African Real Estate & Infrastructure Summit comes to Gauteng

The African Real Estate & Infrastructure Summit comes to Gauteng in October to gather leading built environment and property professionals, architects, project developers, investors, town planners, and city and municipal managers from all over the continent to focus on “Developing Future African Cities”.

“Over the next 20 years, growth in Africa’s urban population will increase the demand for more infrastructure, including transport, housing, hospitals, schools, retail, industrial and fundamental facilities,” said Benjamin Jones, Event Manager of African Real Estate & Infrastructure Summit.

He added: “To meet this ongoing demand, public and private sector stakeholders will need to adapt their strategies to develop and fund projects that will need to meet the specific demands and challenges of African cities.”

The summit will take place at the Sandton Convention Centre from 25-26 October. JLL is the official content sponsor for the event.

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Simon Ardonceau (MRICS), JLL’s Head of Strategic Consulting, Sub-Saharan Africa and speaker at the African Real Estate & Infrastructure Summit, said: “Driven by strong fundamentals such as sustained economic growth, favourable demographics, emergence of a middle class and rapid urbanisation, the real estate sector is bound to grow.”

In November last year, Cape Town hosted the inaugural African Real Estate & Infrastructure Summit.

A key finding of the 2016 conference was that Africa’s cities are facing an urban ‘polycrisis’ and that there is a need for a new urban agenda and an opportunity for innovative solutions to address urbanisation challenges.

The future of Africa will be more and more linked to how cities are managed and the way they choose to contribute to African unity.

The City of Cape Town has invested over R22bn (US$1.6bn) in infrastructure over the last five years and needs to provide an additional 650,000 housing opportunities over the next 20 years.