The Sunday Mail
Prof Innocent Chirisa
Urban and regional planning is founded on the basic understanding of the natural environment.
The planner, using the natural environment, will create a “built environment” through environmental design and urban planning.
The built environment is the sum total of substructures, infrastructure and superstructures.
It is also a constellation of the socio-cultural and economic environment in which humanity expresses lifestyles and business pursuits.
One of the founding fathers of planning, Patrick Geddes — a biologist-turned-planner — had a formula to summarise what planning involves: Survey, Analyse and Plan (S-A-P).
Surveying in this context summarises all the activities that have to do with information gathering regarding the natural and physical features — gradients, flora and fauna, aspect or angle of the sun and water.
Then there is also the human factors that include population, heritage and economic activities of the place or space.
Once that information is gathered and known, the planner has to sit down and ask the meaning of this is, and engage in analysis.
To analyse is to break anything to its constituent parts; to synthesise is to build something from its broken pieces.
Planning is that systematic putting together of component parts of a system towards construction a functional environment where the community enjoys and maximises its potential with a sustainable future in mind.
Every good urban design artefact must be informed by the understanding of the environmental system including the landscape.
At the end of the day, a functional settlement must be there in place.
Zimbabwean cities, especially Harare, have often faced serious flooding in times of rains. There are two explanations why the city faces this challenge.
One, of course has to do with the planning engaged in putting up the settlement aspects.
The other is behavioural and maintenance.
Three years ago, I had an opportunity to visit one rural-based intermediate city of Monteria in Colombia (close to the Panama Strip).
The city is located close to the major Sinu River whose mouth is into the Caribbean Sea.
It is a major river that has facilitated trade for more than five centuries.
Although, the medium-sized city has a share of the squatter menace, the city does not ignore the planning of environment.
It allows, as part of livelihoods promotion, its urban poor to operate boats for crossing.
They can also extract river bed sands for construction in the city.
Before the coming of the rains, there is serious dredging of the canals that must drain away excess run-off in the city.
I saw people engaged to just remove the unwanted material (paper, plastics, grass, sticks and mud, which was a case of casual employment, I guess.
In terms of biodiversity, I remember the all sorts of big lizards, some the size of a live mature goat, which I saw in the park. The citizens have learnt to live and play with them.
They come down trees with sunrise and go up the trees around sunset. I also saw the brown instead of the grey monkey. Colombia is in the tropics just like the bulk of Sub-Saharan Africa. I was impressed by the way in which the people co-exist with nature.
Unless we begin to see the city as a system where settlement, production and waste generation are part of it, then we are also very myopic not too see that some of the so-called small issues will bog us into serious problems.
The wastes will block the drainage system and when rainwater comes, it has nowhere to go but the places where we do not need it. This is a maintenance issue.
I recall one of my lecturers at Second Year, Mr Tatenda Mbara’s statement, “Infrastructure, like babies, is easier to produce but difficult to maintain.”
Any production of artefacts in space — houses, industries, schools and recreational parks — that fails to put maintenance planning is perspective is good as bad.
Our cities are usually masters of corrective maintenance. During the storm, you them see personnel busy on the ground trying to clean the system.
Yet, maintenance can be planned hence planned maintenance and even predictive maintenance. Put simply, we all know, one day, we are going to die.
But you hear someone say; ‘there is no need for me to plan about my funeral. One thing for certain is that if you keep my body you are the ones to brace with the smells.” Such is a reckless talk.
Then, they die and for sure, it will be nhamo (and not a funeral, as others would want to put it). You have to run and around and make ends meet. Shame!
Planning is a cyclical and iterative process which means, from time to time, we must be checking whether what we instituted or birthed still has live and is functional.
It is not enough to bring a life on earth (production). It is equally important to see that such a life has lived a life abundant.
The outcry by the public, who get affected by the flooded areas of the facilities and settlements we created as a planners, is indeed a genuine concern.
We may say, we were not involved when such and such was established but we have to intervene positively.
We should work hand-in-glove with officials from the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) and assist our brothers and sisters who are in trouble because of the effects of the rains. This is all in the name of serving the public interest.
EMA must continue to raise awareness to the public to check where they are choosing to construct various structures and ask the following questions;
Has the plan been subjected to Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)?
What are the mitigation measures put on the table by the developer?
Has the developer gone a step ahead to implement those suggested measures?
Is he/she not playing us ‘hit-and-run’?
I know the major problem with the home-seeker is about just getting ‘where to lay my head’. This explains partly why, in Brazil, for example, year in and year out, slum dwellers are victims of flooding and mud-flows.
EMA can also help by pressing hard on the citizens to stop littering in the city.
I have just observed that we now have two cities in one, especially, if one uses the central business district as an example.
We have the formal city that normally runs from 8am to 5pm (the day city).
This city is heavily regulated. It tries to follow the rules and regulations of city management as stipulated in the Regional, Town and Country Planning Act (Chapter 29:12) and the Urban Councils Act (Chapter 29:15).
The other city (the nocturnal city) runs from around 5pm till late (maybe 3am).
This city follows the rules of anti-planning. It is unregulated. In Shona, idongawatonga muzinda wenyuchi.
Unlike the day city, one wonders where the nocturnal citizens get their toilets. They don’t respect waste bins; where they sell is where they throw their litter.
Then early in the morning, the Harare City Council employees get busy sweeping the mess. The nocturnal citizens are free riders. The government has a huge task to create employment or rather to have policies that allow for the re-opening of industries.
Perhaps, on that day, everyone will be busy at their workplace.
On that interesting day, there will be no more vendors in the streets.
There will be no more indiscriminate littering.
The pipes and drains will be breathing fresh air. The suffocation of the city will end and we will live happily ever afterward!
Prof Innocent Chirisa is University of Zimbabwe Department of Rural and Urban Planning chairperson. He wrote this article for The Sunday Mail
