Sketches

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...