September 29, 2003

By Roy Cokayne

Johannesburg - The inner city of Johannesburg could have 10 000 new residential units in the next decade, according to the Inner City Report 2003.

The flight from the city to the suburbs of the 1970s to 1990s was about to become the flight from the suburbs back into the city, said the report, compiled by property group Trafalgar.

This trend had occurred in hundreds of major cities around the world from Detroit to Melbourne, Liverpool to Milan.
 

The way had been prepared by efforts by a host of organisations from the Johannesburg Development Agency to Blue IQ's Mandela Bridge, Newtown and Constitutional Hill and the Johannesburg council's task forces normalisation of the streets and the normalisation of crime by the police and closed circuit television.

However, the report said private developers had become the "trigger of reinvention" of Johannesburg as "a great international city once more".