City planning goes beyond 2010 World Cup

29 August, 2007

By Siyabonga Maphumulo

The City’s vision of becoming Africa’s premier sporting and leisure destination was taken a step further when the first plans for the Kings Park Sports Precinct were unveiled at the Executive Committee (Exco) meeting this week.

A presentation to the Exco revealed that, as part of the “City’s 2010 and Beyond” strategy, it would be more practical to build a stadium where all the Olympic sporting codes existed together in close proximity, with world class facilities.

The proposed stadium would give high priority to “important developmental benefits such as housing, infrastructure, transport and hotels”.

In a diagram of the Concept Spatial Plan of the proposed precinct, 19 areas in the vicinity of the existing Kings Park stadium have been earmarked for development.

These include a planned world-class soccer stadium, hotels, a major indoor soccer stadium catering specifically for the disabled, and sporting academies for the youth.

According to Julie-May Ellingson, who heads iTRUMP (the City’s strategic projects unit), Durban “does not have its sights set only on the 2010 Soccer World Cup semifinals”.

She said the City was positioning itself to host the FIFA Beach Soccer 2009 tournament, the Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games.

The projected investment in the Kings Park precinct was said to be more than R3-billion, with the majority of this happening before the 2010 World Cup.

Ellingson said studies suggested the new stadium should act as a catalyst for further development, and the Kings Park soccer stadium best fitted the purposes for the stadium needed for a host city.

The new stadium was seen as a “new tourism product for the city” while the neighbouring ABSA Stadium could not be upgraded because it did not comply with the rules of the bid book.

According to FIFA regulations, a World Cup stadium has to have a seating capacity of 70 000, which means that the seating capacity of ABSA Stadium would have to be upped by 18 000 at an estimated cost of R500-million.

Although the Exco supported the report in principle, the matter would be revisited at the next meeting after the 1 March elections.

City Manager Michael Sutcliffe would be mandated to sign the Host City and Stadium In-Use agreements with FIFA.

Both are requirements for host cities for the 2010 World Cup.

The Exco also received the findings of the South African Human Rights Commission regarding a complaint laid by eThekwini Mayor Obed Mlaba against Minority Front leader and provincial Minister of Sport and Recreation Amichand Rajbansi.

The Commission’s findings recommend, among other things, that Rajbansi “must accept responsibility for the publication of the article (which makes generalisations about the propensity to commit crime based largely on race and socio-economic status) and apologise unreservedly and unequivocally publicly”.

Chief Whip of the ANC Jethro “BJ” Buthelezi and Mayor Obed Mlaba said they were still awaiting an apology from Rajbansi.

“We require an apology. Africans were insulted when we queried his statements.

“He called me an upstart and told the mayor to shut up,” said Buthelezi.

The Democratic Alliance’s caucus leader Lyn Ploos van Amstel echoed Buthelezi’s call for the Independent Electoral Commission to come up with a set of rules which would be used to monitor party actions when campaigning for elections.

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