Cape Town's 2030 vision needs debate

An unusual discussion document, Cape Town 2030, published by the City of Cape Town in 2006, outlined a holistic, long-term view for developing and managing the broader city region. Strikingly, very little public debate has followed in its wake.

Words like "world-class" and "iconic" are often used to describe aspects of Cape Town. We are a world-class tourism destination, worthy of world-class awards. We have a world-class waterfront and world-class universities, entertainment and hotels. Yet there is a growing darker side - increasing poverty, joblessness, crime, hopelessness and despair. The applauding, the backslapping, the entertainment and enjoyment are limited to a declining minority.

Despite a broad mandate and considerable command of resources, public action has failed to bend negative trends; in fact, it could be argued, poverty has deepened. The ability of the city to sustain a reasonable life for ordinary citizens has weakened. Hype about awards, limited booms and life pleasures hides a prevailing culture of parochialism and fear of the Other. Around us we see the theft of opportunity from the poor to benefit those who have access to ample.

City leadership stumbles along in lurches that give the impression of speed and decisiveness. As challenges increase, there is an intensified flirtation with a hit parade of instant, "legacy project" solutions.

Inherently they have limited reach and, as the only show in town, they become overburdened with expectations. Sadly, as illustrated so well with the World Cup stadium, they skew the disposition of opportunity further.

The Cape Town 2030 discussion document is an attempt to lead the city beyond knee-jerk thinking (to a debate about) how to position Cape Town on a sustainable trajectory by redirecting public and private resources.

Among the eight core beliefs underpinning the document are that a future plan has to focus on the needs of ordinary people and ought to identify renewal or remedial tasks and creative new ones - understanding that parts of Cape Town need renewing for the sake of its people and ecological health, but that this won't fully cater for the needs of future growth.

Upfront, Cape Town 2030 sets a challenge: what if Cape Town has to accommodate five to seven million people (roughly twice its current population)? How do you best organise such a city? The document then works backwards, looking at key building blocks and how things could be phased.

Cape Town's functional footprint stretches far beyond its administrative boundaries. It draws its water from further and further away, outlying towns serve as places of residence for some of its workers, and so on. Yet planning for settlements in this wider region occurs largely in a vacuum; each area tries to meet its own understanding of a backlog in housing, jobs and other needs.

What we require is clarity and direction on the future role of all the settlements in the region, how they must work together, and how each should grow.

The plan suggests that Cape Town should break from its routine of trying to accommodate most growth in lower-income settlement on the Cape Flats.

We have to use some available land on the Cape Flats to relieve current overcrowded areas and expand opportunity and choice, including extended and alternative opportunity for more sustainable livelihoods within walking distance from residences. Broadly, the area for new city development is to the north of the existing city, between the coast on the west and the eastern mountain foothills.

Equally, it is vital to protect and improve green spaces and natural assets and use these to structure future city development. Before they are used for settlement, natural areas of biodiversity, agriculture and the cultural landscape need to be defined.

A third focus is on the make-up of the city's economic backbone: its centres of economic activity and strategic infrastructure. The new economy of Cape Town's space has seen increasing geographic and structural complexity, including decentralisation from the central city to other centres, expansion of industrial land use and suburbanisation of business activity.

The spatial and economic function of the Cape Town central city has extended eastwards in a broad band running parallel to the N1 freeway and Voortrekker Road. This area provides 50 percent of all formal employment and has the largest number of industrial estates in the city offering 85 percent of formal industrial employment. It is proposed that this area be significantly reinforced through the strategic use of public land and development of infrastructure. It will reshape opportunity patterns in the city, breaking from a historical focus on the old central city, and bring opportunity closer to poorer residents.

Key infrastructure elements are critical components of the city's economic backbone. The argument focuses on the location and nature of the two sea ports (Cape Town and Saldanha), the airport, and major movement routes to show how the city can make the most of the potential of these economic assets to assist growth and break down spatial patterns of exclusion.

The roles of the two ports and the relationships between them must be optimised to assist in growth and a more sustainable pattern of settlement. We ask, for example, whether the processing and export of steel products at Saldanha can support greater settlement in this area. Could this become the Rosslyn of the Cape? Is it ideal to depend so heavily for export on the Cape Town port, with its restricted access and mix of freight and commuter traffic on surrounding road networks?

We also argue that the airport is perhaps not ideally placed for making its fullest impact and contribution to development. For example, putting a new airport near to Atlantis can assist in renewal and new development here while offering the opportunity for less friction between land and sea port-related and commuter movement. The present airport site is too small and hemmed in by residential areas to allow for the construction of a second runway. A single extra runway can make all the difference; lack of it puts the predictability of air transport in the city at risk and limits future investment decisions in the region. Obviously, a new airport would need to have rapid public transport links to the city and the proposal would be for long-term planning.

If the Cape Town airport is eventually relocated to the north, this will release over a thousand hectares of land on the Cape Flats. The careful development of this land, together with the adjacent 500ha of the Denel landholding, can fundamentally restructure opportunity patterns in the old city.

We ask: should this not be site of a future regional centre, the focus of future regional facilities, the next Century City (but thoughtfully packaged), a Midrand? Is this not the way to deal with Cape Town's poverty trap, providing an opportunity so large that it fundamentally restructures the disposition of activities in the city? An opportunity of this size (providing security and economy of scale) is the way to harness private capital meaningfully in addressing the issues of the Cape Flats.

In this way, through public action, Cape Town 2030 explores how to engage the market more aggressively in developing the city, guiding private entrepreneurship without too much prescription.

The N2 freeway is another example. Again, the nature of this infrastructure has remained unchanged over time, despite enormous change in its context. A freeway which largely served as a link between settlements now runs through the city ... a dangerous barrier that divides communities. If the cross-section of the freeway is redesigned to allow for different modes of transport; and if the freeway is integrated with adjoining communities, it can generate opportunity and contribute enormously to local economic development.

Broadly, Cape Town 2030 argues for an old city renewal and new city building growth path.

The discussion document has sparked interest in the Cape Town functional region, and, we hope, greater cooperation between the province, city and other settlements in planning and resource allocation - a precondition for meaningful long-term planning. It has shown the potential of key places, notably the Athlone power station and the coastal land abutting Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha. It has formed the basis for a series of eight district plans recently released for public comment by the city.

But some responses illustrated our self-centredness and short-term fixation as a society.

The idea to move the airport is a good example. But moving the airport is a long-term idea. In the interim you just have to manage facilities well. Existing infrastructure and building stock can largely serve a new centre on the airport site, if the will exists to integrate it by intelligent, sustainable design.

The real issues are neglected in the critique: how do we integrate Atlantis, Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha as part of a more sustainable urban space economy? How do we harness private sector participation at greater scale in constructing a more equitable future?

The essential element that is missing is leadership.

Our civic leaders are not renowned for their vision and high-mindedness, but for one-upmanship, struggles for power, and efforts and counter-efforts to discredit and smear. This, of course, is spiced with the occasional splash on the latest fad, the project which will miraculously bend our negative development path.

The City has begun a process to translate Cape Town 2030 into a statutory spatial development framework. What was a view of the future aimed at stimulating broad discussion, debate and creativity, is becoming isolated and limited.

The city leaders are defining the text as the limited instrument of the planners, not a doorway, open to all, that begins a discourse to construct a common view of the future.

Its boldness is being sanitised away.