal settlements.
— Mmamoloko Kubayi, human settlements minister
“The way to think your way into that opportunity is to think of America in the 1950s: the combination of highways and new suburban forms ... drove consumer demand and thus the production of cars, goods like cleaning materials and packaged food to name but a few.”
He said that a growing Gauteng city region could be viewed in the same way, and likewise the continent as a whole where “the greatest wave of urbanisation is still to happen over the next 100 years”.
Gotz also highlighted how the “immediate and pressing energy crisis in South Africa” had led to what he called “a silent revolution of households and businesses going off-grid”.
“The crisis is driving a comprehensive infrastructure transition,” he said, “and we’re seeing an evolution to smart or active grids with community-level storage and energy micro-grids, for example.”
However, urbanisation is not without its inherent problems, which are difficult to reframe, and for many, the energy crisis is not so much a driver towards a silent revolution but a slow and horrible economic collapse.
Late last year, human settlements minister Mmamoloko Kubayi spelt out the realities of rapid urbanisation.
At the launch of the Global Action Plan Framework on Informal Settlements and Slums in Pretoria, she said that migration to urban areas had placed major strain on the housing backlog, with the country seeing more than a million shacks in at least 2,600 informal settlements which, she said, “place huge strain on the economy”.
According to UN Habitat director Maimunah Mohd Sharif, urbanisation in areas not built for large and dense populations results in “slum-like conditions where people lack access to water, sanitation, and decent housing and are sharing a room with three or more people”.
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