Don’t limit the horizons of our city

The following article appeared in the Cape Argus, 24 November 2010.

Reinventing Cape Town in all its parts is the key to making it a whole, wholesome city, writes Iain Harris

WHERE are the centres of Cape Town? Khayelitsha, for instance, is a city in its own right. It has a bigger population than most European capital centres. It has five train stations of its own and numerous taxi ranks. Apparently, it is the fastest-growing suburb in South Africa. Khayelitsha is a city. And yet, we call it a township. When people talk about “Cape Town”, mostly they mean the part of the city that we know as the inner city, the old city, the City Bowl. When we Capetonians say we are “going to town”, we don’t mean to Athlone town centre or the CBD of Wynberg or Khayelitsha. We mean the old city at the foot of the tabletopped mountain. Senior citizens in Wynberg, like my neighbour, the late auntie Annie on Ottery Road, would talk about going to “the main road”, meaning the commercial centre of Wynberg. She would talk about going “to town” – going to the historic centre – as a major excursion, something to dress up for. Two young ladies I met on the train to Khayelitsha recently told me they had gone “to town” to look for work.

Tourism companies offer “city tours”, which are usually walking tours of the inner city, from the Bo-Kaap to District Six, and down to the Foreshore. “City tours” never include townships, and never include the northern suburbs, southern suburbs or the Atlantic Sea Board. For tourism language, the city is really tiny. Just take a look at Metro Rail’s rail map and you will see how, in this model, all roads lead to Rome, the historic centre. And how the same map shows you how big the city really is. The centre of Cape Town, the old city, is a tiny part. For a long time I’ve been intrigued by how we perceive the scale of a city. Joburg is considered a big city. Cape Town is considered a small city. In population size, both cities are quite close, separated by a few hundred thousand. And in landmass they are also close (Cape Town has the mountain range taking up a lot of space). If you travel from Hout Bay town centre to Mitchells Plain town centre, you’ll realise just how big Cape Town is. If you travel by train and taxi each day from Symphony Way in Delft to the harbour in Hout Bay, you’ll know that the city can be as big as about two-and-a-half hours – each way – on a good day. And yet Cape Town is perceived as being small – partly because we see only one centre.

Recently, I posted a sketch I drew in 2008 in which I repositioned the centre of Cape Town in Langa. It was a conceptual idea – how differently do we look at Cape Town if we put the centre of the city in the visual centre of the map of the metropole? And it raises the question, how can we turn the centres of Mitchells Plain, Athlone and Gugulethu into thriving zones that attract a diversity

of Capetonians? It’s a bit facile, perhaps. But the point is, how do we look at this city differently? Andrew Boraine, visionary CEO of the Cape Town Partnership, responded that it wasn’t about repositioning the centre, or maintaining a single centre in a city. It’s about multiple centres. He commented that “Cape Town is today a multimodal or polycentric metropolitan area, no longer a radial city with the traditional central business district (CBD) of 50-100 years ago”. And I agree with him completely. Cape Town does indeed have multiple centres. I’ve touched on just some of them. But we don’t see them as centres, as citizens or city government. We are very Roman in the way we still, today, defer to the “throne of power”, the epicentre of Cape Town, in the historic centre. The radial perspective of the city is still exactly how most of us still see the city. And while it is true that the historic centre is, as Boraine says, “one of the few spaces in our divided city where a relatively diverse range of Capetonians meet each other on the streets, in the public spaces and at events”, surely the future of the city is one where this kind of diversity exists in multiple parts of the city. Could we imagine, for instance, the Manenberg Waterfront, a hot attraction in the next 10 years, and the centre of new Manenberg? The point is, how do we transform the city’s other centres into spaces that we would consider “town”? How do we make Langa town centre a space that residents of Woodstock, for example, head to for entertainment? How do the zones that are most in need of economic development, and that would benefit most from the effects of diversity and densification, actually diversify? How does Bonteheuwel, for example, open up and attract a diversity of residents and a diverse internal economy? And how do we start to see a place like Khayelitsha as the major urban centre that it is, rather than simply a township? I am excited by the potential of the Athlone Tower precinct alongside the N2. It could create a hot new node for the city.

But how do we change the language we use in order to change the way we see things? We know that in this city, the more we find each other across the boundaries mapped out by apartheid town planning, the more we change the way we experience and see and express the city. Is there the space in Langa, for example – a neighbourhood with a lot of heritage – to create a smartwired and smartly priced residential piazza, with stunning views of the mountain, that can draw a diversity of young professionals as first-time buyers who cannot afford an apartment in the old centre? Everybody knows Mzoli’s, but why is it about the only attraction in the suburbs of the Cape Flats? The challenge we face, I believe, lies in the question: How do we as citizens collectively imagine the future of the city? 

● Iain Harris runs Coffee Beans Routes. This article first appeared on his blog at http://iainharris.blogspot.com