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 possibi...