One of the most pressing challenges facing South African cities — now and for the foreseeable future — is the provision of affordable housing. We have programs for the poorest of the poor through the RDP housing scheme, and we have private sector developers building for those who earn a salary. But in between sits a significant gap, and it is this gap that social housing exists to fill.

At noh Architects, we have been working on exactly this kind of project in the inner city of Nelson Mandela Bay, in the historic South End precinct. The work began as part of a larger urban design commission — a Spatial Strategic Infrastructure Framework (SSIF) for the Mandela Bay Development Agency — in collaboration with GAPP Urban Design from Johannesburg, with town planners Metroplan, environmental engineers EAS, and quantity surveyors BTKM. Out of that broader study, a specific site emerged around the Baakens River in South End.

A Site With History

South End carries a heavy history. It was once a vibrant, mixed-race neighbourhood — Nelson Mandela Bay’s equivalent of Cape Town’s District Six — before forced removals in the early 1970s left vast swathes of land vacant. Much of that land remains undeveloped to this day. Walking past it, or driving past it, that emptiness is a quiet reminder of what was lost.

But emotions aside, the technical reality is that this is a well-located, developable site — and one of the best arguments for inner-city affordable housing you could ask for.

Demand-Driven Design

Good urban design doesn’t start with a grand vision. It starts with the facts: who owns the land, what the current land use rights are, what future rights are plausible, and critically, what the demand actually is. There is no value in an architect producing a beautiful urban design proposal that bears no relationship to what people can afford or what the city actually needs.

So our process involved a thorough affordability study — understanding income levels, benchmarking against existing social housing schemes, comparing public and private sector offerings, and designing unit types to match what residents can realistically pay.

Addressing the “Too Steep” Objection

The site slopes. And yes, people drive past it and say it’s undevelopable. It’s too steep, they say.

It isn’t. The historic photographs tell the story plainly: this land was fully developed before the demolitions. And it doesn’t take rocket science to see how it could be developed again. Cities all over the world have been built on slopes — Barcelona’s famous city blocks being one of the most celebrated examples. The solution is simply good design thinking: working with the topography, creating a repeating city block pattern, stepping the buildings in response to the gradient.

We do not need thousands of hectares of flat land to solve our housing problems. We need creativity, and we need to make better use of the small pockets of inner-city land that already exist.

The Case for Urban Location

Affordable housing is not just about buildings. It is about access — to jobs, to education, to public transport, to opportunities. Locating people who need employment 20 or 30 kilometres from economic activity is not a housing solution; it is a poverty trap. South End sits close to the city centre, well connected to the broader economic life of Nelson Mandela Bay. That proximity matters enormously.

Increasing residential density in well-located inner-city areas also strengthens the economic case for the city itself — more people, more activity, more viable public transport, more local commerce.

Scale: From the Door Swing to the City

This is the part of urban design that young architects especially need to internalise. The thinking required of you spans from how a door swings in a unit, to how a building sits on a block, to how an entire precinct integrates with the city’s bulk infrastructure and public transport network. Architecture and urban design are not separate disciplines — they are brothers. You cannot afford to be comfortable only at one end of the scale.

Where Things Stand

Regrettably, this project has not yet proceeded. The Mandela Bay Development Agency had its own ideas for the site, and the proposal was blocked. The land remains vacant. That is a real shame — the work is done, the feasibility is established, the design is ready. The button could still be pushed.

To colleagues at the MBDA: what happened? Why has a perfectly viable social housing project been stalled while the need for affordable housing in our city continues to grow?

This conversation needs to keep happening. We cannot design cities only for the wealthy, and we cannot limit our ambition to only the most extreme end of poverty. The gap in the middle is where a functioning city lives. It is where we need to build.

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noh Architects is a Nelson Mandela Bay-based architecture practice with experience in urban design, social housing, and inner-city regeneration.

There are projects that stay with you. The Njoli Precinct Plan is one of them — a genuinely ambitious urban intervention that had the vision, the funding, and the thinking behind it, and yet never came to be.

Where It Began

The story starts in 2005, with a mayoral vision for the intersection of Njoli Road and Daku Road in Kwazakhele, Gqeberha. The original concept promoted by Mayor Faku was bold — almost theatrical — a giant dome anchoring one of the city’s busiest intersections. Over time, that idea evolved into something more grounded and arguably more powerful: a major intermodal transit node as part of what would become the IPTS, the Integrated Public Transport System.

The location made obvious sense. This intersection is a natural convergence point — people travelling from New Brighton down Njoli Street, from Motherwell down Daku Road, and onward toward Kwamagxaki. It was already functioning as an informal transit hub; the plan was to formalise and amplify what was already happening organically.

The Vision Takes Shape

When funding was secured through the Neighbourhood Development Partnership Grant — R189 million from National Treasury — the concept was revisited and reconceptualised in earnest. Working closely with colleagues at Metroplan, particularly , the team moved away from the dome and toward something more urbane: a properly resolved four-way intersection surrounded by a mix of formal office and retail space designed to complement, not displace, the thriving informal trading already present at Njoli Square.

The design thinking was rigorous. The team engaged urban economists to model real market demand in the area. They consulted the taxi industry. They worked across all three tiers of government — national, provincial, and municipal — to understand what services each needed to deliver locally and what space that would require.

The resulting vision was genuinely mixed-use: IPTS infrastructure, formalised trader facilities, a library, an amphitheatre, civic support spaces, and — critically — national and provincial government office functions. The idea was to bring high-paying, formal employment back into a part of the city that apartheid planning had deliberately kept as a dormitory suburb, with no local economic base to speak of.

For Kwazakhele, this wasn’t just about transport. It was about economic justice.

Why It Didn’t Happen

With a compelling vision, substantial funding, multi-stakeholder buy-in, and detailed design work completed, the Njoli Precinct Plan had everything it needed to succeed.

It failed anyway.

The reason, in plain terms: poor political leadership. Not a funding gap. Not a design flaw. Not community resistance. Leadership failure at the point where decisions needed to be made and sustained.

That’s a hard thing to say, but it’s the honest analysis. And it’s worth saying clearly — because understanding why good projects fail is the only way to stop it happening again.

What Remains

The intersection is still there. The informal traders are still there. The transit demand is still there. Kwazakhele is still a dormitory suburb, still waiting for the kind of investment that would change that equation.

The Njoli Precinct Plan represents what urban design at its best can look like: technically sound, economically grounded, socially purposeful, and spatially resolved. That it was shelved is a loss — not just for the project, but for the people it was designed to serve.

Before you boo me off stage, hear me out.

I know there are a lot of people out there — many of you fresh out of university, having been promised a good career — who are looking at artificial intelligence and feeling genuinely anxious. I understand that. But I want to offer a different way of thinking about it, because I believe AI is not your enemy. AI is your friend.

Here’s why.

Technology Has Always Done This

Every significant technology that has come along has done the same thing: it has helped us see more clearly what is truly valuable and what isn’t. That clarity can feel threatening at first, but it has always, ultimately, been liberating.

Think about the ATM. When automated teller machines arrived, the assumption was that banking tellers would become obsolete. And in a narrow sense, yes — you no longer need to queue to draw cash from a person. But what actually happened is that we began to understand how valuable our time with real bankers is when it matters. The ATM freed us up to have more meaningful engagements with the people in the bank for the things that actually require human judgment, human relationship, and human trust.

Technology didn’t destroy the value of the bank. It clarified it.

The Real Thing Always Wins

Here’s another way to think about it. You can watch a rugby match from your couch in high definition, with action replays, close-ups, and expert commentary. It is, in many technical respects, a better experience than being there. And yet people still go out in the cold and the sleet to watch the game live, because they know there is something irreplaceable about being present for the real thing.

The same is true of the Mona Lisa. Technology has allowed us to reproduce that painting with extraordinary accuracy. You can see it in crisp detail on any screen. And yet people save for years, travel to Paris, and stand in long queues at the Louvre just to stand in front of the original — because they know it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and that knowledge changes everything. The real thing carries a weight that no reproduction can replicate.

Or consider diamonds. Most people genuinely cannot distinguish a diamond from a cubic zirconia, or even a well-cut piece of glass. And yet people value the real thing deeply, sometimes fiercely. Because authenticity matters. Because knowing something is genuine matters.

What AI Is Actually Teaching Us

AI is going to generate an enormous amount of content. Much of it will be good. Some of it will be indistinguishable from the real thing. And that is precisely what will make us understand, more clearly than ever before, what human creativity, human judgment, human presence, and human authenticity are actually worth.

AI is not going to make your skills worthless. It is going to make the right skills more valuable. It is going to sharpen our collective sense of what matters.

So yes — AI is your friend. Not because it will do your job for you, but because it will help you see, perhaps for the first time with real clarity, what your job actually is.

— Tim Hewitt-Coleman

Director, noh Architects

http://www.noharchitects.com

Gqeberha, Eastern Cape

One of the most common sources of confusion in building plan submissions is floor area measurement. When you submit drawings to a municipality, you’re required to show your calculations — erf size, coverage, floor space ratio, and so on. But where do those definitions actually come from? This is something we get asked about regularly, so it’s worth setting the record straight.

Use the Definitions in Your Zoning Scheme

The first place you should be looking is your local zoning scheme. Not your own judgment, not a rule of thumb you picked up somewhere — the zoning scheme for the area where the project is located. If you’re working in Mossel Bay, use the Mossel Bay zoning scheme. George, use George’s. Nelson Mandela Bay, use ours. Each municipality publishes its own scheme, and the definitions for terms like “floor area”, “coverage”, and “floor space ratio” are contained in there. That is the authoritative source for submissions to that municipality.

This matters because the definitions are not universal. What counts as floor area in one scheme may be treated differently in another, and if you submit calculations based on your own interpretation rather than the relevant scheme, you’re going to run into problems.

The National Building Regulations Are Also Relevant

The second reference you should know about is SANS 10400 — the National Building Regulations. There is a section dealing with dimensions and measurement definitions that is worth familiarising yourself with. We’ll make a dedicated video on that part of the regulations, but for now, know that it exists and that it’s another legitimate source of definitions you can draw on.

For Retail and Commercial Projects: SAPOA

If you’re working on a shopping centre, commercial development, or any project where you’ll be providing floor area information to tenants or property owners, the relevant standard is published by SAPOA — the South African Property Owners Association. Their measurement standard is widely used in the commercial property industry, and if a landlord or tenant is asking for GLA or GBA figures, that’s the framework they’ll be working from.

Don’t Invent Your Own Method

This is the point we want to land firmly: don’t make up your own way of measuring things. It sounds obvious, but it happens more often than it should. The moment you start making ad hoc decisions — do I include the wall thickness or not? Does the deck count? How do I handle a double-volume void? Do I count the staircase on both floors? — you’ve left the realm of a defensible, document-backed calculation and entered territory that a municipal plan examiner can legitimately query or reject.

These are genuinely complex questions. The answers vary depending on which definition applies. The only way to get it right is to anchor every calculation to a specific clause in a specific document. When you do that, you have a basis to stand on. When you don’t, you’re exposed.

So to summarise: for municipal submissions, go to your zoning scheme first. Cross-reference with SANS 10400 where relevant. For commercial property work, use the SAPOA standard. Always work from the document — not from memory, not from habit, and not from a colleague’s interpretation of what seems reasonable.

If you’re unsure which definition applies in a specific case, ask. It’s a much shorter conversation before submission than after.

— Tim Hewitt-Coleman

Director, noh Architects

http://www.noharchitects.com

Gqeberha, Eastern Cape

If you’re submitting building plans to a municipality — whether you’re an architect, a draughtsperson, or a contractor managing the process yourself — there are two reference numbers you need to understand. Confusing them is an easy mistake to make, and it causes unnecessary delays and headaches. So let’s clear it up once and for all.

What Is an Erf Number?

An erf number is the number assigned to a piece of land. It’s a fixed, cadastral reference — it describes the property itself, not anything built on it. Whether there’s one building on the site or ten, the erf number stays the same. It’s how the municipality, the Deeds Office, and your title deed identify the land.

What Is a Plan Number?

A plan number is different. It’s the reference number assigned by the municipality to a specific building plans submission. You submit a set of plans; the municipality gives that submission a plan number. It’s their tracking reference for that particular application.

Here’s the key point: one erf can have more than one plan number.

If there are multiple buildings on a site, each building’s plans get submitted separately — and each submission gets its own plan number. If you submit revised or amended drawings, that’s a new submission, and it gets a new plan number. The plan number is tied to the submission, not the land.

Why Does This Matter?

The confusion usually arises when people are working on a site with multiple structures, or when they’re resubmitting amended drawings. It’s tempting to think: same site, same number. But that’s not how it works.

Using the wrong plan number — or reusing an old one — can cause one submission to overwrite another in the municipal system. That’s a problem that’s difficult and time-consuming to unwind.

A Simple Rule to Remember

Erf number = the land. Fixed. Doesn’t change.

Plan number = a specific submission. One erf, many possible plan numbers.

If you’re unsure how to handle a particular submission — especially on a larger or more complex site — ask. It’s far easier to get it right upfront than to chase a correction through the municipal system afterwards.

This applies primarily to Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, where we work, but the principle is consistent across most South African municipalities. The terminology may vary slightly, but the distinction between a land reference and a submission reference is universal.

— Tim Hewitt-Coleman

Director, noh Architects

http://www.noharchitects.com

Gqeberha, Eastern Cape