Last week, I attended an urban conference organised by the South African Cities Network (SACN). The purpose of the conference was to begin preparations for the publication of the third edition of the SACN State of the Cities Report, scheduled for October 2010. I will be writing more about this process over the next year.

 What I want to write about now are the two speeches delivered on behalf of the SA Government by two colleagues of mine – Yunus Carrim, now Deputy Minister of Local Government, and Jeremy Cronin, Deputy Minister of Transport.

 Yunus is a former lecturer, and Jeremy, a well-respected poet. On the day of the conference, however, they seemingly reversed their roles. Yunus waxed lyrical about cities. He produced a series of quotes from a remarkable book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, first published in 1972, about an imaginary journey by Marco Polo to the ‘infernal city’. He described two types of people in cities - those that accept and therefore no longer see the inferno, and those that who are not part of the inferno who need to be given space to operate. Yunus was poetically illustrating the need to move away from the previous national government ’one size fits all’ approach to local government policy and capacity building towards a more differentiated approach.

 Yunus also quoted from Joel Kotkin’s The City: A Global History, describing cities as ’sacred spaces’ with a key role in shaping the future of humanity, and how the performance of cities affects all the citizens of the nation, not just those who live in cities. Yunus was making the point about the need to take cities seriously, something historically absent from our national policy discussions.

 Jeremy, on the other hand, was the teacher on the day. He bluntly outlined the shortcomings evident in our democratic transition to date, focusing on the systematic reproduction of apartheid spatial relations in our cities and towns. He decried what he called ’shallow discussions’ in our national discourse, where, for reasons of denialism, white racism, corruption, deployment policy or individualisation of politics, there is precious little attempt to address the root causes of poverty, inequality and unemployment, amongst other things.

 Jeremy used the example of what are called ‘township service delivery protests’ to illustrate his point. He criticised those who characterise ’service delivery’ as a process of delivering public services to passive recipients, thereby effectively demobilising community organisation and struggle. He also controversially, but correctly in my opinion, pointed out that the strategy of delivering basic services to former black townships over the past 15 years has been short-sighted in that it has attempted to solve citywide development problems of urbanisation, land, housing, services and jobs within the townships, thereby reproducing apartheid space. Jeremy emphasised the need for a citywide approach that challenges the existing spatial realities, particularly with regard to land and housing markets, densification, public transport and economic growth.

 Both Yunus and Jeremy were refreshingly candid about the failures of government policy and strategy, and proposed innovative approaches to city strategy. While I didn’t agree with Jeremy’s analysis of the ’global city paradigm’ (the subject of a future debate to come, I’m sure), the fact of the matter is that both speakers were taking cities in South Africa seriously, at a time when the focus of the ruling party has been mainly on rural development.