OneCity

13/02/2025

OneCity is now free to explore development opportunities in Joburg!

OneCity says:

“With the all-new Personal Account, join us today to stay on top of new development opportunities and tools we will be shipping in 2025.

What can OneCity do today?
- Geography: Johannesburg (Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Durban coming in 2025)
- Save Your Search and Notes: Keep potential sites and notes about them in one place
- Share Opportunities: Share any sites you found with your team using direct links
- Compare Sites: Side-by-side, helping you make better decisions faster.

We are building a new OneCity system to find and evaluate development opportunities, manage the pre-construction process and help with fund-raising. Stay tuned!”

31/07/2023

Is investing an art, a science, or both? How important is hard data for experienced investors, and to what extent does it matter for them when market conditions change? How could data stewards be incentivised to share verified and quality data? What role do professional services companies play in aligning policy intentions with individual property development strategies?

Join us next Tuesday to discuss these questions! We will be sharing the link shortly- stay tuned.

04/04/2023

We are live! 🙌

Investing in residential property in South Africa?

⚪ Check out this release of OneCity Insights for . We have identified 181,753 potential opportunities to develop or extend single-family detached houses. If you are considering a particular site or location – check your planning risk and potential development impact on the environment and the local community.

⚪ Read our blog for details on this release and why we are building OneCity https://t.ly/O3GZ

⚪ Get in touch – we would love to hear from you!

We are building new tools to make land markets transparent and urban plans work

28/03/2023

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Same time. Next week. Watch this space.

08/12/2022

The 15-minute city trend. What’s in it for an investor and a neighbourhood?

Many cities are trying to promote more compact, mixed-use, walkable urban forms. The most famous of these is the ‘15-minute Paris’ concept promoted by Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Johannesburg is on the same track - a large part of its planning arsenal aims to create dense nodes and equitable, walkable neighbourhoods.

Recent studies demonstrate many benefits of more compact and denser cities. For example, increasing building density by just 1% results in an 8.5% decrease in vehicle mileage. It reduces energy consumption by 7% and public spending by 14%. However, there are harms too. Higher densities contribute to the inflation of property prices and rent rates.

By promoting densification, new policies unlock the development potential of low-density sites and, in many cases, reset local land markets. We used image recognition technology and to obtain a site-by-site granular picture of how implementing one policy objective - creating subsidiary dwelling units - affects surrounding residential properties in Johannesburg. The test sample included 296 800 sites zoned Residential 1 and compared potential densities with actual land use.

Follow us to find out about the outcomes, which will be published in early 2023.

08/09/2022

What are your thoughts on the role of technology in creating more inclusive cities?

OneCity says its digital-mapping app can help planners create housing that better serves the needs of the poor.

31/03/2022

🤩We are super exited to be selected to join 9. Read more below about an impressive bunch of start-ups that are shaping our


・・・
We’re super excited to announce the startups joining us for this year’s Alpha Accelerator. This cohort of smart city innovators is paving a more sustainable, efficient, and equitable urban future 🚀

🏙 OneCity- Co-creating equitable towns and cities with tech

👗 .design - Creating sustainable materials for the construction industry

🚲 - Creating smart parking for micromobility

🗺 - making cities and transport more accessible

🏠 KeyHome - Reducing home's energy demand and increasing efficiency

🌱 - Using algorithms to make greener building product choices easy

What a cohort. Head to the link in our bio to find out more about these phenomenal startups ✌️

15/03/2022

⚡️⚡️⚡️ We have formed a strategic partnership with an innovative impact-driven property finance company - .

Together will make it quicker and easier for UMaStandi- Building Rental Property Entrepreneurs in Townships to extend its support in new urban townships.

is a township rental finance product developed by . Its first commercial property finance is to be offered in targeted township areas based on freehold title. OneCity will help property developers to navigate the pre-construction stage and make the best investment decisions aligned with the latest city plans.

Read more at Property Wheel https://bit.ly/3I7ZPfe

04/02/2022

"The reality is that none of us, not even experts, really have a handle on the prevalence and nature of regulatory constraints imposed by zoning. That means we don't have the information we need to make good decisions."

Any good solutions around?

Bidding wars, low inventory and huge price hikes have turned homebuying into an ordeal for many house hunters over the past two years.

02/12/2021

Reflections on digital trends in planning following 57th ISOCARP In Doha

1. Smart city has been a trend for almost a decade. But do we have a shared understanding and definition of what the term means to each particular country and nation? We stand that it should be seen not as a set of rules or a strategy but as a flexible framework, where each can find the solutions suitable to reach specific strategic goals.

2. Smart city planning is changing from "how to make a city smart" to how technologies can help defeat inequality and lead to efficient and sustainable planning decisions.

3. AGORA inter-regional co-generation project uses digital tools to highlight declined areas and identify relevant regeneration mechanisms. At the bottom of the planning process are stakeholder engagement and related policy solutions delivered through a digital matchmaking platform for regional stakeholders.

4. Local and regional IT budgets will benefit from diverting investments from in-house planning and management systems into data-sharing protocols. When realised, the resulting digital services could be driven by the market and developed by the private sector.

For transparent and data-driven urban transformation

05/11/2021

In the UK only, local governments spend over £1 billion on sourcing and supporting software annually. However, as data becomes more open new trend is emerging - third party providers take on not only some of the cities' responsibilities but also a significant portion of their spending.

Join us on the 10th of November in Doha at the 57th to learn how open data helps to deliver better services, direct investments, reduce spending and carbon emissions with tools like OneCity.

29/06/2021

This Thursday our co-founder Yuriy Milevskiy will be at the discussing the transformation of urban technologies.

He will speak about OneCity, as well as:
- Security risks and data swamps
- Data silos vs. data collaborations
- City open data as public infrastructure vs. proprietary data
- From law enforcement to ‘policy-as-a-service’

To register to attend online, click the link below 🙂

MOSCOW URBAN FORUM — is the largest international congress on the development challenges of global megacities. The Forum has been held annually since 2011.