Making a Smart Johannesburg relevant and accessible to everyone

Johannesburg is already one of the smartest cities in Africa, and it plans to totally transform itself by 2040. TowerXchange sat down with Smart City Director Lawrence Boya to discuss how the city’s smart programme is reversing segregation, connecting people with jobs and services, and exploring options for monetising street furniture and collaboration with fibre operators, MNOs and towercos.

TowerXchange: What is the structure of Johannesburg’s Smart City Programme – are you looking at evolution or revolution, and what are your top priorities? 

The smart city programme is an overarching programme to translate and complement the city’s overall growth and development strategy. Johannesburg has a long-term city development strategy to 2040. By then it must be a different city and one of the smartest cities in the world.

Within that development plan various outcomes have been identified that must be realised. These outcomes relate to social-economic conditions, infrastructure and sustainability – moving to a greener future, and a more carbon-neutral future. But the plan also addresses issues about the city becoming a digitally transformed smart city in a holistic sense. 

This long-term plan is then translated into five year implementation programmes. Every administration has a five year term and formulates a medium term implementation plan: The Integrated Development Plan. We had national and provincial general elections earlier this year, and there is a new programme of government which we have to factor as a sphere of government. We have also been reviewing the five year implementation programme since 2014 and looking at the impact, and developing the next five year period.

The roadmap towards the modern metropolis we see today started in 2000. Next year it will be 20 years since we became a metropolitan government: prior to that Johannesburg was segregated between different municipalities like Sandton, Randburg, Soweto, Midrand et cetera. So we will have seen 20 years of centralisation next year as a less segregated city, and technology has played a part in pulling us all together. 

TowerXchange: How has the history of segregation affected the city plan and how does that affect Smart City planning and programmes?

Since 2000 we have basically reengineered a new way of governing. Within that we must address the issues of our past. Certain areas of the city were underdeveloped and underserved; spatial transformation was racially defined and so our city planning must work to rectify that. A city cannot be efficient or fair where black residential areas are far from where the jobs are and transport options are limited. The racial structure of our city made it economically inefficient. 

Our smart city starts from that: first we must normalise things. The basic needs of the population must be realised, which means access to clean water, electricity, waste removal, housing, roads and addressing spatial challenges through improved public transport. When you look at the Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system, the concept behind it is not so much a smart city, it is just about how to provide a more efficient public transport system that can move people from the south, Soweto for example, and take them to the furthest point in the north, and east where the jobs are. But it is a necessary step towards becoming a smart city. 

In introducing that public transport system we needed to factor in some of the global issues that are on the table in various cities. We had to address issues of reducing emissions, so our new bus fleet had to be greener, with stringent standards for emissions. Likewise, the Gautrain made public transport more convenient and very quick and very attractive. The new rail line was a chance to make changes to the physical structures of the city, making north-south travel easier than before and linking up new areas to economic development. 

It may sound trivial but north-south links and connections with the airport by rail were not easy before, and the BRT and Gautrain are making the spatial structure of the city more efficient, as well as improving our ability to monitor it. There is a proposal for 19 more Gautrain stations and 150km more of rail to make the city more connected. The BRT system has also been expanded to connect to Sandton from the south, and from Alexander. Past segregation meant we needed to introduce a BRT system, and the congestion on the Pretoria- Joburg corridor has necessitated the introduction of the Gautrain system. Investment in new infrastructure has proved to be a catalyst to make our city smarter and better connected.

TowerXchange: MNOs are looking at rolling out 5G networks, and would like cities to use these networks. What are you doing to coordinate or support 5G? Where do you think 5G could help?

We have a challenge in working with MNOs and towercos because we don’t really have a forum where we can meet with the MNOs and towercos and discuss projects and programmes without prejudice. Our normal interactions are only when there are tenders advertised by the City, and so that limits the opportunities to discuss innovation or collaboration more broadly. We know less about what investments are planned by the telecoms sector than we would like, and they know less about what the city has planned than they would like. But with a little more coordination we would be open to working together more, that’s the first point.

The second point, as the city, is to understand how we can leverage the investments the private sector is already making without the city needing to duplicate or repeat or compete with what they’re doing. If people have access to the internet through mobile operators that means we can deliver services to areas in new ways and we should leverage that. 

Another important area to explore is understanding the infrastructure the city already has and how to optimise it. There are thousands of towers and street poles for street lights and security cameras in the city. That real estate belonging to the city now has value. These sites can become the platform that is needed to carry the connections to enable access to modern, faster internet.

For 5G these sites become critical because you need to densify networks, so the opportunity is there for cities to optimise on existing assets. The question is: how do you optimise them in the context of revenue generation, ensuring old and obsolete infrastructure is replaced, that new smart poles and street lights go up, and that a platform for 5G is created? 

TowerXchange: You sound open to collaboration but can you be any more specific on the terms of collaboration between yourself and mobile operators and towercos? What would the relationship look like?

We need to explore the issues a bit more. It is really new terrain. The city has been very cautious, because most of the poles in the city are owned by the city and carry electrical power. We do not necessarily want to give up the poles and let someone else run them, because we can’t guarantee the performance if they are outsourced, and we may miss out on opportunities to monetise the assets for the city.

But we are keen to explore opportunities for the city. A private partner may be able to help optimise our assets so the city can benefit from improved services without additional capital investment. If the poles could be monetised while also being refurbished and made more useful, we would be interested. 

I was in the U.S. last year at a smart cities conference in New York and had some meetings with an international towerco who had indicated an interest to engage and look at options about how to work together. We would still be interested in exploring proofs of concept in which we could experiment with some different options to see what ideas are coming up from the private sector. 

TowerXchange: What are the successes of the smart city programme so far?

In the internet-era, broadband needs to be seen as critical infrastructure. We made a major investment into broadband: over 1,000km of fibre was laid by the city with private sector financing which the city eventually bought back. We have now installed over 2,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in the city, on top of private-sector provided hotspots. Creating that fibre backbone and overlaying various kinds of applications was a big step for the city. You can’t really do any smart city programmes without that fibre backbone to connect your various centres and applications. 

Now Johannesburg clinics have no more paper based records and have completely digitised record keeping. In libraries we have introduced e-learning to enable users of library services to access free Wi-Fi, download materials and learners resources. We also equip libraries with a resource centre that enables people to develop their CVs and apply for jobs. We also have centres linked to certain universities where people can take online university courses linked to institutions overseas. 

We have also trained young people as digital ambassadors to introduce people who have been excluded to the world of digital technologies. We need to spread expertise in their communities if people will be able to take advantage of the smart city. We need a holistic transition into a smart city, people need to know what is already available, how and where you access Wi-Fi, how you do the basics. 

We are also modernising the organisation of the City of Johannesburg council. There were two critical interventions. We are doing a business process reengineering initiative around SAP 4 HANA, which is a best in class IT system. It is a massive project trying to bring all the competencies of the administration together under a common platform for reasons of efficiencies and integration. 

We are also looking at customer facing services and improving them with live monitoring through cameras. Early cameras were installed in partnership with Vumatel, but we are also working with Huawei who are providing cameras and analytics too. Whether it is for road construction or repairs, garbage removal or security, we have the ability to collect data on-site through cameras, linked into an integrated operations centre. We can then zoom into a specific area and look across the city at those areas which are connected.  As we collect more data and analyse it we will be able to do more proactively too. 

TowerXchnage: What are the next steps for the smart city programme as you enter the next Integrated Development Plan?

We must scale up our operations and get more departments involved. The digital transformation of Johannesburg will affect all departments and we want their operations to be automated or digitised so that we are able to move towards a 24/7 smart city. People should be able to access their city services anytime, anywhere through digital platforms or e-services. 

We want to end the requirement to visit an office and end queuing. Do away with it and make queuing a thing of the past! That is already raising sensitivities with respect to job losses, if you don’t need people manning queues, and don’t have people responding to human queries, you need fewer people. If that will cause resistance we need to respond with new skills for young people and so they are given the opportunities to drive the digital revolution and find better jobs.

And for your audience, there is also the issue of more and more towers in suburbs where people are now beginning to say “not in my back yard.” We want a connected city so we must work on how we deal with opposition to our skyline becoming cluttered with new towers, especially in a city that is rolling out many new 5G sites. 

TowerXchange: What is the ultimate vision for the City of Johannesburg? What will an integrated, cohesive, smart Johannesburg look like?

So my background is not in IT and I think that is useful because IT is just the enabler to other goals. Actually I was academically trained in social sciences and development studies. But over the years, I have been involved in many areas of development. Whether it is in health, in infrastructure, in waste management, transport, regional administration or even urban development, like coordinating urban planning, local economic planning and housing. Together all of these areas come together to make a city great and so I hope a development perspective, not an IT-perspective, is the right one for this city. 

To become the city we want by 2040 there’s different enablers that the city must look to. Ultimately you must drive socio-economic development, which means higher economic growth. You must generate jobs for your community and prosperity so that there is enough money for people to build their own houses, buy gadgets, to buy services and all of that. Economic growth is fundamental. But we must not just looking at that from a trickle down perspective, we need to build a city which produces inclusive, equitable, and balanced growth. 

Take for example people who don’t have skills to find a good job on the internet or elderly citizens. To them a smart city may not sound very useful, if they cannot engage with the technology. So to make a smart city work there is a role for a social programme to enable people to use smart city programmes. You look at how you can use technology to reach out to your people. To make it accessible, to provide services, to make it convenient.  That is what we need to do. 

Another example: many of our people live in substandard housing in informal settlements which are prone to fires. We can use technology in a smart city to give an alert to the nearest fire engine when a fire is starting so they can then respond quickly. We can use simple sensors and connectivity to trigger water sprinklers that will douse the fire as it starts. All of this is possible and will massively increase quality of life in the city. We need also to make use of drones that can respond quickly when a fire has started, and to direct the firemen where they should go.

If we can do those things then we demystify the concept of a smart city. It is not a concept for people with expensive smart phones, but technology that is useable for everyday people. 

So if we can do those things then we’re getting smart.