Separated City

By Lee R. Epstein

Cape Town, South Africa, is a city of enormous physical gifts. The city proper sits in a bowl dramatically formed by surrounding mountains, on the western edge of the Indian Ocean. Tendrils of beautiful white sand beaches reach around to the west and down to the southeast, the latter framed by coastal mountains and the striking, open landscapes around the Cape of Good Hope.

The 948-square-mile metropolitan municipality, with its extensive suburbs, has a population of more than 3.75 million. The climate is Mediterranean — somewhere between temperate and subtropical (it's actually on the same latitude as Buenos Aires, Argentina). Its offshore waters are plied by whales, and some peninsular shorelines are home to penguins that have adapted to the climate.

Parts of the city's European heritage enhance its beauty. The " Company's Garden," a blocks-long botanical garden, with places for children to run and play and a wide, tree-shaded promenade with views of the famous Table Mountain, is a lovely place to stroll.

The streets are mostly lively with urban activity. There are mid- and high-rise offices, excellent restaurants, bookstores, bars, hotels, and other businesses, a large square offering African crafts, and some unique and colorful neighborhoods such as Bo Kaap, the largely Muslim " Malay Quarter" settled by maritime Southeast Asians from Madagascar and Indonesia, who were originally brought to Cape Town as slaves. The city also has a " festival" waterfront area reminiscent, in my mind, of Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

Cape Town has an overblown confection of British imperial architecture that serves as City Hall. Its highly articulated facade sits across from the Grand Parade, which was jammed by 200,000 joyous black, " colored" — people of mixed race — and some white South Africans who listened to Nelson Mandela's February 11, 1990, address on the occasion of his release from prison. The city has a massive old fort (the " Castle" ), wonderful museums of art and culture, and museums of its tragic history of slavery and apartheid.

This is some of what I saw on a weeklong visit in 2015; I was there at the end of a three-week vacation in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. As a long-time urban planner and land-use and environmental lawyer, I tend always to view my foreign city sojourns through that professional lens. When I return home, I usually undertake further research so I can put what I saw and experienced into context.

The city has many wonderful attributes, without a doubt, but Cape Town also is a city struggling to shrug off its dark past. There are still many physical divides between the races and vast evidence of inequalities citywide, which provide stark reminders of a place intentionally redesigned within the last century to separate cultures, races, and economic classes.

District Six is one such reminder. There are many others.

Some history

Clear intention to segregate black South Africans from white settlers in Cape Town had its roots in the harsh Dutch settlement and " city design" ideas of Jan van Riebeek as early as the 1650s. Two hundred and fifty years later, the very early 20th century British colonial government undertook its own resettlement practices, removing 6,000 black Africans from desirable areas of the city to the Cape Flats, under the pretense of controlling the plague and attaining better " sanitation."

Two decades later, the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 furthered these initiatives by prohibiting the purchase or lease of land by black South Africans in most cities, where they were required to carry passes to prove they belonged and could legally reside.

Cape Town's District Six had been a place that had attracted freed slaves and where various races, cultures, and religions — black South Africans, Indians from the subcontinent, whites, and Asians; Christians, Muslims, and Jews; immigrants, laborers, artisans, and merchants — had amiably mixed for a very long time. It was an economically energetic and socially vibrant stew.

Apartheid became official national policy in 1948, and the Group Areas Act in 1950 created the mechanism to carve up cities and physically separate legislatively defined ethnicities. On February 11, 1966, District Six was declared a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act.

Sixty thousand people were forcibly removed and separated by ethnicity — including the wrenching of children from parents in mixed race, " colored" families — and sent to distinct new " neighborhoods" in the Cape Flats (some 15 miles to the east), and elsewhere. Homes and thriving businesses were flattened, and the scarred, newly bulldozed area awaited white settlement. (It's still largely waiting today.) Those far-flung new settlement areas offered relocated Cape Town residents very little.

Both prior to this, and as it was occurring, various black townships or " suburbs" sprung up, and today continue to evolve both informally and formally some miles from the city center. Massive and sprawling shack and shanty settlements such as Langa (established under the Urban Areas Act), Nyanga (established in 1948), Khayalitsha, and Gugulethu have mostly poor sanitation and inadequate city services. In some parts of these and other places there is no official electrical service to individual residences, scores of portable toilets line the exterior fences, and outdoor water taps supply perhaps 20 families each. In " Europe," a close-in informal settlement of shacks, just 8.5 acres in size adjacent to the International Airport, 13 official taps reportedly serve 4,000 people.

It has been 26 years since Nelson Mandela was freed, and 22 years since free elections were first held in South Africa in April 1994, ushering in what most people consider the actual end of apartheid.

After that amount of time, one could be forgiven for some impatience. On the other hand, two decades is the blink of an eye, considering the calculated segregation enforced for centuries.

The settlements of Cape Town reinforce the fact that physical design and location were used nefariously to promote neglect: man-made and natural barriers like highways, rivers, sewage treatment plants, topography, and distance intentionally separated the townships and far suburbs from white middle- and upper-class areas.

Recent planning and development

There are parts of some black townships, suburbs, and settlements that have been redesigned and rebuilt since 1994 by the government's Reconstruction and Development Programme. These appear to have merely rehoused the still-segregated thousands of black Capetonians — and not in much better fashion.

Indeed, the spatial history of apartheid was in many ways reinforced during a decade of this well-intentioned work. While somewhat better materials have partially replaced the jumble of scrap wood, galvanized aluminum, and tarps still found elsewhere outside the city proper and inner suburbs, the linear, undifferentiated squadrons of thousands of tiny, single-story " matchbox" houses on an unending grid, surrounded by a fence, at a far remove from the economic center, constitute a somewhat grim and, at least, thoroughly segregated place. In every respect, these areas are ghettos, with significant problems of crime, violence, and gang activity.

Some residents of the townships have regular jobs in the city and suburbs, though unemployment remains high (from 40 to higher than 50 percent). At the same time, creative entrepreneurship and thousands of very small businesses can be found there. Indeed, some township residents have even set up shacks in which they live, behind their tiny government-built houses — which they then either sell or use for business purposes.

It's obviously true that in situ solutions for many of these urgent problems are necessary, but not sufficient. After all, these suburbs are where so many Capetonians live now, and many are living without basic or adequate public services.

In 2004, a new policy to upgrade at least the well-located informal settlements helped lead to so-called " re-blocking" : reconfiguring internal roads and providing infrastructure for electricity, water, and sewer service to some areas. These are surely important improvements, though they don't resolve land tenure issues and other problems that remain so important to residents.

The Tragic Legacy of District Six

District Six was a vibrant, mixed community before it was declared a white area 50 years ago. More than 60,000 people were forced to leave. During the final stage of removal, homes and businesses were razed. Families were relocated to the Cape Flats and Atlantis under the terms of the Group Areas Act.

Today, the district — which sits in the shadow of Table Mountain and Lion's Head — is largely abandoned, as this 2006 photo shows.

The District Six Museum was established in 1994 to help capture the memories of the neighborhood's former residents and create a living memorial to the places and streets that were destroyed.

There are, of course, certain new realities that urban planners would love to help create, such as improved transportation linkages between city and both near and far suburbs and, along with that, investment around new transit stations conveniently serving the townships. (Some of this new transit is already being realized, for example, with bus rapid transit or at least express buses penetrating even some far-flung informal settlements.)

The Re-Blocking of Kuku Town

Re-blocking is a term used for the reconfiguration and repositioning of shacks in dense informal settlements with the aim of delivering better services.

Informal settlements in Cape Town are characterized by very different shapes and sizes, ranging from smaller inner-city settlements — like Kuku Town — located in residential neighborhoods, to large, sprawling communities on the periphery.

The re-blocking of Kuku Town, with its 21 households, seeks greater quality of place, safety, and security through improved layouts and better located services. Here, dwellings were rearranged to face a communal courtyard — where people can gather for activities and keep an eye on their neighbors and shared facilities.

Inviting new plazas and green public spaces would be well used and beautifying. Even inclusionary housing in the city proper, whose various policy approaches have been discussed in Cape Town for more than a decade, would provide some additional integration, albeit very slowly. There is evidence of some elements of all of these things already happening (at various degrees of effectiveness), both through public intervention and private enterprise acting on its own. More would surely help.

One example of public policy attention to economic and residential development was created in 2000 to increase investment in the city, so-called City Improvement Districts (also known as " Special Rate Areas" ). As an urban redevelopment strategy, it mostly worked — that is, for the developers, since it essentially conferred " planning" authority on wealthy private real estate investors who could decide where to plant their projects, as well as which extra services they would provide in their privileged urban districts. But it left out the poor, tenants, and at least in its early incarnations, many black Capetonians.

All in all, there still exist two separate and wholly unequal cities — Cape Town proper and its immediate suburbs, for well-off and middle-class whites (and some educated, middle-class " coloreds" ); and another Cape Town, far removed, for those black South Africans who haven't succeeded economically through their own extraordinary effort, courage, luck, talent, or more likely all of these attributes together.

Planning solutions?

In my view, for more than a decade after apartheid ended, the postapartheid policies aimed at rectifying past ills didn't go anywhere near far enough. Further, some of the newer design attributes or land-use changes may in fact not represent what many residents of the townships actually want

Recent University of Cape Town-driven efforts that include extensive citizen participation — which seems an uncommon approach there — have tried to change that by doing more fully inclusive, people-driven planning. " Enough of these top-down ideas by people who are saying they know better than we do," these settlement residents seem to be saying. " We want things that are responsive to our expressed needs and desires: good, solid, housing in good, convenient locations (though unfortunately, they mostly want the " Captonian Dream" — the same wasteful suburban sprawl patterns that the city has sold all of its residents, black and white, for decades); enhanced safety and security; ready access to the central city; good public services; and crucially, title to our real property."

So what might work, and what is especially important, from an admitted outsider's perspective?

FIRST, a slightly higher density housing mix with small multifamily units seems a good compromise to at least discuss and perhaps try to promote. If it is well designed and well built, located near jobs and transport, and (most crucially) if the residents buy in, this approach could work far better than what's been done for decades — repeating the impractical, land-wasting, single-family sprawl model in townships miles from nowhere.

The idea would be to achieve efficiency without being too intense, through a transparent and truly participatory process so that future residents' desires are considered and accommodated.

SECOND, building more attractive central places of commerce or safe community space — like the successful multistory " active boxes," which are government-sponsored community facilities and de facto safe zones built in some townships — might be especially helpful. These can be places from which both local enterprise and a sense of community can then spread.

THIRD, continuing to connect the townships with more and better transit at safe, well-located transit stations, and creating safe routes through the townships (through the existing and very successful " Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading Program," designed by planners some years ago), is also still crucial for improving the dismal unemployment and township crime situations, essentially to create better " facts on the ground."

As one writer recently recounted about the planning graduate students' experience, a planning charrette with the residents of Europe 'became a crash course in the difference between the pieties of urban planning theory and the reality of communities that are fluent in the language of political leverage.'

FOURTH, there should be a systematic attempt to recognize ownership and create property tenure. Such a system might not use all the typical tools (extensive land surveys, for instance, are just as likely to be viewed with suspicion as be welcomed), but high-resolution, satellite-based imagery might make it possible just the same. And a full-blown inclusionary housing policy should become law citywide, so that such a process can at least begin to right segregation's wrongs in the city center and immediate surroundings.

FINALLY, if efficient development patterns that promote public health, affordability, an improved quality of life, and a desirable future are legitimate objectives, then planning with the environment in mind is a necessity, not a luxury.

Environmental sustainability, green spaces, management of (terribly) polluted stormwater runoff, sanitation, renewable energy production and distribution and, in that normally dry environment, water conservation and reuse, should all help frame whatever solutions are developed. Sustainability will eventually help all Capetonians to live healthy, productive lives; its absence will lead, eventually, to systemic failure.

This set of five design and planning objectives won't themselves solve the huge habitat and socioeconomic problems wrought by several centuries of harmful and sometimes intentionally misdirected public policy; indeed, design and planning provide imperfect and incomplete solutions to problems built by the many layers of adverse political intent.

On the other hand, there is good news here: Some of these initiatives are already moving forward, at various speeds and with varying degrees of attention, and a limited menu such as this might just help move the ball in the right direction.

Finally, after fits and starts, urban planners and architects in Cape Town may now be headed toward trying to secure at least the place they want their great city, and all its inhabitants, to be able to realize. Equity, democracy, and good planning and design are a part of a better future. With continued focus, we can hope that social advances will accompany or shortly follow.

Lee Epstein is an urban planner and environmental lawyer with three decades of practice in the mid-Atlantic area of the U.S. He visited South Africa in 2015.