Takeaway 2 from the 2025 International Precinct Management Leadership Summit
By Brian Wright, Managing Director, UrbanMGT
At the International Precinct Management Leadership Summit in Cape Town last month, we weren’t there to trade success stories. The agenda was clear: identify the most urgent issues facing managed precincts around the world and develop a roadmap for how to respond.
What stood out most was not how different our contexts are, but how aligned our challenges have become. From Seattle to Stockholm, Auckland to Toronto, precinct managers are facing the same pressure points we navigate daily in South Africa, sometimes with far greater resources, but often with fewer layers of resilience.
Challenge 1: Declining Municipal Service Delivery
It was striking how much time precinct teams, even in first-world cities, now spend lobbying city leadership for enabling policies and core service delivery.
Whether it’s a New York BID or a London District, the refrain was the same: city services are on the decline, and precincts are picking up the slack. Street cleaning, stormwater management, minor infrastructure fixes, even safety interventions, these services are increasingly having to be augmented by the precincts, regardless of whether budgets or mandates support them.
That’s not new to us – even with optimising municipal service delivery through collaboration we have had to absorb this kind of operational pressure for years. In some cases, we’re the delivering specialist services outside of the municipal mandate which are essential for destination appeal – this all with a measurable level of consistency and performance.
Challenge 2: The Rise of Homelessness and Urban Breakdown
COVID-19 didn’t just empty out city centres, it accelerated a human crisis. Many delegates, particularly from North American cities, reported sharp increases in homelessness, drug addiction (especially opioids like Fentanyl) and public health deterioration in precincts.
The photos from Seattle were jarring, entire areas of the of city now overwhelmed by unmanaged social displacement. It’s affecting safety, business continuity, tourism, investor confidence and the very viability of the precinct management structures themselves.
In our managed precincts, we face a different but equally complex dynamic. Our homelessness challenges are less visible in scale, but compounded by limited municipal capacity, fragmented social services and a lack of enforceable strategy. Our team has worked closely with NGOs, SAPS and private security to find workarounds, but the systemic pressure continues to mount.
Challenge 3: The Levy Base is Shrinking – While Demands Grow
Across the board, precincts are being hit by shifts in property use:
- Remote work has reduced office space demand
- Online retail continues to reduce footfall and bricks-and-mortar occupancy
- Pressure for affordable housing has driven residential conversion of commercial properties
As the international the property landscape evolves, it is placing significant pressure on precinct funding models. In many countries, residential properties are exempt from levies – yet they create substantial service demands and introduce new management complexities. This exacerbated by the reducing commercial levy based and declining managed precinct budgets.
This dynamic is something we’ve been raising for some time while grappling with pragmatic and workable solutions. Commercial funding of managed precincts on their own coupled with increasing residential service demands and complexities, is not sustainable without residential buy-in and formalised contribution to managed precincts.
So, Where’s the Opportunity?
What struck me most during these conversations was not just how common these issues are but how far we’ve already come in building internal mechanisms to respond.
Because we’ve had to deal with these challenges earlier, and often without institutional support, our teams in KZN are equipped with a level of agility and innovation that many precincts are still building toward.
We’ve made precinct-level community support a priority. We’ve built operational platforms that don’t wait for government systems to catch up – they lead. And we’ve learned to plan precinct growth and activation strategies with an eye on usage, funding, and long-term sustainability, because we’ve had no choice.
Looking Ahead
Global cities are being forced to rethink what the purpose of managed precincts are, and what they must evolve too. The traditional levy model, based on stable property use and consistent public services, is cracking.
In KZN South Africa, in particular, the precinct models have evolved to close the service gap – we’ve built something that, while still imperfect, is increasingly relevant globally.
In the next article, I’ll explore what this shift in property usage means for the long-term sustainability of precinct funding, and what options we need to start considering now to future proof the managed precincts.
