VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

Cape Town is still spatially locked into an apartheid urban planning arrangement with the predominantly white, middle- and upper-class concentrated in well-resourced and well-connected neighborhoods and the poor caught in the poorly resourced and poorly connected urban periphery. How to overcome the apartheid city and to reverse the spatial legacy of apartheid remains one of the most pressing questions in South Africa. Access to well-located affordable housing is a key to breaking the established inequalities. However, in twenty-five years of democratic rule, very little has been achieved in ‘replacing’ the urban poor. In the mid-20th century, the city’s CBD was doubled through a reclamation and harbour development project. The endeavor came to an unproductive and unfortunate conclusion with the construction of a highway that dissected the city from the sea. In 2017 the City of Cape Town launched an ambitious foreshore rejuvenation project as a tender competition. The site offered was the derelict terrain vague below and in-between this highway. The brief called for a balance between development for profit and social good and required the inclusion of affordable housing. Six teams submitted bid proposals. Ambitious in scope and programme, the projects aimed to position Cape Town as a future focused, progressive yet socially inclusive city. My paper will critically consider the disconnect between the city’s intention for the project against the developer’s proposals for the city. Using the proposals as a basis for analysis I ask: what constitutes a socially responsive architecture for this city?