In this final instalment I want to emphasise the importance of urban institutions, politics, regulation and deliberate epistemic communities for the realisation of the potential of platform urbanism. Two domains of frustrated policy innovation will be explored. The first area takes us back to the realm of public housing provision in South Africa and explores how genuine innovation from within the state cannot find traction in the refinement of the public housing programme. The second area pertains to (private) public transport – i.e. minibus taxis that dominate public transport trips in most African cities. In both cases, I will demonstrate the emergence of innovative policy proposals that are unable to gain political traction in favour of perpetuating deeply inefficient models. The line of argument seeks to extend the exploration of platform urbanism into more overtly political and institutional questions.

Reinventing Public Housing Materials and Processes

In the previous section, I spelled out the unanticipated challenges that arose when an aggressive public housing policy was implemented in South Africa from 1994 onwards. Racialised class segregation was worsened because public housing had to be constructed on the cheapest possible land, which tends to be on the periphery of cities and towns. Another unfortunate dimension of the public housing delivery system is that to optimise economies of scale, commercial private construction companies are enrolled to prepare the land and build the houses by using conventional construction materials, such as brick and concrete. Most of the stock is also freestanding and at relatively low densities, which is offset by the phenomenon of backyard shacks, as elaborated on in the second instalment of this series. Many public housing areas are marked by high levels of crime, unsafe public spaces, under-utilised public infrastructure and low levels of economic development and commercial infrastructure. Even though there are long-standing efforts to innovate within this system through the introduction of alternative construction materials and the incorporation of small contractors that come from working class areas, very little success has been achieved to date.

A few years ago it came to my attention that a remarkable ‘solution’ had been incubated in another government department called the Department of Environmental Affairs. Linked to a branch in the department that deals with public employment schemes, a sophisticated experiment was undertaken to develop an alternative, low-carbon building material. The initiative is called the Lighthouse Project. It produces biomass concrete by using wood chips from alien plant species removed by bands of public employment workers.[1] These alien species are problematic because they consume a lot of water and grow so prodigiously that they often supplant existing vegetation. It took almost five years of experimentation to come up with the right type of wood chip and cement additives to design a construction material that was incredibly strong and easily manipulable for construction purposes by relatively unskilled workers. Practically speaking, the Lighthouse Project figured out a system to deploy low-carbon materials that would require the large-scale removal of alien vegetation – with all of its ecosystem regenerative implications – for deployment as a construction material in ways that could offer forms of employment to unemployed residents. Given the nature of the construction process, no machines were needed, which in turn created an opportunity for small and under-capitalised businesses to benefit from state expenditure, addressing the economic asymmetry between large, predominantly white-owned companies and small, black-owned firms. The Lighthouse Project built prototypes and decided to experiment with the housing typology in game reserves as a form of developing proof of concept.

Given all this innovation, it would seem to be a no-brainer that the Department of Human Settlements would embrace this technology to underpin the implementation of the public housing programme, or at least part of it. This has not happened and remains highly unlikely for a variety of reasons that are too intricate to get into here. Suffice to say that the housing regulatory code makes this form of construction material illegal. Furthermore, all of the procurement systems and project management capacity in this department, and their local government counterparts, are geared towards working with big private-sector construction companies. They are not positioned to operate with a decentralised system comprised of a large number of micro actors doing relatively slow and incremental work. I wonder whether this might be a space in which the institutional logics and tools of platform urbanism can make a difference, as we say with the Undlu Urban Initiative.

Reimagining Public Transport Solutions: E-Taxi

Moving from housing to public transport, a similar set of questions arise. First some context is required. Public transport trips are split between passenger rail, private minibus taxis that require public licences, and buses. The latter has the smallest share and they fall into two categories: buses that travel along road networks and a small fleet of buses that operate on dedicated lanes in a similar fashion to the bus-rapid transit system popularised in cities like Curitiba and Bogota. Forty or fifty years ago rail was by far the largest carrier of public transport commuters but its dominance declined due to long-term neglect and underinvestment in repair and maintenance and limited replacement of train sets. A similar story applied to the bus system. In the early 1980s an informal, makeshift solution started to appear. Fifteen-seater minibus taxis emerged to ferry township dwellers to their places of work. Importantly, they operated without any form of public subsidy and it would take some time before a structured regulatory system of licences would emerge. Within two decades the highly organised and cut-throat sector became the largest black-owned enterprise in South Africa and continued to fill the void left by a decaying formal public transport system.[2]

The minibus taxi industry grew dramatically as urbanisation took off between 1970 and 1990, especially after the abolition in 1984 of the legislated influx control of black citizens wanting to live in cities. In the democratic era (1994 onwards), the state struggled to figure out how best to regulate and support the industry. In addition, large swathes of the sector are operated illegally and, due to the business model, these vehicles operate outside of traffic regulations, creating risk and frustration for other road users. The reason why they continued to grow in importance is that they were able to respond to the sprawling, low-density urban form of South African cities. They can reach just about every nook and cranny of South African cities and towns, making them a far more effective form of mobility in terms of access. They are simply a lot nimbler than rail or buses.

During the last fifteen years there have been two very expensive efforts to upgrade rail and bus services. By definition, rail reform is always expensive and comes with an enormous opportunity cost – if you back rail, there are a very little resources for other modes and priorities. The rail investment proved to be particularly disastrous because it was caught up in the large-scale larceny of the Jacob Zuma presidency. Billions of dollars were misspent, and unproductive investments were made in companies willing to pay kickbacks but unable to deliver the core infrastructure. Furthermore, the physical infrastructure was routinely vandalised, and the state was patently unable to secure its assets, rendering rail services unreliable and effectively unviable. Tens of thousands switched their preferred mode of transport to minibus taxis.

Against this backdrop, we explored an alternative policy approach to public transport, one that would recognise the de facto solution that the minibus taxi industry provided in terms of affordable access, but combined with a digitally enabled capacity for intelligent regulation. Through a dialogical process in Cape Town focussed on addressing the spatial legacies of apartheid, we coproduced contextually relevant but innovative policy propositions to address the logjam that characterises urban management in terms of housing, mobility, place-making, digital exclusion and youth engagement.[3]

The proposition on public transport put forward an argument for embracing the minibus taxis as an innovative, organic response to the crisis of affordable and safe public transport. A set of technological and institutional innovations was proposed that would allow minibus taxis to be even more responsive to demand through an online hailing system, combined with opportunities to conduct other kinds of trips in off-peak periods. A precondition would be a share of the public transport subsidy pie and in return the industry would subject itself to regulation, compliance with basic traffic management requirements and working through an integrated ticketing system so that passengers can move seamlessly between trains, buses and minibus taxis. The image on this/the opposite/the following page provides a visualisation of the proposition to enable more informed public debate. At the heart of this proposition is a digital platform to enhance convenience for passengers and greater efficiency for the operators.

In focus groups that we conducted with regulators from the city government, minibus taxi operators and drivers, commuters and mobility researchers seemed to agree that this approach would be logical and desirable. The problem is that government is so fragmented and the existing legal framework so immutable that translating a broad consensus into new laws and policy seems near impossible. This underscores again that often the easier part is imagining what the digital platform tool might involve and how it could revolutionise a sector or service. But to get to that adjustment, substantial institutional and political groundwork is required to address much deeper challenges.

What Really Matters?

So the challenge remains: what matters most is not just imagining the potentiality of platform urbanism but working towards its materialisation as part of a larger societal transformation project. In shorthand form, I want to draw on the useful visualisation of the institutional, discursive, regulatory and cultural layers that constitute the machinic reproduction of the city as proposed by Alaistar Parvin.[4] He captures succinctly the entangled nature of urban imaginaries weighed down by inherited belief systems and as a result trapped by a specific cultural imaginary which legitimises predominant institutional systems. Unless one is able to trace the reasons why certain ‘innovations’ will not take off through such a systemic reading, it will be near impossible to find traction for the kinds of alternatives intimated before. Moreover, it will be difficult to discern the tactics and strategies needed to undo the status quo and instantiate credible alternatives. Where does this leave us practically? What kind of politics is called for?

Experimentation Labs can play a powerful role in the aggregation of actors across various societal institutions to work in an exploratory manner on tracing the systemic dimensions of a given problem area such as public housing or public transport. These processes will need time and a transdisciplinary ethos to ensure that all kinds of knowledges – professional, tacit, activist, academic – are validated, considered and cross-pollinated.[5] Furthermore, specific sites in the city that are emblematic of the problem should be focussed on as test cases to explore and try out aspects of a grand alternative. All along the way the key will be narrativising the experiments and enrolling as many publics as possible because that serves as a form of accountability and creates a space for other innovations to enter the frame. Unless new modes of working arise from radically open and accountable learning processes that carry some form of societal legitimacy, it is unlikely that contextual innovations will indeed become a future norm, even if the potential is palpable. Universities and other knowledge brokers have a key role to play in figuring out new alignments and epistemic communities that need to be forged to drive urban innovations that can be both radical and inclusive. Whether our existing universities have the foresight and appetite to play this role is an entirely different and terrifying question.