Do SA's metros have the capacity to cope with migration?

Nomalanga Mkhize - History Lecturer at Rhodes UniversityGuest: Stacey-Leigh Joseph - South African Cities Network Programme Director1.Urban Land conversations in South Africa tend to be dominated by rural land issues and land ownership. While both of these issues are undeniably important we need to find a way to broaden the conversation to issues of urban land (where 2/3rds of South Africans live) and to broader issues of how we use land, how we access land and who has rights to land.2.Land is required for everything. An urban land conversation needs to be a conversation about inclusivity and what creates inclusive and spatially transformed spaces within cities. Urban land conversations need to include consideration of land’s economic productivity, socio-political dynamics, infrastructure capacity, ecological considerations and geography, amongst others 3.There are a number of role players that are important to urban land, these include local government, the private sector, state owned enterprises and people in cities who use and contribute towards spaces in cities. Each of these groups has different interests and goals for land, but there needs to be some level of agreement on economic, social, environmental and cultural value of land. 4.Urban planning needs to find a way to balance the formal planning requirements (land use planning, infrastructure planning) with more inclusionary socio-economic aspects in a manner that reflects the needs and realities of African cities5.How land is valued is different for different users. Urban land has social, economic and environmental values, which are not mutually exclusive to each other. Urban land is in many ways a confluence of converging and diverging interests within the context of a rapidly urbanising South African population needing access to space for work, living and play.