Last week I spent a week in South Africa with the intent of digging deeper into demographic changes in South Africa. It was an amazing and eclectic visit to say the least. It involved a mix of former ANC activists, stunning mountain tops, and some delicious food I perhaps should not have eaten. Chris Luebkeman the director of our Foresight & Innovation group at Arup London led the Drivers of Change workshop with the Department of Transport and Public Works in Cape Town. Chris seemed curious but doubtful that our DHL shipment of all the Drivers of Change card sets would arrive in time for the workshop.

Later on that afternoon, after the no-show of our cards, Yasir, the chief director of the Transport Dept., introduced Chris, and then Chris launched into the Drivers of Change presentation. It was interesting to see what key issues came up during the course of the afternoon. I joined the STEEP group working on “social” drivers of change. Social exclusion and poverty/unemployment took up the top two spots as key drivers of change in South Africa.

That evening Yasir, the chief director at the Dept. of Transport took us out for dinner at a local Italian eatery on the waterfront. Chris and I were beat but held it together for the enjoyable dinner.

I had two meetings scheduled. One with the University of Cape Town’s professor of urban planning Vanessa Watson, and the second with former advocate and consultant Mirjam Van Donk. The first meeting was at UCT, where Vanessa Watson walked me through some of the challenges South Africa is facing in terms of urban planning. There is most definitely an ongoing tension between modernization and the push to urbanization and traditional African culture. We discussed the prevalence of mobility in African culture and how formalized housing did not work as a result of that, because it did not take into consideration the ebb and flow between urban and rural areas. Building for South African’s African many black cultures needs to incorporate informal characteristics within the larger formal plan. We moved onto the proliferation of mobile phones, a quite “modern” technology, but part of why it has taken off is because of its support of the social network that black Africans strongly embrace.

Mirjam picked me up on campus and we headed to the Cecil Rhodes Memorial overlooking a wonderful view of the city. Over lunch we discussed Mirjam’s thesis on the need for a broader conceptualization of HIV/Aids in Sub-Saharan Africa. I told her about the previous day’s workshop results, and Mirjam delved a little further into the work that she has done and is currently doing. The theme of implementable ideas came up a second time. It seems that a lot of time has been spent on analysis and that people now want action. This is usually a good sign. I think. Mirjam promised to send me some more documents and then dropped me off at the local Arup office.

Sitting at my temporary desk in the Arup office I couldn’t help but wonder at the amazing view of the mountains. It is absolutely stunning.

Flew to Johannesburg with South African Airlines. I was quite impressed with the service. I was picked up by Arup’s driver Moses who took me along a well-built highway that reminded me of Miami and briefly to the hotel to drop off my belongings, and then to the Arup office so that a local Arup-ian could lead me to the Witwatersrand University campus, where I was meeting sociology professor Devan Pillay. The campus (to me) appeared to be an intertwining intestine with very little clarity. I kept stopping to ask for directions, but it only seemed to get us to another stopping point. Eventually we found our way to professor Pillay’s office. I called him on his cell, and waited for him outside his office door. Aidan politely stayed by my side until the prof showed.

Devan then spoke to me about his interesting experience with South Africa. A former ANC activist, he had spent 20 months in prison. During his imprisonment he began studying spirituality, as it provided the only means of connecting to neighboring hardened criminals. Devan was also the first to question the relevance of HIV/Aids stats. Maybe I’m a dissident, he explained, but based on prior projections made while I was in government in the mid 90’s, half of the South African population should have been wiped out. He also pointed out that little was known of the upper-middle class teen neighborhoods in the north, where sexual activity was clearly going on without any sense of the implications to HIV/Aids stats. The association of HIV to sexual promiscuity among young blacks was an ongoing reference that some within the South African government and community are trying to dispel. I recalled seeing a billboard on a Jo-burg highway that read: “Aids likes to sleep around”.

The most interesting element of our meeting was that it was the first time anyone had raised the possibility that the methodologies being used to report on the scenario in South Africa were perhaps imperfect and needed modification. You can count on a dissident to raise questions and eyebrows.

Freedom Day in South Africa. Aidan took me for a tour of the Apartheid museum and Soweto. All in all an unforgettable day-tripping experience.

Chris flies in from Durban and meets me at the Arup Johannesburg office. We are expecting to meeting L. Suzulu and American consultant Garrett Matthews. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances neither happens. As Chris heads off to Dubai, I opt for a quiet early night at the Garden Court in Sandton a wealthy suburb of Johannesburg. Across the street from me is a convention center, a large mall and the Nelson Mandela Square. It seems funny to me that a planner thought this would make a cohesive arrangement.

All in all the week in South Africa has been a worthwhile one. There is something prohibitive about pure demographic stats. While the stats are informative they also stunt any deeper interpretation of context. In some ways, it is as though we are expected to accept facts at face value. But as professor Pillay pointed out, methodologies should more often be called into question with regards to South Africa, and perhaps the rest of the world.

Between my meetings with professors, professionals, and every day people, who lived and worked in South Africa, I saw that beneath the surface issues were a lot more complex and interconnected. Just because apartheid has ended does not mean that inequity has disappeared and that all South Africans have the same level of access to education and well-paying jobs. Like me, South Africa has just scratched the surface, and there is more work to get done in order to achieve social or human sustainability.