P R OF ILE • BV I
Perfecting a
mixed style art to engineering
BVi has a proud history of providing essential engineering services to the City of Tshwane, forging ahead on diverse projects that range from social housing and water, to design services on South Africa’s new automotive manufacturing hub.
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he City of Tshwane is South Africa’s largest municipality. It also ranks among the biggest municipal regions in the world in terms of its footprint. The key distinction for South Africa is Tshwane’s complex urban, peri-urban and rural composition, set within a developing nation context. This puts the talents of the best consulting engineers to the ultimate test in achieving an integrated and sustainable infrastructure delivery model. It’s not a new context for BVi, a multidisciplinary engineering, design, procurement, and management company that was established in 1967 in Pretoria, since expanding nationally and internationally. BVi has 20 offices operating across Southern Africa, with its head office situated in Tshwane. “As a leader in the consulting engineering industry, BVi sets the highest possible standard, based on local and global design and construction management practices. This includes a non-negotiable adherence to construction material specification and quality on all our projects,” says David Leukes, managing director, BVi.
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REIGNITING EXCELLENCE IN TSHWANE 2 0 2 1
Local content, and the need for soft and hard skills “Wherever possible, we reinforce the need to specify local content, since this is a direct and indirect enabler of much needed employment,” he continues, adding that the company is a Level 1 BBBEE contributor, underscoring BVi’s commitment to helping meet South Africa’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. “The so-called ‘hard’ engineering skills, when it comes to design and execution, remain paramount. Then there are the ‘soft skills’, which have become as important, since they’re often the gateway to construction enablement,” says Leukes. “I’m talking specifically here about on the ground engagement – whether it’s a potential investor, a landowner, or an affected community. Collective facilitation and buy-in from all stakeholders have become an extension of the traditional consulting engineering suite of services,” he explains.
Work in Tshwane For the past 54 years, Tshwane has been BVi’s foremost passion as its home city. And over the past five decades or so, the company has provided professional services for most of Tshwane’s divisions and departments. Recent Tshwane projects include road upgrades in Mamelodi, Soshanguve and Hammanskraal; infrastructure upgrades in Mandela Village; and water and sewerage installations in Kameeldrift and Kudube. At Mandela Village, the works entailed the construction of various streets – delivering asphalt surfaced roads over the old gravel routes – as well as the
