The third edition of Entrepreneurship in Planning (EiP3) took place on Youth Day, 16 June 2026, at the Courtyard Hotel in Rosebank, Johannesburg. Convened and hosted by Eliezer M. Gomat of Chedza Enviro & Planning Solutions, the gathering ran under the theme “Plan. Build. Disrupt.” and explored a single, provocative idea: that tomorrow’s town planner should think and act like an entrepreneur rather than a regulatory functionary. Programme Director Michelle Mbhalati guided a day of practitioner-to-practitioner conversation aimed especially at young graduates and emerging professionals.
Why the Planner Must Become an Entrepreneur
In opening the session, Gomat traced the origins of the EiP series back to his own student days at the University of Johannesburg, when he found plenty of consultancies but few spaces where young planners could meet seniors and discover opportunities. An early edition conversation about land acquisition for telecommunications firms revealed how many adjacent fields planners are well suited to but rarely enter. That realisation gave the series its name and purpose. The first edition, held on Workers’ Day 2024, already produced two student internships, and the series was later recognised in the SACPLAN Newsletter. For 2026, Gomat framed three frontiers of greatest opportunity: digital planning powered by GIS, big data and AI; the green and circular economy; and Pan-African practice opened up by continental free trade.
Lessons From Three Decades of Practice
A guest reflection from Abrie Snyman, CEO of Multiprof Property Intelligence, drew on roughly three decades of practice. His durable lessons resonated through the day: get your foot in the door because initiative beats credentials; deliberately escape the comfort of the familiar zone, as real growth requires discomfort; combine two genuine skills to become rare rather than competing with everyone holding the same degree; and master a tight elevator pitch while always capturing the prospect’s contact details, because whoever controls the follow-up controls the relationship. His closing thought set the tone: the world is yours, and nobody is coming to save you.
Digital Planning and Urban Innovation
The first panel, on digital planning and urban innovation, was led by Reabetswe Masombuka of the City of Johannesburg’s Open Space Planning team and a 2024 SACPLAN Young Planning Professional awardee. She reframed the environmental planner’s protective role, often dismissed as red tape, as a genuine form of value creation, and stressed that the city’s limited budget makes partnerships essential. Demonstrating the City’s public GeoData GIS platform, she showed how layers such as zoning, flood lines, wetlands and biodiversity areas give planners an evidence base that replaces intuition. Her advice to young planners was to start early in private consultancy, seek job-shadowing, and be willing to admit what they do not yet know.
The Green Economy: Turning Waste Into Value
The green economy track was led by Dr Gamuchirai Mutezo, founder of Madam Waste and Director of Circular Business Models at the African Circular Business Alliance. Tracing her own path from town and regional planning through energy poverty and renewable energy into waste, she described finding an intersection few others occupied. Her central message was that waste is a resource rather than a problem: through circular-economy principles, organic material becomes compost, biogas, briquettes and even electricity, with value created the moment waste is separated at source. The session’s interactive centrepiece turned on the idea that your network is your net worth, with partnership built on a genuinely shared vision, an honest understanding of what each party contributes, and an absence of greed.
Pan-African Practice and the AfCFTA Opportunity
The Pan-African track was led by Taboka K. Malwapeng, Secretary General of PITP and a board member of the Special Economic Zones Authority of Botswana. Her presence embodied the track’s thesis of a planner exporting expertise across borders. Using Botswana as a case study, she argued for strategy over scale, pointing to a country of about 2.5 million people that treats its small population as a determining strength rather than a limitation, with tourism planning anchored in the Chobe region and the Okavango Delta. The discussion drew out the wider opportunity for South Africa’s relatively mature planning expertise to serve a large, largely untapped continental market opened by the African Continental Free Trade Area, while learning in turn from how other African states approach city-making.
Building Your Planning Business Model
The closing workshop, facilitated by Yamkela Dyantyi of the SME CEOs Group, was the day’s most practical. Coining the term cityreneurs, he set out the macro case that cities will dominate population and global output in the coming decades and asked who would design them. Walking participants through the nine building blocks of the Business Model Canvas, anchored in his live Smart Cities work, he urged planners to begin with the customer’s frustration before reaching for a solution, to borrow credibility by partnering with established structures, and to match channels to audiences. His ripple-effect metaphor captured the day’s logic: a true expert understands not only their own sector but the adjacent ones, and the session closed on wisdom, knowledge and understanding as the foundations of entrepreneurship.
Key Takeaways From EiP3
Three threads ran through every session: mindset before method, with the real barrier located in comfort and a narrow view of the profession; leverage and networking as strategy, modelled in real time as speakers formed partnerships in the room; and the call to specialise in order to differentiate. EiP3 reinforced a consistent throughline, that the planner who pairs professional expertise with an entrepreneurial mindset and genuine partnerships is positioned to create real economic and social value across the digital, green and Pan-African frontiers. Recordings of the sessions will be made available on the Chedza Planning YouTube channel, and the series will continue to convene the next generation of planning professionals. Plan. Build. Disrupt.