The City of Johannesburg on Thursday tabled its Integrated Development Plan (IDP) and Flagship Programmes for the next five years to the city council, highlighting green projects and infrastructure upgrades as being critical to achieve the Joburg 2040 Strategy outcomes.

Executive mayor Parks Tau said in his recent State of the City address that council had adopted an integrated planning and budgeting process that would see the city changing course.

He identified four pillars on which to build Johannesburg, namely human and social development, sustainable services, economic growth and governance.

One of the most critical programmes announced was the rollout of ‘smart meter’ technology, which will connect 230 000 customers over 18 months. Benefits of this initiative included increased meter-reading accuracy and reduced disputed billing and increased customer satisfaction levels. In this way, the city will also increase its revenue collection.

Coinciding with this is a plan to dispatch City Power technicians daily across the city to repair and replace damaged cables and take necessary corrective action. This will increase the network reliability and reduce power interruptions. In some areas where this has already been rolled out, the utility has found that customer satisfaction levels have increased significantly.

The city’s new bus rapid transit system, Rea Vaya, was also highlighted as improving integration between rail, walking and cycling. With 18 km of the Phase 1B trunk route infrastructure and 17 bus stations almost complete between Noordgesig and Parktown, the focus of the next financial year would be to procure so-called ‘green’ buses and establish a bus operating company for the affected operators.

The procurement process for the 134 new buses would incentivise maximising local content and job creation.

Further, in an effort to increase street and neighbourhood safety, the city would employ ten additional Johannesburg metro police officers in each ward.

To complement this, the city also announced it will redesign the basic street template to include greater space for pedestrians, space for cyclists, improved traffic calming measures and new storm water approaches. “Demonstration projects will be rolled out in Orange Farm and Kaalfontein and this approach will be applied to all gravel road upgrading going forward,” Tau said.

The gravel roads programme will be also implemented using large numbers of local labour through the Expanded Public Works Programme, and R92-million had been earmarked for Orange Farm, Ivory Park, Diepsloot and Braamfischerville.

The Johannesburg Roads Agency will also continue to focus on road rehabilitation including resealing, resurfacing and pothole patching. Critical pedestrian bridges will be rehabilitated or introduced in Alexandra, New Canada and Naledi.

Meanwhile, Tau reiterated that Johannesburg is moving towards a green future in order reduce its carbon footprint and pollution, as well as to reduce waste.

The city will launch its waste-to-energy project as a public-private partnership to address the issue of decreasing space at landfills and to add to the city’s electricity grid. R2-billion has been earmarked for this investment and construction was expected to be complete by 2015.

Further, Johannesburg Water is currently upgrading the water infrastructure in Soweto as part of its rehabilitation programme. The R880-million Operation Gcin’amanzi is aimed at upgrading Soweto’s water infrastructure and is targeted to be complete in 2014.

In the present phase of the programme, the infrastructure rehabilitation and upgrade will comprise the completion of all mains replacements, leak detection and retrofitting, replacing of wasteful and damaged devices, as well as the installation, upgrade and repair of water metres.

It is expected that over the next ten years, the city will need to invest over R100-billion on infrastructure development and upgrading projects.