About

One City is a group of independent consultants who seek to help people and their organisations build communities, neighbourhoods and cities that work for all.

We partner with community organisations, government, international agencies, private companies, NGOs and anyone else who shares our goal. In such partnerships, we aim to help build strategies and systems via actual programmes and projects, not abstract ideas.

One City’s urban experts have broad and mutually-supportive capabilities:

  1. Sustainable urban solutions that require capacity building and ways to transfer the knowledge generated by practical programmes and projects. So we help by helping:
    • Organisations to assess their capacities and build on them;
    • Institutions to map their internal and external systems and relationships, and strengthen them;
    • To design and implement training programmes based on on-the-ground capacities and institutional relationships;
    • Develop peer-to-peer methods to share knowledge; and
    • To mobilise and manage resources and finances.
  2. We help to mobilize specialist urbanist skills for programs and projects, including:
    • Integrated Development Planning
    • Urban Design
    • Land Development
    • Local Area Planning
  3. Practical implementation and assessment of actions for change, focusing on:
    • Sustainable neighbourhood development;
    • Sustainable livelihood development;
    • Facilitation of private, people, public partnerships;
    • Project management; and
    • Project assessment and documentation.

One City is based in Cape Town, South Africa but has a national and trans-continental reach.

One City’s personnel come from all walks of city life and from all institutions involved in city development. We’re qualified development professionals with tertiary degrees, former high-level government officials, private sector senior managers and grassroots leaders in informal settlements.