South Africa's urban future needn't be synonymous with erosion. It demands reimagining cities that work for everyone, investment strategies balancing development across all communities, and citizens willing to participate actively in shaping their environments.

The cratered roads of Grahamstown that look like they've been shelled; the boomed security complexes of Jozi's northern suburbs; the ClearVu walls sprouting up all over the Western Cape, threatening to transform patches of the province into a mosaic of mini Gazas; the squalid parks, bridges, train tracks of Durban's southwestern fringes that make you feel as if you're passing through a zombie apocalypse when crossing the buffer. That reads like an extract from a dystopian novel, but it is reality. These are some of the sociopolitical woes we face in our fragmented urban landscape.

Relatedly but possibly more frustrating are the public service delivery crises. The load shedding beast has thankfully been tamed (though rolling power outages still plague forgotten rural areas that often go for days without electricity), but in its place has re-emerged one more ferocious (than any other and relative to its 2010s incarnation): the water shortage - let's call it Decade Zero. Menace out, menace in - there's never a power vacuum for long in the savannah. The now-regular deployment of watercan convoys reminiscent of those triggering apartheid police vans lets one know we're at war.

The problems are many; formal and social media keep...