The Athlone Tower Precinct - the new Cape Town CBD?

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 possibility of a triangle of land that can open up these three areas to each other, is so huge. This is potentially a landmark un-engineering project for apartheid town-planning, and the beginning of a rollout of similar de-trangulation / de-strangulation buffer engineering projects to try and bring disparate communities into communion.

Easy enough to create a buffer zone, but how to populate them, re-imagine them and re-configure them so that people will use the spaces, that people from all over will use the spaces. How to make relevant and compelling social spaces?

One of the ideas is to create a zone centred by an integrated rapid transit node, with train (the line runs past the station already), bus and minibus all converging here; physical mobility is the heart of a zone that is smart-wired for IP mobility, with several thousand mixed-grade apartments (and by mixed-grade I mean social or subsidsed housing for lower-income residents, middle tier apartments and then the penthouse kind of movement). There would be a cultural precinct with restaurants and recreation and library and live music and theatre possibilities, art galleries etc, and then a major retail component with anchor tenants such as big supermarkets. A supermarket would be relevant to all the surrounding neighbourhoods. As of course would a central transport interchange.

The 30hectare tower precinct would take up a substantial part of the Cape Town central area, ie the part of the city that is considered Cape Town proper. So my thinking is, with the location of the tower precinct is just about dead-centre of the metropole, could this not become the new CBD or the new downtown?


I'll update this blog soon with pics and thoughts from the day of the demolition, 22 August.
Have a lovely day.
Iain