Initiative doesn’t quite sweep clean
FOURWAYS - Although a Fourways clean-up campaign is aiming to transform the suburb, it seems to be sullying some community members' opinions by excluding them from the project.
Urban Genesis is a company which creates and manages City Improvement Districts (CIDs) in suburbs across Johannesburg.
According to Ryan Matthew, chief operations officer for Urban Genesis, CIDs are geographic areas in which the majority of property owners determine and agree to fund supplementary and complementary services to those normally provided by the local authority. In a CID, the local authority continues to provide their normal services but supplementary CID services might include public safety ambassadorial services, pavement cleaning, litter collection, maintenance of public space and removal of illegal posters. There is a small group of Fourways residents who are working closely with Urban Genesis to bring the concept to Fourways and they plan to launch the CID early next year. In the meantime, Urban Genesis has been cleaning up William Nicol Drive, outside Fourways Crossing, to give residents an idea of what can be done in a CID in a short space of time. Matthew said the concept of the CID has been very successful in other suburbs like Rosebank and Sandton. However, Douglasdale Community Policing Forum chairperson, Jean Berdou said while the forum is delighted by any initiative to clean-up Fourways and improve security, they believe that all area stakeholders should be included in the initiative. “This is not the case with the present initiative and we are prevailing upon Urban Genesis to include all relevant role players in the initiative and not allow the mandate of such an initiative to be miscarried by an exclusionary agenda,” he said.
Responding to Berdou’s statement, Nic Papas, a community member engaged with Urban Genesis in the implementation of the CID, said at present the project was not official and was rather a test-run to assess the effectiveness of the CID. “This is not a forum matter,” he said. “In the new year, when we are official, we will definitely include the whole community.”
