Sketches

The fishing village of Khayelitsha... or the city of Khayelitsha? Khayelitsha is a city. It has a bigger population than most European capital centres. It has five train stations of its own, and numerous taxi ranks. Apparantly, it is the fastest growing suburb in South Africa. Khayelitsha is a city. And yet, we call it a township. (Because it doesn't have a cathedral, noted one commentator!) Public art in the Khayelitsha CBD, between the courts and the public baths. 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. The neighbourhood called Camissa. When we Capetonians say we are `going to town', we don't mean to Athlone town centre, or the CBD of Wynberg or Khayelithsa. We mean the old city at the foot of the table topped 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...

Sketched this in 2008. But how could Cape Town de-centralise? Isn't `the city' actually the historic centre? Isn't `the city' this entity that encompasses all below? Uptown is Khayelitsha, downtown is Tableview? We haven't changed the language we use. Cape Town was Long St, the Grand Parade, Buitengracht etc a very long time ago. Cape Town is now Klipfontein Rd, Lansdowne Rd, NY1, Thames Avenue, Modderdam Road, Voortrekker Rd as well as Long St et al. East City nowadays is the Khayelitsha Mitchell's Plain coastline. West City is Tableview Milnerton. `Cape Town as we call it today is the `old city'. nesce pas? Can we change the economics of the city if we change the way we see it?

You can't get away from the mountain. But we got away from the towers. So here are just some pics from two of my current favourite spaces: The Tower Precinct Waterfront Park (former Athlone Towers), and the Manenberg Waterfront. And at the centre of both is the Mountain. The perspective from this side is very refreshing. These pictures should provide the sense in what I'm saying. Managed to miss the actual demolition of the towers due to early implosion. The City of Cape Town could never be a live TV show! However the implosion itself was not as interesting as the way in which Cape Town responded to it. I was on the Kewtown, Athlone side of the N2, where it was a carnival. People on the rooftops, traffic jams, hooting. It was World Cup stuff. I'll post a couple of pictures of all of this shortly. What was most fascinating on the day - post implosion still looking for a good viewing site - David and myself found an entrance to the park in the City's Waste Management...

On Wednesday, my colleague Michael and I spent the afternoon doing content development. We went looking for new possibilities, new angles, refinements, intrigue etc, all the stuff that makes our tours swing, that makes the threads converge where we need them to. One of Cape Town's hot talking points at the moment is the imminent demolition of the Athlone Towers. Athlone Towers? somebody asked, `aren't they in Langa?' Huh! So this is the crux. The towers are on the Langa side of the N2 freeway, in a 30 something hectare area of land, a triangle buffering the `garden suburb' of Pinelands, formerly white; Langa, formerly black, still considered a township; and Kewtown and Silvertown, part of Athlone, formerly coloured, and still considered a township. The Tower complex is the epitomy of apartheid planning. It separates three sets of communities created along colour lines. And it keeps these communities separated. And this is why the demolition of the towers and the possibi...