Sketches

What is goema?

2011-11-23T17:00:00.002+02:00

Goema is a music of liberation.

It is a music of transcendence.

Cape Town is a pirate city. We are a pirate of cultures. It's like Cape Town has pirated pieces of the whole world. Everything is gathered here. Cape Town is a port city after all, absorbing the world over hundreds of years. It's a touch of Europe, a little bit of India and Malaysia, it is a piece of Africa, there's Brazil in here and there's America and Israel and Maputo. Cape Town is not one thing: it is many things in one.

The music of this city with multiple identities is called goema. The name originates with the Khoe people. The Khoe women played a drum, it was called a goma, because of the ox skin that covered the drum. The women would play and the men would dance.

Over hundreds of years, bantu tribes migrated south, missionaries arrived, colonisers laid claim and slaves were imported to the city. As the music of these worlds collided and became a common language, the goma became goema.

Think of samba. It emerged in the favelas, the slums, out of hundreds of years of oppression, and now it infuses everything in the Brazilian nation. Goema is our samba. It is our blues, it is our rebel music. It is our home.

Goemarati - a music strategy as design

2011-07-24T23:24:00.000+02:00

I'm not a designer. I trained as an actor and film-maker, and became an entrepreneur.

But I've learned that design is at the heart of everything that we do - if not always entirely by design. So that makes us all designers, in an unconscious way.

In people's homes, decisions have been made about where to put this painting in relation to that picture, where the chair stands in relation to the sofa, the pot plant in relation to the graduation certificate. These are all design decisions, but very few people doing this would consider themselves as designers.

I watch my son, he's 14 months old, plot his routes. Even at this early stage of life, design is central. When we walk out of the apartment, he has a specific routine. He always turns right out of the door. He touches the geyser outlet pipe on the wall. He touches the neighbour's gate. He stops at Leon's bamboo wind chimes, flicks it, and when it sounds, he laughs and turns to me. Then he grabs a stone from the pot plant and hands it to me. Every time, exactly the same. He has designed a set of rituals. And the design process is unconscious.

So I have realised that everyone is a designer. Some design unconsciously by virtue of being alive, and others design by design, as practicioners.

In 2007 I produced a project called Goemarati. The roleplayers were Coffeebeans Routes, working with Creative Cape Town, the Cape Town Partnership and Lunch Communications, with funding from the Department of Economic Development and Tourism. We designed an intervention for the music industry of the Western Cape built around the distinctly Cape Town music called goema.

And I use the term design very deliberately, as we were consciously designing a solution to a problem. It just so happened that the design solution wasn't a manufacturable outcome.

Goemarati had four primary components:

1. thirteen live performances, one each month on Church Square in the central city, one in a suburb of the Cape Flats.
2. an online sales portal for Cape Town music and creative products
3. a street level mobile shop, an extension of the online shop, in the form of a loud tricycle
4. a monthly `zine', an edgy monochrome fold out magazine designed by Lunch, profiling the featured artists for the month, the Cape Town product available for sale, and celebrating a different facet of Cape Town’s history, especially stories from the era of slavery.

Take a look here at the full online report: http://www.coffeebeans.co.za/goemarati/report/start.html

So we designed an umbrella marketing campaign for music and other creative products from Cape Town, using monthly live shows as the leverage, alongside local and global sales platforms and a dedicated monthly publication.

Kalkfontein

And one of the core elements underpinning the musical strategy, was a spatial strategy: connecting the central city as a site of heritage with sites in the Cape Flats, and by doing so attempting to create the basis for stronger linkages and movements of people and ideas. We wanted to link across apartheid boundaries and beyond cultural disconnects. Had the project lived beyond its pilot phase, this would have been a significant long term device for shifting some of the parameters of apartheid town planning and mental ghettos.

Khayelitsha

The tagline for the initiative was `You are Welcome’, and the entire project was designed to be inclusive. The criteria to be featured for performance was that you had to have product, in any form, whether it be an MP3 song or poem. The open mic session surprised us, it was oversubscribed for all performances except one, and turned out to the be most significant performance element of the project. It made us realise that if Cape Town doesn’t create spaces for its young people to be heard in public forums, we are incubating a time bomb.

The mobile vendor on Long Street

The project’s success was also its failure. You can’t measure on paper the value of the open mic sessions, the hunger to get on stage and be heard. You can’t make tangible in a report the effect on children of seeing a local star perform in the rain at the taxi rank close to their home. Except for the stats of the project - audience numbers, financial benefit to the industry, units of product sold etc - you can’t adequately measure the extent of the impact of such a project in its first few years.

We designed a powerful initiative, but one that couldn’t leave permanence after its pilot 8 months, one that wasn’t designed to leave permanence. Politicians in their 5 year stints need to tick boxes, show legacy, and a culture project is too difficult to measure and therefore that money is diverted to more tangible, measurable activities. That was the thinking behind not continuing after the pilot. That, and the instability of the Western Cape's politics at that time, shifting so constantly between political masters. This is one of the crises of South African government: it does not, in any of its designations, know what to do with culture. Identity, how we perceive ourselves, is a crucial economic cog.

And so there lies one of Goemarati's crucial design flaws: we couldn’t measure cultural impact. And its something that needs to be worked on. Any suggestions would be welcome!

The Secrets of the Baxter

2011-07-12T21:48:00.002+02:00

Dirty secrets? Not really. The Baxter is a public entity, audited, all dirty washing aired, and or turned into a production.

No, the Secrets of the Baxter is a new experience that I'm excited about, something that Coffeebeans Routes has created in partnership with the Baxter Theatre.

Sometime in 2010, Michelle Constant, CEO of Business Arts South Africa, joined one of our Jazz Safaris, and shortly after met with Baxter Theatre CEO Lara Foot. Michelle called me after the meeting and said Iain you have to have to have to meet with Lara and talk about creating a theatre tour together.

So Lara and I met. And then months later, after lots of thought, myself and Lana Paries started putting things together. Very quickly we hit on the right mix, and in June this year we tested it out.

Below is what it looks like, we think its a winner, will be interesting to see over the coming summer season how it does. Expect to see a lot about it in the media over the next year. We anticipate that by the summer of the 2012/2013 season, if a tsunami hasn't moved us all to the highlands of Zimbabwe, we will not be able to meet the demand.

Look out soon for another theatre experience we are creating, together with the Out the Box Festival (early September 2011), and the Handspring Puppet Company. That will be something that debuts with the festival and runs regularly thereafter. Will post on that as soon as we are ready.

Regards to everyone, I hope your families are happy.
Iain
@iainiain

Secrets of the Baxter
A Baxter Theatre Centre and Coffeebeans Routes collaboration

Secrets of the Baxter takes `Dinner and a show' to a new level. If you've always wanted to stand on a theatre stage, hear rapturous applause and experience the bright lights, then this is for you. If the idea of a behind-the-scenes tour of a bustling theatre thrills you, then book Secrets of the Baxter.

For a limited-edition specialist theatre experience, guests will get a backstage pass to the Baxter Theatre Centre in Rondebosch. Coffeebeans Routes collects guests from their hotels and welcomes them into the Baxter's lounge. Over a glass of wine, we meet the Baxter Theatre Centre's host for the night, take a guided tour of the complex and discover what happens behind the scenes. See artists in preparation. Hear the stories that have made the Baxter what it is today. Step onto a stage and experience the sensation of being in front of a full house!

For dinner, in the recently renovated restaurant run by The Forum, enjoy a Taste of the Cape, featuring highlights of the Cape's traditional menu.

And then it's time for the show. Secrets of the Baxter will feature cutting-edge productions, focusing on original local theatre, showcasing South African stories.

After the show, how about a drink at the Play bar, and maybe a chat with the performers who regularly gather here after coming off the stage!

Thereafter, Coffeebeans Routes will escort you back to your accommodation, having drunk deeply on our stories, and having discovered the Secrets of the Baxter!

Places on Secrets of the Baxter are limited, and advance booking is essential. Secrets of the Baxter takes place on certain nights during the run of selected productions, and numbers are limited to 14 per night.

For updates, follow @coffeebeansrout and @BaxterTheatre on Twitter, and `Like' Coffeebeans Routes and Baxter Theatre on Facebook

All bookings through Coffeebeans Routes
info@coffeebeansroutes.com
+27 21 424 3572
coffeebeansroutes.com

R795 per person including transfers, welcome drink, Taste of the Cape dinner, tour and show. The tour is hosted by a Baxter Theatre Centre host, and a Coffeebeans Routes guide.

Creating a Pan-African Festival Travel Circuit

2011-06-15T17:38:00.074+02:00

The St Louis Jazz Festival,
in St Louis, Senegal

Back in 1999, I attended the WOMEX World Music Conference and Marketplace in Berlin. One of the most interesting sessions there was one looking at creating a pan-African festival circuit, much like what Europe has, with festivals connecting, and making it possible for artists to tour festivals in Africa.

12 years later, we're perhaps marginally closer to that, but we certainly haven't made the kind of progress that was anticipated. Political instability is one reason, funding another, but one of the most crucial, I believe, is the lack of good, cost-effective, regional travel options in Africa. As you know, it is damn expensive to travel within Africa, far more so that to travel from somewhere in Africa to Europe.

From the Sauti za Busara festival, Zanzibar, Tanzania, East Africa's most important festival

That is now starting to change. Once upon a time, there was Air Afrique, which made a lot of things possible. But they went bust. Only in the last two years or so have South African low cost carriers started offering flights to other parts of Africa, and other African national carriers are starting to do the same. The costs are coming down. The frequencies getting better.

And so we are looking more capable - from a mobility point of view - of achieving some of the goals laid out in 1999. There are some other areas that are not looking so good, still, and that's the topic for another post sometime.

There's not much tourism to Angola at this point, but the possibilities are huge. This festival opens up a lot
of opportunities, for the country and the region

Since that time my interest has shifted from being exclusively pan-African music to a combination of pan-African music and travel. And the opportunities for pan-African festival travel packages are hot.

In 2009 Coffeebeans Routes put together a business plan for the creation of a set of such festival packages, working with the Arterial Network. It was an insightful process. While there are thousands and thousands of safari offerings and safari operators and agents, there are some five entities offering festival packages in Africa. It's a wide open space. And of those offerings, none of them offer much more than flights, hotel and tickets. Pretty much nothing that gets you inside the city you are going to.

Fespaco, Africa's most
important film festival, in
Ouagadougou, Burkina
Faso

And so I am delighted that, in alliance with the Out of the Box Festival in Cape Town, we have now made a start on realising our goal of offering a variety of Coffeebeans Routes pan-African festival travel packages. Eventually you will be able to book a package with Coffeebeans to experience - very deeply - some incredible festivals in Africa:

- Fespaco Film Festival, Ougadougou, Burkina Faso- Sauti za Basura, Zanzibar, Tanzania - Cape Town International Jazz Festival
- Maputo International Jazz Festival
- Luanda International Jazz Festival
- Mawazine, Rabat, Morocco
- St Louis Jazz Festival, St Louis, Senegal
- Ethiopian Music Festival, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
- HIFA, Zimbabwe

It'll take some time before we are offering packages around the whole lot, but that is the goal. And there are others too...

Int'l music festival in Morocco

This September of 2011, the process begins with the 9 day Out of the Box Festival in Cape Town, a festival of puppetry, physical theatre and cinema. Coffeebeans will be offering a small selection of small-group travelling theatre experiences as part of the festival. And in 2012 we plan to be offering full packages with accommodation, tickets, behind the scenes experiences, tours etc.

Here is the little press release that went out on Tue the 14th at the press launch for the Out the Box Festival.

Thanks for listening
Iain
@iainiain
@coffeebeansrout

Out the Box Festival September 2011

Coffeebeans Routes is delighted to be a part of the 2011 Out of the Box Festival. It is a part of our strategy, as a pioneering cultural travel company, to work with pan-African festivals, finding novel ways to bring storytelling into the tourism economy.

The long term goal of the alliance is for Coffeebeans to offer international travellers compelling packages around the festival, including flights, accommodation, tickets, `behind the scenes' festival activities, as well as tours. This would ultimately form part of our pan-African circuit of festival packages, including festivals such as the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, Sauti za Busara Zanzibar and the Addis Ababa International Music Festival.

As a starting point in 2011, Coffeebeans will be curating a set of `fringe' theatre experiences, working with community theatre organisations that have been through the Unima Active Puppets programme. Available to very small groups of up to 12 guests per event, Coffeebeans will take guests to unusual spaces for short form performances by township-based physical and puppet theatre practitioners.

Closer to the time more detail will be announced.

In the meantime, take a look at what Coffeebeans does by visiting www.coffeebeansroutes.com

Watch http://www2.outtheboxfestival.com/ for updates on the festival activities.
And follow @UNIMA_SA for Twitter updates

Please don't feed the whales

2011-05-15T23:26:00.000+02:00

Hermanus is the armpit of the Western Cape, isn't it. What a way to destroy a coastline. We scream and shout about coastal mining or other issues, but I haven't heard an outcry about Hermanus. Hermanus is what fracking looks like. That coastal walk isn't enough to save it. And nor are the whales. Like the UAE, Hermanus needs to consider what it becomes when the whales (or oil) have gone. Just a coastline, endless bad food and tacky B&Bs with lots of dos and don'ts.

And it's not just Hermanus, it's that whole strip from just after Hawston - Onrus right through to Hermanus is just an industrial wasteland of malls and warehouses and Tuscan retirement Villas on the N2. Graceless and creedless.

(Do a quick search in your favourite search engine for Hermanus. You will find nothing that shows town centre, it's all sea and coast and hotels, and just about nothing featuring people, except for some archive portraits, click for BING and GOOGLE results).

But that coastline is beautiful. It was wild and cold on the day I was there, and magnificent.

I was staying around the corner in Elgin, at the Old Mac Daddy. I think it's one of the country's best little escapes. Much much better than the Grand Daddy version on top of the Grand Daddy hotel. The combination of whim and nature is a killer. I rolled out of the Mills and Boone airstream, onto a deck that opened into a sky of apple orchards. I want to come back in summer.

Elgin is getting sharp with packaging and presenting itself. I didn't realise there were so many wine estates here. The Ross Glower Cab Sav is a fine glass of wine, at R40 per glass at the Old Mac Daddy's restaurant, Brinny Breez. The estate is one door down from the Mac, so to speak. Everything is nicely signposted in a unified attempt to present the area. The Orchards farmstall has gone to hell, but Peregrines, which I remember years ago as being the dogs ass of the area, is now the bees knees. And they were busy busy busy. And serving good coffee, they're proudly, almost smugly, using Origin Coffee, and I couldn't help wondering how much of an impact the hipsters draw to the Old Mac Daddy have made on the region's tourism decisions.

(check out the Old Mac Daddy at oldmacdaddy.co.za, book as soon as you can)

Hermanus, by contrast, is still on its National Party 99 year lease scheme, and stinks of arrogance and short termism and ex pat paternalism. There's nothing hip about it except the book shop on a strip of sly 4 star hotels. Back at Coffeebeans HQ a while back we did some research on non-whale related tourism activities in Hermanus, and apart from a beer tour and some wine tastings at estates in the region, and don't forget the boat trips to get closeup to the whales, there was nothing worth mentioning.

Which doesn't mean that it isn't getting the visitors. In spite of the horror that is itself, its pumping with tourists. But they're not coming for Hermanus stories. It is presently impossible to hear any above the din of a town becoming a concrete slum. Hermanus is eating itself from the inside out.

Is there a plan to change the course of Hermanus?

So what is being put in place to provide alternatives?

Cape Town Tourism has signed an agreement with the Overberg region to work together to develop and refine tourism opportunities beyond the whales, but what is local government doing to develop innovation and change beyond the status quo of circa 1989 mentality and tuscan architecture?

Pretty soon there'll be signs saying don't feed the whales...

Designing for Dialogue - Cape Town's blueprint design challenge

2011-04-14T01:47:00.005+02:00

Can design change the world?

In South Africa, design entrenched apartheid. Our town planning was carried out on a design brief of isolation. That was the apartheid blueprint.

Cape Town is splendid in its design dysfunction. Freeways and train lines divide neighbourhoods and isolate us into language groups; common recreation areas there are none; in a city surrounded by the sea, some of us have never even seen it! That is how isolated and immobile we are.

To enable the city, to undesign the trenches - metaphorical and physical - that divide it, we need design for dialogue.

Design for dialogue - design that transforms physical spaces in a way that brings people together who otherwise would not be able to. In coming together we are able to discover how similar - rather than how different - we are, and we discover shared resources. In these discoveries we are better equipped to act on opportunity. And if the design is right, there is the physical mobility available to get us where we need to be to benefit from these opportunities, and the intellectual mobility to share our ideas. Good design creates dialogue and opportunity. Bad design creates silence and isolation.

(Here's some thoughts on the topic http://www.designfordialogue.org/, by the guys who coined the term).

On the 31st of March 2011, the Cape Town Design Network (@ctdnetwork), a new entity, hosted its debut event, bringing together architects, designers, cultural entrepreneurs, policy makers and all sorts of interested people, from across the city. It's the same mould as the original Creative Cluster sessions presented by Creative Cape Town.

One of the CTDN's core activites is `[the promotion] of the use of design to solve economic, social, geographic, infrastructural and political legacy problems'.

And so to the post-apartheid design brief. For it's first session, CTDN came out with a strong push in the direction of design as a tool for social change and economic development.

CTDN invited four speakers to the first event that would bring out different facets of this brief:

Yehuda Raff introduced us to the Fringe Innovation District project he's co-ordinating on behalf of Creative Cape Town. Follow the link to explore it.
Yj Tsai (@tsaidesign), of Tsai Design Studios, showed us some of his container projects, and an idea to paint a South African flag on top of hundreds of shack roofs as a welcome to visitors. He's got some intriguing design solutions
Khalied Jacobs of Jakupa architects and urban designers introduced us to a group of poor women who contracted Jakupa to design their own RDP development.
And me myself (@iainiain), from Coffeebeans Routes, I was invited to speak on The Centres of Cape Town, a presentation based on a previous blog and the notion of an ideal city mimicking neural networks.

The Field Office was the venue, a cool little coffee shop kind of hipster joint in the heart of the Innovation District, and it was packed. The Jack Black lookalike behind the bar was a bit taken a back it seemed, and refused to hand out the free cheese and biscuits.

The trolley-homes of the neighbourhoods homeless were as loud as passing trains intermittently just outside the window (what will happen to them as the zone develops and inevitably pushes them out, is there a solution with the design of the Innovation District?).

Live tweets of the event were projected onto a tweet wall on one side of the bar, that was very cool (could be an interesting educational tool?). Big ups to super-tweeter @futurecapetown, who types faster on an iphone than Steve Jobs, and who captured superbly the salient points of the evening.

And what a lovely audience between these walls. Attentive and open and interested. That's a good start for creating change.

As an invited speaker what pleased me the most was that I was invited. What I mean is that I'm not a designer, I don't move in the design world, although a lot of my work is the design of experiences. It's great that the CTDN doesn't want to talk only to its own community, but to engage many communities. That's the only way this will work. The other day I was talking to a creative head who was pitching his way-out creative project, a project about creativity and how to be creative, to creatives. And I was saying but brother, you need to pitch this to people outside of the creative industries, it's useless to sell cakes to cake makers, sell them to cake eaters.

So I`m imagining a kind of monthly circuit of these events, hosted by many different strands of Cape Town business; TED-ish oriented presentations with dialogue around them, and they all invite speakers from different sectors in order to inform their own. That in itself would be a form of dialogue for design.

The thing is that Cape Town wants to talk. But the interventions are not always there that make it possible. Events like these put some fire in the hole.

Where are the centres of Cape Town?

2010-10-05T12:29:00.001+02:00

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 commercial centre of Wynberg. She would talk about going `to town' – going to the historic centre - as a major excursion, something to dress up for. Two young ladies I met on the train to Khayelitsha recently, they told me they had gone `to town' to look for work.

Tourism companies offer `City Tours', which are usually walking tours of the inner-city, from the BoKaap to District Six, and down to the foreshore. `City Tours' tours never include townships, and never include the Northern Suburbs, Southern Suburbs or the Atlantic Sea Board. For tourism language, the city is really tiny.

Just take a look at Metro Rail's rail map, above, and see how in this model, all roads lead to Rome, ie the historic centre. And how the same map shows you how big the city really is. The centre of Cape Town, the old city, is a tiny part.

For a long time I've been intrigued by how we perceive the scale of a city. Joburg is considered a big city. Cape Town is considered a small city. In population size, both cities are quite close, separated by a few hundred thousand. And in landmass they are also close (Cape Town has the mountain range taking up a lot of space). If you travel from Hout Bay town centre to Mitchells Plain town centre, you'll realise just how big Cape Town is. If you travel by train and taxi each day from Symphony Way in Delft, to the Harbour in Hout Bay, you'll know that the city can be as big as about two and a half hours. Each way! On a good day.

And yet Cape Town is perceived as small. And that is partly because we see only one centre.

Recently on this blog I posted a 2008 sketch I did where I repositioned the centre of Cape Town in Langa. It was a conceptual idea - how differently do we look at Cape Town if we put the centre of the city in the visual centre of the map of the metropole?

How to turn the centres of Mitchell's Plain, Athlone and Guguletu into thriving
zones that attract a diversity of Capetonians?

It's a bit facile, perhaps. But the point is: how do we look at this city differently?

Andrew Boraine, the visionary CEO of the Cape Town Partnership, responded that it's not about repositioning the centre. That it is not about maintaining a single centre in a city. It's about multiple centres. He commented that “Cape Town is today a multi-nodal or polycentric metropolitan area, no longer a radial city with the traditional Central Business District (CBD) of 50-100 years ago.”

And I agree with him completely. Cape Town does indeed have multiple centres. I've touched on just some of them above.

But we don't see them as centres. Not us as citizens, not the city governers. We are very Roman in still, today, deferring to the `throne of power', the epicentre of Cape Town, ie the historic centre. The radial perspective of the city is still exactly how most of us Capetonians still see the city. And while it is true that the historic centre is, as Andrew says, “one of the few spaces in our divided city where a relatively diverse range of Capetonians meet each other on the streets, in the public spaces and at events”, surely the future of the city is one where this kind of diversity exists in multiple parts of the city.

The Manenberg Waterfront. A hot attraction in the next ten years, and the
centre of new Manenberg?

And so, for the moment, I would like to pose a set of questions.

How do we transform the city's other centres into spaces that we would consider `town'? How do we make Langa town centre a space that residents of Woodstock, for example, head to for entertainment?

How do the zones that most need the economic development, that would benefit most from the effects of diversity and densification, diversify? How does Bonteheuwel, for example, open up and attract a diversity of residents and a diverse internal economy?

And how do we start to see a place like Khayelitsha as the major urban centre that it is, rather than simply a township?

The Athlone Tower precinct from the sewerage works on the other side of the N2.
I'm excited to see what this all gets turned into. It could create a hot new node
for the city.

How do we change the language we use in order to change the way we see things? We know that in this city, the more we find each other across the boundaries mapped out by apartheid town planning, the more we change the way we experience and see and express the city.

Is there the space in, for example, Langa, a neighbourhood with a lot of heritage, to create a smart wired and smartly priced residential Piazza, with stunning views of the mountain, that can draw a diversity of young professionals as first time buyers who cannot afford an apartment in the old centre?

Why is Mzoli's about the only attraction in Cape Town's Cape Flats suburbs?

And how do we as citizens of Cape Town collectively imagine the future of the city?

Bonteheuwel, outside the library precinct in town centre.

What happens when you move the centre?

2010-09-06T22:45:00.002+02:00

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?

The Mountain, The Manenberg Waterfront, The Towers Park.

2010-08-24T23:57:00.001+02:00

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 facility, in a little cul-de-sac. A lucky discover.

From Jan Smuts Drive, at the fence of the waste water management plant

The Mountain. From Pinelands side of the Tower Precinct

From the Pinelands side

From the Langa side.

The park in the waste water management plant. Not open to the public, but there are soccer posts beyond the trees.

Post-towers, from the park. I didn't know this space existed, thought it was all water processing stuff. But here is a lake with ducks in it. Makes me imagine an urban park, opening into Kewtown, under the N2 and into the Tower Precint.

Post-towers. Love the turbine hall. Could be rugby posts.

The possibility of a park already there is very delicious. So would the waste processing plant section be moved? Could these two sides of the N2 be linked?

Another urban park is the Manenberg Waterfront, the subject of a future post. What a view of the mountain.

It's that mountain again. Perhaps the view from here will one day become as iconic? The mountain of the new downtown?

Manenberg? Is where its at.

The Mountain, from Bokmakierrie side.

The Athlone Tower Precinct - the new Cape Town CBD?

2010-08-13T11:03:00.000+02:00

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