Cities Are Built By People, Not Presidential Dreams

South Africa does not need more presidential dreams. It needs space for ordinary people to act on their own.

Photo by Andrea Cau on Unsplash

In 2020 President Cyril Ramaphosa asked South Africans to imagine a new smart city rising in Lanseria. It would be a “truly post-apartheid city”, home to hundreds of thousands of people, 5G-ready, green, modern, and supposedly a benchmark for the continent.

Six years later, the benchmark appears to be open fields, shacks, an incomplete fence, and a few solar-powered streetlights.

This should not surprise anyone; not because South Africa is uniquely incapable of building things, though our state certainly does seem to specialise in proving that point. Rather, it should not surprise us because cities are not born from speeches. They are not summoned into existence by master plans, state-of-the-nation addresses, or glossy artist impressions. Cities are the product of human action, real demand, accumulated capital, institutions, trade, and countless individual decisions that no minister, president, or planning committee can possibly foresee.

Development is spontaneous.

That does not mean development is accidental. Nor does it mean there is no place for roads, sanitation, zoning rules, courts, policing, or basic infrastructure. It means that genuine development emerges when people have reason to build, invest, settle, trade, hire, commute, and take risks. It grows out of needs that exist in the real world, not out of political fantasies imposed upon the map.

A city is not merely a collection of buildings; it is a dense web of relationships. It is where employers need workers, workers need homes, families need schools, shops need customers, customers need transport, landlords need tenants, entrepreneurs need foot traffic, and investors need some confidence that their capital will not be expropriated, wasted, looted, or regulated into oblivion.

No central planner can design that web in advance. At best, government can aid the conditions in which it is allowed to form.

This is why real cities tend to grow around ports, mines, factories, universities, trade routes, administrative centres, transport nodes, and existing patterns of opportunity. People move where they can find work. Businesses open where they can find customers. Developers build where they expect buyers or tenants. Infrastructure follows demand, then enables more demand. Over time, what began as a cluster becomes a town, and what began as a town becomes a city.

This process is messy; it is uneven. It is not always beautiful, but it is real.

By contrast, the political mind hates this. It wants development to be legible, announced, branded, and controlled. It wants to stand at a podium and say: here shall be a city. It wants to replace the unpredictable decisions of millions of people with the supposedly superior vision of a committee.

The result is often not a city, but a monument to hubris.

Lanseria Smart City is a useful case study because it reveals the gap between political imagination and economic reality. On paper, it sounds impressive. In practice, a city of 350,000 to 500,000 people requires an extraordinary concentration of capital, institutional competence, private-sector confidence, functioning local government, reliable infrastructure, enforceable property rights, safety, transport connectivity, and actual human demand.

These cannot be decreed.

A president can announce a smart city. He cannot announce the millions of private calculations that make such a city viable. He cannot command families to want to live there, businesses to want to operate there, banks to finance developments there, or entrepreneurs to risk their savings there. He cannot wish into existence the trust required for long-term investment. He cannot compensate, with rhetoric, for failing municipalities, unreliable electricity, crime, water constraints, and a regulatory environment that often treats investors as suspects rather than partners.

There is a reason people build where there is opportunity. There is also a reason they avoid places where opportunity is politically imagined but economically absent.

South Africa’s tragedy is that it has no shortage of real development needs. We do not need politicians to dream up cities from scratch while existing cities decay. We need functioning ports. We need reliable rail. We need safe streets. We need municipalities that can fix water leaks and process building approvals. We need property rights that are secure. We need businesses to be able to hire without navigating a minefield of ideological labour policy. We need electricity that works, roads that are maintained, title deeds that are issued, and local governments that do not turn every development application into a hostage negotiation.

In other words, we need the conditions for development, not merely the theatre of development.

The state’s proper role is not to play entrepreneur, architect, banker, developer, landlord, futurist, and social engineer all at once. It is to provide the legal and institutional framework within which ordinary people can build. Enforce contracts. Protect property. Keep people safe. Maintain basic infrastructure. Allow prices, profits, rents, and losses to tell the truth about what people need.

That last point matters. Prices are not just numbers - they are signals. A rising rent in an area tells developers that more housing is needed. Congested roads tell investors and municipalities where transport demand exists. High commercial vacancy rates tell us that a glossy precinct may not be as desirable as its brochures suggested. Profit and loss discipline ambition. They force builders to ask whether people want what is being built.

Political projects often avoid that discipline. They are funded by taxpayers, development finance institutions, public guarantees, or opaque partnerships where failure can be blamed on “delays”, “stakeholder engagement”, “funding constraints”, or “legacy challenges”. The ordinary entrepreneur cannot behave like this. If he builds where nobody wants to buy, he loses money. If the state builds where nobody wants to live, it issues another statement.

This is why state-led megaprojects so often become monuments to bad incentives. The politician gets the announcement today. The bureaucrat gets the planning process. The consultants get the feasibility studies. The connected contractors get the tenders. The taxpayer gets the bill. The public gets a fence, a few streetlights, and another promise.

None of this means South Africa cannot have smart cities. But a smart city is not smart because a politician calls it one. A city becomes smart when it solves real problems for real people. Cape Town becomes smarter when it makes it easier to build more housing near jobs. Johannesburg becomes smarter when it fixes water, electricity, and policing. Durban becomes smarter when its port works. Pretoria becomes smarter when development is driven by genuine demand rather than bureaucratic fantasy.

Technology can help. Sensors, fibre, solar, data systems, and digital services can improve urban life. But technology cannot substitute for institutions. A corrupt, unsafe, badly governed city with an app is still a corrupt, unsafe, badly governed city. A streetlight in an empty field is not development, it is decoration.

The lesson of Lanseria is not that South Africa should abandon ambition. It is that ambition must be disciplined by reality.

If government wants development, it should stop trying to manufacture it through spectacle. It should ask a humbler question: what is preventing people from building already?

Why are approvals so slow? Why is infrastructure unreliable? Why are municipalities bankrupt? Why are property rights under threat? Why is crime tolerated? Why are small businesses smothered before they can grow? Why are developers treated as enemies unless they fit into a politically approved scheme?

Answer those questions, and development will not need to be forced. It will happen because people want homes, businesses want customers, workers want jobs, and investors want returns.

South Africa does not need more presidential dreams. It needs space for ordinary people to act on their own.

Cities are not built by decree. They are built by the beautiful chaos of human action.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a senior associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.