When the City of Cape Town joined the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme in 2016, the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID) took this to heart, vowing to implement and adapt its own programmes as far as possible to ensure the future resilience of the Mother City’s CBD.

It’s a theme that is echoed in the CCID’s 2016/17 Annual Report, the results of which were presented at the NPO’s 17th annual general meeting, held on Monday 13 November at Tsogo Sun’s new SunSquare hotel in the CBD.

Celebrating the CCID’s 17th clean audit in a row, and speaking at the event, CCID chairperson Rob Kane noted the seven qualities an urban environment needed to develop to deal with “the stresses and shocks that life in the 21st century could throw at us.”

According to the Rockefeller programme, says Kane: “These were the abilities to be reflective (learn from experience), resourceful (find alternative ways to use resources), inclusive (broad-based consultation and participation), integrated (have systems that work together), robust (with well- conceived, constructed and managed systems), redundant (have the spare capacity to deal with disruptions) and flexible (the willingness to adopt new strategies in response to changing circumstances).

Following on from this, Tasso Evangelinos commented on the importance for city improvement districts to identify their resilience priorities: “We’ve used the compilation of this year’s annual report to do just that in terms of our own resilience priorities here in the Central City – in other words, to identify those factors that could threaten or challenge our resilience as an urban environment.”

In terms of public safety and security, these challenges could include crime, drug and alcohol abuse, and traffic congestion, while in terms of urban management, challenges could include ageing or inadequate infrastructure, climate change, water insecurity and possible urban blight. For social development, challenges such as homelessness, poverty and youth disenfranchisement were front of mind, while there were also general communications challenges in terms of educating the public around crime prevention, the promotion of investment and diversification of the economy, the call for creating social cohesion and changing mindsets around sustainability and the use of resources.

Commenting on how these challenges were the same as those found throughout the metropole, Evangelinos noted how the experiences of the CCID could also benefit other communities throughout Cape Town: “We believe there are many lessons we’ve learnt here in terms of building a city improvement district that could provide vital information as communities across Cape Town look towards their own future resilience and towards adapting the model to their own neighbourhoods. It empowers property and business owners to become involved in more than just their own bricks and mortar, while also providing enormous potential for job creation and work opportunities.”

“But you can’t begin to plan for future resilience, if you don’t have the basics in place,” says Evangelinos, “and if you don’t have the hard facts, figures and numbers to back up what it is you do. It’s in the assessment and constant maintenance of these basics, that you are then able to plan and adapt for the future, and go beyond what you do on a day-to-day basis.”

There is also a great deal that largely goes unnoticed in the eyes of the public: “Apart from the very important role our public safety officers play 24/7, are the tasks performed while many of us are sleeping in our beds at night. For example, the clean up of the Central City that happens during the late-night hours by our professional J&M cleaners, as well as by our Straatwerk dawn patrol in the early hours of the morning.

“Were it not for these dedicated teams, the Central City would look very, very different in the morning when office workers enter the city, not only due to the clean up that needs to happen after people have been partying or as a result of events that take place at night, but to the high volumes of illegal dumping that regularly occur when culprits take their chances.”

Along with the “basics” achieved by each department (see statistical highlights at the bottom of this release) Evangelinos highlighted several projects with which the CCID had been involved during the 2016-17 financial year: “These are projects in which we believe we went ‘beyond’ the normal day-to-day operation of a city improvement district, to bring added valued to our ratepayers and stretch every rand we spend as far as it will go.”

Public Space Management

Begun within the 2015-16 financial year, this involved the pilot project, involving St Georges Mall and Greenmarket Square, being run in conjunction with the City of Cape Town. The project is a City initiative that is envisaged will eventually guide best-practice management and revitalisation of public spaces across the metropole. The CCID’s involvement in the 2016-17 first six-month phase of the project (Dec 2016 until June 2017) involved stabilisation of the existing environment both in terms of public safety and urban management, and included:

• The deployment, on rotation seven days a week, of 13 new CCID public safety officers (PSOs) to concentrate on preventative measures and incident management
• The deployment of two City Law Enforcement officers (LEOs) from Monday to Friday, to deal with bylaw infringements, resulting in well over R1.6m worth of fines being issued in these two spaces alone.
• Deployed, via Urban Management, new teams of Straatwerk participants to perform cleaning and maintenance tasks in these spaces, thus providing a number of additional work opportunities to one of the CCID’s partner NGOs.

The CCID also heard, shortly before the start of the AGM, that the success of the initial phase has now resulted in the City of Cape Town approving funding for the project to continue, in terms of the CCID’s contribution, for another six-month period (December 2017 to June 2018).

Public Safety Programme

The CCID has been able to step up public safety over the past year via several initiatives:

• The CCID has for many years funded seven City LEOs who are deployed across the CBD. However, during the past year, it has been able to add an additional 10 CCID-funded LEOs, contracted via the City’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP). Eight of these new officers are deployed at night in the busy Long Street area, while two are deployed during daytime hours in areas across the CBD as required. (This is in addition to the two officers who were directly contracted to the Public Space Management programme, as above).

• The second programme with which our Safety & Security department has been involved, is a student ambassador pilot project, first announced in the 2015-16 financial year and run in The Company’s Garden. This project is funded by the Western Cape Government Department of Community Safety (DOCs) which also provides students from its Chrysalis Academy, to be trained as ambassadors. Together with the City of Cape Town, who are also a partner in this project, the CCID manages and deploys the students on a day-to-day basis – 25 at a time for up to nine months at a time. Along with their visible presence on the ground and a resultant drop in crime in The Company’s Garden, the work experience which the students receive has enabled many of them to move on to permanent jobs. Because of the overall success of the programme, the CCID is now in talks with DOCs to see how this could potentially be rolled out as an ambassador programme to other areas in the Central City.

Traffic Congestion Programme

Following another successful pilot project, was the deployment of six CCID-funded traffic wardens from the City’s Traffic Services Department to complete six of the City’s own wardens. These 12 officers primarily deal with traffic congestion at major intersections across the CBD during peak hour traffic in the afternoon. The six that are CCID-funded are then also deployed across the Central City outside of those peak hours to deal with non-moving violations such as parking on red and yellow lines, double-parking in roads and blocking loading zones. A first for South Africa, the six CCID-funded traffic wardens have also been equipped with the same body-worn video units that the CCID’s own public safety officers wear, and this has had a significant impact on behaviour modification among motorists.

Social Development programmes

With Evangelinos acknowledging that the CBD was also experiencing the high numbers of homelessness being felt throughout the metropole, he also believed that what had still been achieved by CCID Social Development’s on-the-ground four-person fieldworker team had been extraordinary, and ran across a few of the programmes which complemented the day-to-day operations of the team. These included:

• The rollout, wherever possible, of CCID- funded lockers, housed at partner NGOs, to try to supply street people with facilities in which to at least lock up important belongings such as ID books and medications. To date these included: 20 post-box lockers at The Carpenter’s Shop, 36 mesh lockers for Straatwerk participants, 16 mesh and 20 post-box lockers at the new TB/HIV Care Drop-In Centre in Rose Street, and 18 new steel lockers to complement the 18 wooden lockers installed already last year by the CCID at the Youth Solutions Africa facility in Woodstock.
• With ablutions facilities also being a serious challenge for street people, the CCID piloted a project this year together with its NGO partner Khulisa to provide toilet facilities for people participating in the Streetscapes garden project in the CBD.
• The CCID also expanded its Winter Readiness programme, not only providing an additional 30 bed spaces and meals to its partner NGO, Youth Solutions Africa, to ensure the CCID had a total of 48 beds available for its own clients in winter, but also running the programme for one month longer than originally planned.
• However, knowing that 48 beds were still not nearly enough and trying to further alleviate the plight of some of the CCID’s other clients who had no option but to take shelter on the streets, its Social Development team provided 150 sleeping bags, made by the NPO Street Sleeper, as well as 100 waterproof ponchos and over 1000 sachets of soup, in addition to the thousands of care bags it gives out annually, hundreds of pairs of new shoes, and the hundreds of thousands of donations sourced from concerned stakeholders and redistributed via the CCID’s partner NGOs.

CCID DEPARTMENTS: STATISTICAL HIGHLIGHTS

The following are some of the statistics achieved during the 2016-17 financial year, per department.

Safety & Security  

• 1 007: Arrests made together with the CCID’s law enforcement partners
• 10 981: Daytime fines issued amounting to a total value of R7 505 500
• 4 176: Nighttime fines issued amounting to a total value of R2 554 400
• 2 430: Fines issued (in addition to those above) during the first year of the St Georges Mall/Greenmarket Square pilot project, amounting to R1 643 900
• 38 309: Warnings issued
• 107 225: Crime prevention initiatives conducted
• 737: Times the CCID assisted at the scene of motor-vehicle accidents
• 648: Times the CCID assisted with medical and rescue callouts
• 197: Illegal trading offences dealt with
• 699: Number of times the CCID rendered public assistance

Urban Management ​

• 20 704: Number of times municipal drains were cleaned
• 3 189: Number of times storm water drains and channels were cleaned
• 180: Drain covers replaced
• 3 638: Illegal posters identified
• 13 178: Strings and stickers removed
• 3 398: Incidents of graffiti removed
• 955: Road maintenance repairs undertaken
• 1 064: Road markings painted
• 1 625kg: Amount of cigarette butts removed from the CCID’s branded cigarette bins
• 28 840kg: Waste removed to landfill
• 2 698: Tree wells maintained and 42 trees trimmed

Social Development

• 5 830: Number of engagements with clients on the street
• 279: Clients assisted to shelters
• 44: Clients assisted to healthcare facilities
• 22: Mothers with children assisted
• 104: Clients transported home for potential family reunification
• 17: Clients referred to Straatwerk for a work opportunity
• 72: Youth and children assisted
• 350: Pairs of shoes donated to clients
• 2 600: Number of care bags donated (and distribution organised)
• R50 000: Amount distributed to NGOs from the (previously named) GIVE RESPONSIBLY SnapScan & SMS donations line

Communications

• 200 000: Copies of the quarterly CCID newspaper, City Views, distributed
• 62 300: Copies of the CCID’s other publications distributed
• 117 000: Items distributed in regard to the CCID’s many targeted campaigns
• 35 000: Smart Smoker pouches distributed
• 805: Media clips generated across broadcast (91), online (358) and print (356)
• R25 583 953: Value of total media exposure obtained during the year

A selection of images from the AGM, as well as from the Annual Report, are available to the media on request. Please email the CCID Communications manager, Carola Koblitz, carola@capetownccid.org