However, whilst Iwas still in the air on the way to the city on Monday 1^st March the Mayor cancelled the meeting which was scheduled for the 2^nd! For a meeting of that importance with a large number of people having cleared their diaries to attend, 16 or so hours is short notice indeed! The reason for cancellation was that a SALGA issue required the Mayor’s urgent attention.

One of the programmes which was to have been reported on at the meeting was in fact the City Property Programme. Which is what? Well, you may remember it originally as the “Bad Buildings Programme” then as the “Better Buildings Programme”. So, three name changes and three changes of departmental responsibility since its inception! These certainly don’t appear to have expedited the process, in fact quite the opposite.

Read more: Bad, Better...?... Buildings and new bins don’t make a clean city!

The beginning of a new year is a good opportunity to report on the progress of the Inner City Charter.

You may recall that the Inner City Charter process is a highly laudable effort led by the Executive Mayor - following an Inner City Summit that was held on 5 May 2007 - to identify inner city issues requiring attention and setting targets for their completion.

The first part of the Inner City Charter speaks about the future of the Johannesburg Inner City. It asks all stakeholders to envisage the future Inner City as a place 

Read more: Charter chatter updates

On the last Saturday of October, I took a 6 hour stroll through the Johannesburg inner city basically from Newtown to Ellis Park.Wow! The progress overall has been quite startling. If you want to really see a city, by foot is always best. At ground level you always get such a better perspective. (Back in 1992 my favourite view of the inner city was in a passing plane from 3 000 metres up in the sky!) How that has changed in 17 years - you can now walk with confidence and pride through a pulsating, living, bustling city and see something new happening on just about every corner. Sure, the sinkholes have got more familiar and many of our citizens (and city officials) don’t seem to care, but the overall metamorphosis has been extraordinary and both public and private sectors can take a bow.

I went along a specific route which is the one that developed for taking folks to see what is really happening in the inner city. This time, on my own, I had time for lots of side forays, and took a couple of hundred pics along the way. I reckon one could quite comfortably double or triple that number if one criss-crossed the inner city but I wanted to record a specific route. The reason was to finalise a “Manual for Teaching Tour Guides” which Urban Inc was appointed to do for the JDA. Amongst other things, it records regeneration that has taken place along the route over the past ten something years. A decade ago the tour was quite short consisting of me saying to skeptical groups “this is what we are going to do!” and getting the “Ja, right!” kind of look on many disbelieving faces. By contrast, tours over the past two to three years have been three-and-a-half to four hours and it is now a case of what to leave out rather than what to include in the time!

Read more: Ending the year in elation and despair