admin
The need for proper planning of cities, towns and suburbs and for the subsequent new housing to be of decent quality was stressed by President Mnangagwa on Monday.
The Government has programmes to clean up and regularise much of the unplanned settlement that has occurred, and to add the services required in other settlement where there was planning before the land barons sold off the land before the servicing was done.
But these are a one-off, to sort out what should never have happened or been allowed to happen if city councils and municipalities had been doing their job properly and it has been made clear that while the victims of the land barons can be helped where possible, there must be no more similar disastrous mistakes created.
The Government itself, as the President reminded us on Monday, has its own major housing programmes, and the private sector is exceptionally welcome to join in, both as developers and financiers to ensure that the target of 220 000 new flats and houses is achieved by 2025, and achieved by correct development with at least the basic services of roads, sewers, water supply and electricity connections laid on.
These days provision also has to be made to ensure that the digital cabling is part of the service development or can be added promptly as the residents move into new housing areas and estates. This is now a fairly basic service for many households.
The President was speaking at the new twin Aspindale Park and Aspire Heights development in western Harare where the private developer has done their work properly.
Careful planning, with detailed collaboration between the developer and the city planners, ensured that the correct guidelines were followed and the new suburb was properly laid out.
While densities are high, to make best use of the land, the development is fairly obviously middle-income to upper middle income.
We do need to avoid urban sprawl and that does require better planning and better use of urban land.
The old colonial division that the bigger the plot the more up-market the development was a nuisance then and now is absurd.
What determines the value of development and housing is the quality and amenities, and if to get high-quality housing you build up, instead of sideways, and amenities are added well beyond the basic minimum.
The Aspire Heights portion of the development are blocks of flats, but a bit different from even the luxury blocks in other parts of the city.
It is the first apartment complex where the digital cabling is built into the structure, and where gas supplies can be piped from a proper central and safe storage for liquid petroleum gas, with geysers and other appliance already connected.
It is easy and cheap to do all this when the architects and planners are in the design stage, but a lot harder when everything has to be retrofitted.
This brings in another point. Sometimes all services beyond the basic cannot be added at the beginning of a development, but they can be designed in at the planning stage so can be added later with little fuss or bother when more money is available.
The Ministry of National Housing and Social Amenities is spearheading the national housing programme and largely implementing the public sector part of that programme.
It has already through its technical experts been developing and improving innovative construction techniques to cut the costs of building, but its architects could also include the ducting and the plug on points for later upgrades.
One good example of this came up in Germany, the most heavily bombed country of the Second World War with major destruction as the allies moved in to destroy the Nazi war machine.
Unlike some victorious powers with the tower blocks of social housing that proved such a disaster later, the Germans when they were rebuilding their cities in the late 1940s and 1950s tended to go for fairly utilitarian structures but which were soundly built.
From the 1980s a lot of upgrade was in progress, from bolt on balconies onwards, to convert this housing into something more fitting for the highly developed country that Germany had become.
The siting of the Aspindale development was a critical point. Already Harare’s sprawl is nonsensical, with suburbs, some very badly planned, being piecemeal developed more than 20km away as decent farming land is converted to potential urban disaster. We have to go up, rather than sprawl, but that obviously does not mean we have to move down market.
One of the interesting points of the new suburb commissioned by the President is that it has been developed on land far closer to the city centre than is the general trend, and doing this without touching wetland or land designated for education or public open spaces.
A landowner managed to figure out a way of using unused land properly.
There is other such land in the city, where development can take place without sentencing the eventual residents to one hour commutes in each direction when they go to work.
We have already seen in several older suburbs where oversized plots from colonial times have been redeveloped or largely badly built housing has been demolished to make way for new development.
In many cases cluster housing and similar schemes have allowed far denser development, with the value of a cluster house being roughly that of the neighbouring house on a large plot.
The major national housing programme now in progress needs, as President Mnangagwa stressed, both public and private development, but everyone working within quality planning rules and no one cutting corners.
But this development also needs to be adaptable towards a future far more prosperous country, so it should be possible to upgrade what we are doing now, and plan for amenities which do not yet exist.
But we can all learn from each other as we build for the next century and make sure all innovations that make sense are included.
Online Reporter