Local Problems, Local Expertise

How can South African cities address urban accessibility and mobility issues and the marginalizing consequences of past city planning?

By Angely Montilla

For more than two decades, Carnegie Corporation of New York has invested in the development of thousands of scholars across universities in Uganda, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Most of these scholars remain on the African continent, where they are generating knowledge in the region, presenting solutions to development challenges, and informing policy.

Hazvinei Tsitsi Tamuka Moyo, a land-use transport modeler, is a former fellow of the Corporation’s Next Generation of African Academics initiative. The fellowship supported her PhD research at the University of Cape Town on ways to provide increased transportation access to marginalized groups in Cape Town as well as to populations in low-income suburbs and informal settlements.

Problem

Across South Africa’s cities, congestion is a major issue. Cape Town ranks among the top hundred most congested cities in the world. Like most South African cities, Cape Town is also a relic of apartheid planning where the urban spatial patterns reinforce social exclusion for low-income populations — hindering access to employment, schools, recreation, and more — resulting in inefficiencies and extreme congestion. There is a need for more inclusive and integrated cities in South Africa and a need to understand how the interaction of transport and land use can help advance proactive urban policies.

Solution

Tamuka Moyo used Metronamica, a dynamic land-use transport model, to simulate and understand land use and transport change in Cape Town. Looking to explain disparities in access to transport in Cape Town, and the opportunities that transport provides to people, Tamuka Moyo considered marginalized groups located away from transport networks, requiring them to spend lots of time commuting to work and recreation. The study recognizes that low-income earners are captive to minibus taxis; therefore, to accurately illustrate the congestion levels, minibus taxis, private cars, and buses are used to model congestion levels on the network. This captures the uniqueness of the Cape Town transport user system by including both formal and informal modes of transport.

Through her integrated land-use transport planning, Tamuka Moyo was able to pinpoint ways to locate affordable housing in accessible locations, to introduce the development of public transportation corridors that support precinct planning, and to integrate transport facilities and land-use developments in surrounding areas. Her research showed how the integration of land use and transport into policymaking can help solve urban issues, revealing the value of urban modeling in assessing the potential impacts of policies before their implementation. ■