​​South Africa has had a painful past. Nowhere is the legacy of our painful past expressed more than in the racially divided spatial character of South Africa's cities.

The City of Johannesburg has not been immune from this highly unfortunate spatial legacy. Townships have historically served as reservoirs of labour with poor schools, poor recreational facilities, and poor access to water, electricity and sanitation, poor transport infrastructure and absence of economic opportunities. This divided, unequal spatial architecture was inherited in 1994 and has proven difficult to reverse.

The integration of local government post-1994 provided the institutional foundation for the reversal of the apartheid spatial form. The subsequent governments in the City of Johannesburg have been seized with the challenge of reversing the apartheid spatial form.  Yet speaking at the Green Building Convention in 2017, Professor Edgar Pieterse warned that urban sprawl will continue to be encouraged if private- and public-sector land investment in our cities concentrates on keeping the haves away from the have-nots.

In 2016, Council responded by finalising the Spatial Development Framework 2040, which imagined an inclusive, integrated and socially cohesive City of Johannesburg. The Spatial Development Framework 2040 called for the drafting of the Nodal Review to give expression to the urgent spatial challenge of integration and inclusion. After months of modelling and public participation, the Nodal Review was approved by Council on February 28 2020.

This is a critical moment in the City's march towards social cohesion, socio-economic growth and investment. Since the 2000s, the City has pursued an urban growth management strategy that promotes higher density, mixed use development in well located parts of the City. This strategy promotes the idea of proximity to places of work and schools, easy access to public transport infrastructure and other services.

Invariably, such an approach reduces the cost of infrastructure and other services, reduces pressure on the natural environment, and through agglomeration and clustering, promotes economic growth.

While every effort has been made to direct investments towards integration, the reality is that much high-density development has occurred far away from the city's epi-centre of economic activity and sophisticated and efficient infrastructure. Consequently, a dual development trajectory has characterised the City with locations in the periphery of the City experiencing high density development while locations closest to the economic centres of the City are characterised by low densities. The Nodal Review seeks to reverse this trend.

The Nodal Review proposes new innovative nodes and development zone levels. First is the Inner City Node, which is the primary node of the City. This Node provides for the highest mix and intensity of land uses with heights of three stories and up to a minimum of 100 dwelling units per hectare.

The second nodes are the metropolitan nodes such as Sandton, Midrand, Rosebank and Roodepoort. These nodes promote a high mix of land uses at three to twenty storeys with a minimum density of 80 per hectare. These nodes are expanded to include Soweto, in particular, Orlando and Jabulani. The Regional Nodes constitute the third level. These are poised to serve as localised centres of commerce with 80 dwellings per hectare, with three to ten storey buildings.

The fourth “development zone" is the most transformative. The General Urban Zone seeks to maximise opportunities that are presented in well-located sub-urban areas, transforming them into urban areas over time. This Node envisages a mix of land uses per building including economic and residential uses. It promotes three to five storey buildings with a density of at least 60 dwellings per hectare.

Another major change is the fifth node, which is termed the Local Economic Development Zone, which includes Zandspruit, parts of Cosmo City, Ivory Park, the outskirts of Soweto, Orange Farm and Diepsloot. These locations are characterised by poor facilities, unemployment and few economic opportunities. The Nodal Review prioritises interventions that create economic opportunities in the LED zone. The suburban Zone is similar to current residential 1 suburbs. It is a lower density zone of the city with just up to three storey buildings (as is currently generally allowed on residential 1 zoned land). It is characterised by local mixing of land uses including homes offices, shops and local services.

The dark green zone is constituted of areas beyond the Urban Development Boundary where intensification is not allowed. A limit of a maximum of 8% coverage of buildings is imposed. The peri-urban/agriculture zone includes areas that are not well suited for densification and retain a low-density character.

One of the most transformational elements of the City's spatial vision is its “aggressive" promotion of 'inclusionary housing'. It prescribes to private developers that at least 30% of their housing developments should be for low income and low-middle income households, or to households who otherwise would not afford to live in those developments. Housing is an important contributor to social inclusion and spatial integration and this prescription would go a long way towards the achievement of an inclusive city.

The Nodal Review is an important chapter in the evolution of local government in South Africa. But more importantly it creates the foundation for all the stakeholders to work together for the realisation of this socially cohesive, non-racial, inclusive city that the architects of democratic South Africa imagined.

As the UN Habitat correctly points out spatial disconnection negatively impacts on social cohesion and reduces the economic vibrancy and the overall prosperity of cities, including the quality of life of citizens. 

Informal settlements and disconnected peripheries, dysfunctional public spaces and increasing insecurity are often the results. The City of Johannesburg, with its painful past can ill afford to postpone the urgent task of building a non-racial, inclusive and cohesive city. By 2040 the City of Johannesburg, through unity of purpose should have made great strides towards realising the six development objectives as articulated in Section 7 (a) to (e) of the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act, 2013 (SPLUMA), namely:

• Spatial justice: past spatial and other development imbalances must be redressed through improved access to and use of land.
• Spatial sustainability: spatial planning and land use management systems must promote the principles of socio-economic and environmental sustainability. 
• Efficiency: land development must optimise the use of existing resources and the accompanying infrastructure.
• Spatial resilience: securing communities and livelihoods from spatial dimensions of socio-economic and environmental shocks through mitigation and adaptability that is accommodated by flexibility in spatial plans, policies and land use management systems.
• Good administration: all spheres of government must ensure an integrated approach to land use and land development and all departments must provide their sector inputs and comply with prescribed requirements during the preparation or amendment of Spatial Development Framework.  – Written by Cllr Lawrence Khoza, MMC for Development Planning