Bryce O’Donnell, Managing Director of Abcon Developments, comments that there is a draft policy sitting with the Department of Small Business Development right now that deserves more attention than it has received. He expands further below:
WORDS: : SUPPLIED :: PHOTO: PEXELS
The South African Township and Rural Economy Development and Revitalisation Policy sets out an ambitious framework for transforming the economic conditions of communities that have been structurally excluded from mainstream economic participation since before most of us were born. It is a serious document. It engages with real problems. And it will, in all likelihood, take years to fully implement.
That is not a criticism. Policy moves at the speed policy moves. But it does raise a question that practitioners in the built environment ask themselves regularly: what happens in the meantime? Because the communities waiting for that framework to become operational are growing, transacting and generating economic activity right now; often without the infrastructure needed to do any of it efficiently.
This is where physical development enters the conversation as something that can help move change faster.
R900 billion township economy
Bryce O’Donnell, Abcon Developments MD.
Our township economy is estimated to be worth around R900 billion. That figure appears in report after report, cited as evidence of untapped potential. What it actually describes is an economy of extraordinary scale operating largely without the formal infrastructure (the retail anchors, the logistics hubs, the business premises, the reliable foot traffic) that would allow it to grow into what it is clearly capable of becoming. The potential is real. The constraint is structural.
Formal retail development in underserviced communities is one of the most direct interventions available. Not because it creates shopping; shopping already exists in these communities, in spaza shops and informal markets and street traders who have served their neighbours reliably for decades. What formal retail creates is infrastructure: the roads that get resurfaced to service a site, the bulk services connections that follow a major development, the employment that gets formalised, the supplier relationships that get established and the visibility that tells the next investor that a node is viable.
That last point is underappreciated. One of the most persistent barriers to economic development in historically underserviced areas is the absence of proof. Investors and businesses require evidence that a node will hold, that customers will come, that the surrounding environment is stable enough to justify a long-term commitment. A well-executed retail development provides that evidence in a way that a policy document, however well-intentioned, cannot.
Fleurhof illustrates this precisely. It sits on Fleurhof Drive, a commuter link that connects Soweto to the western suburbs, physically bridging two communities that apartheid spatial planning was specifically designed to keep apart. More than 9 000 housing units have been completed in the area in the last decade, with thousands more underway. A fast-growing residential population with disposable income and no nearby formal retail is a market waiting to be served. The development we are building there with Masingita is, at its most fundamental level, a market-making exercise. We are creating the infrastructure that allows an existing economy to formalise and grow.
Infrastructure changes what is possible
The jobs that come with construction, hundreds of them over the project period, prioritised for local residents, matter. The permanent employment that follows opening also matters. But perhaps most consequentially, the platform the development creates for local entrepreneurs and small businesses to access a larger, more stable customer base matters. An informal trader operating near a taxi rank and an informal trader operating within or alongside a formal retail centre are not in the same economic position. The second has visibility, footfall, shelter, security and proximity to national brands that drive traffic. The infrastructure changes what is possible.
This is the argument that gets lost when development in underserviced communities is framed primarily as corporate social responsibility or economic redress. It is those things, but it is also, simply, good business, which is precisely why it works. Developers build where the demand is real and where the fundamentals stack up. When those conditions exist in communities that have historically been overlooked, the returns are genuine and the impact is compounding. Each development that performs well makes the next one easier to justify and easier to finance.
What the government’s draft policy framework gets right is the recognition that the private sector cannot do this alone, and nor should it be expected to. Access to finance for small businesses, skills development and market integration require the kind of sustained, coordinated intervention that only public institutions can deliver at scale. But the framework also acknowledges something that is equally true in the other direction: government cannot build fast enough, or with the commercial discipline required, to meet the scale of need on its own. The handshake between patient policy and decisive private development is where real change happens.
Our cities carry the spatial legacy of decisions made generations ago. The distances between communities, the missing retail nodes, the underserviced corridors, were all engineered and they cannot be undone by goodwill alone. They will be undone by the physical act of building in places that have been waiting too long for someone to treat them as the viable, dynamic, deserving markets they have always been.
Bricks come before businesses. Always. The developers who understand that are finding that the opportunity is substantial, the demand is real, and the returns — financial and social — are ones worth building toward.
