As South Africa continues to urbanise, new mixed-use precincts across the country have an opportunity to rethink safety from first principles, where security is viewed as core infrastructure, alongside roads, power and water.
South Africa’s urban landscape is changing rapidly. Mixed-use precincts are becoming increasingly important as places where people live, work, shop and socialise in close proximity. As these environments become denser and more interconnected, safety can no longer be treated as a separate consideration or delegated solely to perimeter security. It must be embedded into the design, management and operation of urban spaces from the outset.
Late one afternoon, a woman stood alone at a bus stop in Waterfall City. A man approached and began asking questions that made her feel uncomfortable. Within 30 seconds, before she had decided whether she was in danger, a patrol vehicle pulled up, the officer asked if she was alright, and the man moved on. Somewhere in a control room, an operator had read the situation and acted before anything could happen, demonstrating what proactive security looks like. Nothing happened, and that is the point.
South Africans are well-acquainted with the tired dinner table safety conversation that goes: the country is dangerous, crime is everywhere, and the only rational response is to retreat behind high walls. This narrative reflects a concern for one’s personal safety and that of their families, and the property industry response has been to build an entire product category around it – security estates, boomed-off suburbs, and access-controlled office parks have proliferated because fear is a reliable motivator.
At Waterfall City, a mixed-use precinct between Johannesburg and Pretoria that has spent the better part of a decade building security not as a reaction to threat, but as a founding principle of city design, this subtle difference means a more useful conversation can be had.
Designed in, not an after thought
Most urban security is reactive, driven by fear after an incident or a vulnerability is identified and a new measure introduced. A few years in, the result is patchwork: cameras here, a guardhouse there, a boom added three years after the precinct opened.
Security was incorporated into Waterfall City’s master development plan before a single brick was laid. The centralised control room, the nerve centre from which all cameras, number plate recognition systems, behavioural analytics, and patrol vehicles are coordinated, was operational before our first clients arrived, because we understood that the cost of retrofitting protection into a built environment is higher than engineering it in at the start.
Our approach to that system is deliberately framed as intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. Technology is a tool that multiplies human capacity, not a substitute for it. Automatic number plate recognition cameras read around six million plates a month across the city and cross-reference them against law enforcement and insurance databases, of which only a few hundred are flagged as suspicious and acted upon. Virtual perimeters protect areas where physical barriers are not practical, with intelligent cameras tracking flagged individuals continuously until a response team arrives. We continue to pilot emerging technologies aimed at improving threat detection and response times. Each layer informs the next, and all of it converges in the control room.
But the hardware is only half of the investment. The operators in our control room are not passive CCTV monitors. They are trained in behavioural psychology, in reading intent from posture, movement and pattern, and it is that human capability that made the intervention at the bus stop possible. It is also what made a smaller, stranger story possible: an elderly man recently lost his cell phone somewhere in the city, our cameras picked it up, and our team traced him and returned it. In a country where a phone left on a bench is usually gone for good, that is the kind of story people struggle to believe, and it is the same infrastructure at work.
The economics of beating crime
The financial case for proactive security is difficult to quantify because you cannot easily put a price on the carjacking that was prevented, a smash-and-grab that never occurred, the conference that was booked because an international client’s security audit came back clean. But preventing them carries an economic value.
The criminal’s model of observe, approach, attack, overcome resistance and escape, gets disrupted at multiple points, and the interdiction happens before the exit. Predatory criminals will realise that softer targets exist elsewhere. We invest tens of millions of rand annually on operational security – people, vehicles, and the maintenance of infrastructure. This substantial figure should be read against the true cost of reactive security. That cost is human — the safety, security and peace of mind of the people who live and work in the precinct. Only then come the reputational damage from a high-profile incident, the insurance claims, the tenant departures and the eventual difficulty of attracting new business to a precinct with a poor safety record.
The same camera network also has benefits in the form of operational efficiencies, detecting irrigation leaks within minutes, flagging street light outages, and monitoring traffic systems. Infrastructure justified on security grounds is delivering value across the entire operational management of the city. Our security investment, in other words, is a load-bearing component of how the precinct functions beyond its safety mandate.
Safety as a competitive advantage
For international businesses considering a South African base, the security question is asked upfront before a single square metre of office space is evaluated and lease terms considered. A beautiful building in an unsafe precinct is off the table for a multinational with a duty of care to its employees and an insurance framework that demands risk management.
This is why urban precincts that can demonstrate robust, data-backed safety measures are increasingly more attractive to multinational occupiers. Where precinct management can show how an area is monitored, how incidents are prevented and how security systems integrate with national law enforcement databases, the conversation with prospective tenants’ changes. Safety becomes a measurable asset and it is precincts that can evidence this that are finding their way onto international shortlists that would otherwise remain closed to South African real estate.
The partnership South Africa needs
None of this operates in isolation from the broader policy environment. Private security operators and public law enforcement agencies each play important but distinct roles in creating safer urban environments. Continued collaboration, information sharing and an enabling regulatory environment can strengthen the effectiveness of both.
The message from the private sector is a simple one: we are here to serve the people who live, work and shop in our spaces, and are ready to work alongside law enforcement agencies, sharing intelligence and resources to create safer urban environments. This is not a replacement for public policing, but a partnership with it, and the technology, the intelligence and the integration with national databases point to a model of collaborative urban safety management that can only be delivered through that partnership.
The fearful narrative around South African cities is unlikely to disappear any time soon, but we can change it by making security an upfront investment rather than a grudge purchase. The question must be, can any city afford to be built in any other way? That story is already being written in some precincts, with the growing numbers, falling crime rates, international tenants and operational efficiencies as evidence. What remains is for the rest of South Africa’s urban developers to read it.
Just as no developer would build a city without roads, electricity or water, the next generation of urban development cannot afford to treat safety as an optional extra. The opportunity is to rethink safety from first principles – core infrastructure built in from the outset. Security is infrastructure, and increasingly it will determine which cities thrive and which struggle to compete.
* De Vos is the Asset Manager of Waterfall City at Attacq.
