Apartheid ended 20 years ago, so why is Cape Town

still 'a paradise for the few'? The South African city is World Design Capital 2014, yet residents of Khayelitsha township live in cramped, unhygienic conditions. The need for long-promised urban reform is urgent By Oliver Wainwright The Guardian, 30 April 2014

An 'active box' – part community centre, part safe haven – rises above the market of Cape Town's Khayelitsha township. Photograph: Joy McKinney

Sitting on a salvaged sofa in the centre of her small tin shack, Nomfusi

Panyaza looks increasingly worried, as heavy clouds gather in the sky

outside. “When it rains, the public toilets overflow into my living room,”

she says. “Water comes in through the ceiling and the electricity stops

working.”

Outside her makeshift home in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, on

the eastern edge of Cape Town, barefoot children play on the banks of an

open sewer, while cows roam next to an overflowing rubbish heap. Panyaza

shares this tiny cabin with her two daughters and four grandchildren, a

family of seven with two beds between them. “We can't sleep at night

because of the smell,” she says, speaking in Xhosa, a language peppered

with clicks that echo the droplets beginning to drum on the corrugated

metal roof. “I'm worried that the children are always getting sick.”

Twenty minutes' drive to the west, the seventh course is being served at a

banquet of assembled journalists, here to celebrate Cape Town's title

of World Design Capital 2014 on the terrace of a cliff-top villa. An infinity

pool projects out towards the Atlantic horizon, as the setting sun casts a

golden glow across the villa's seamless planes, their surfaces sparkling with

Namibian diamond dust mixed into the white concrete. Guests admire how

the bath tub is carved from a solid block of marble, while security guards

keep watch in front of a defensive ha-ha down below, ringed by an electric

fence.

Apartheid may have ended 20 years ago, but here in Cape Town the sense

of apartness remains as strong as ever. After decades of enforced

segregation, the feeling of division is permanently carved into the city's

urban form, the physical legacy of a plan that was calculatedly designed to

separate poor blacks from rich whites.

“The social engineering of apartheid came down to a very successful model

of spatial engineering,” says Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Centre

for Citiesat the University of Cape Town. Tracing his fingers over a map of

the city in his office, he explains how both natural landscape features and

manmade infrastructure were employed as physical barriers to keep the

different racial communities as isolated as possible.

“Cape Town was conceived with a white-only centre, surrounded by

contained settlements for the black and coloured labour forces to the east,

each hemmed in by highways and rail lines, rivers and valleys, and

separated from the affluent white suburbs by protective buffer zones of

scrubland,” he says.

Urban planning under apartheid used strict zoning principles. Source: David Kay

From 1948, when the apartheid administration began, South Africa's cities

adopted the strict zoning principles of modernist urban planning, taking

inspiration from Ebenezer Howard's garden city movement and Le

Corbusier's Ville Radieuse, only repurposing their dogma of functional

segregation towards racial ends.

The process of relocating Africans to peripheral townships would not only

cleanse the white centres, but create new blank sites, sterilised of any

reference to indigenous culture and tradition. These modern, orderly

settlements, it was thought, would mould the black labour force into an

orderly, submissive underclass. With security and control, rather than

health and happiness, as the chief motivations, the townships were

designed along the lines of military barracks. Streets of grim “matchbox

houses” were laid out in strict grids and surrounded by a fence, with only

two or three points of entry, allowing the police to seal off entire

neighbourhoods with minimal effort.

Driving along the main road from the airport to the city, through the barren

and windswept Cape Flats that roll out to the east, this militaristic planning

is still very much in evidence. Thirty-metre high lighting masts loom above

the homes at regular intervals, with floodlights glaring down all night over

the wide streets, so the area can be easily surveyed from a helicopter.

Housing is set back at least 60 metres from the road, a dimension, like the

lighting masts' height, that is governed by the distance you can throw a

stone.

During the years running up to the 2010 Fifa World Cup, this drive into

town was spruced up. Either side of the motorway, as part of the N2

Gateway Project, shanty-town shacks have been replaced with neat brick

and render houses, each topped with a bright orange pan-tile roof. But look

beyond this thin crust of decent homes – a block-deep Potemkin facade of

regeneration – and a sea of jumbled shacks continues to stretch endlessly

into the distance.

For all the city's attempts at a cosmetic makeover, which was roundly

condemned by international NGOs for the accompanying programme of

forced evictions, this route into town still provides a striking object lesson

in the power of apartheid planning. Beyond the townships, which appear

increasingly titivated the closer towards the city you progress, stands the

site of a former power station. Then there is a sewage treatment plant,

followed by the neatly manicured mounds of a golf course, the bend of a

river, a deep valley and a tangle of intersecting roads. The black

communities were separated from whites not only by distance, but by as

many physical obstacles as possible, the more polluting the better.

“Points of contact invariably produce friction and friction generates heat

and may lead to a conflagration,” declared South Africa's minister of the

interior, Dr T E Tonges, in 1950, when he introduced the Group Areas Act,

the law that enforced the division of cities into ethnically distinct areas. “It

is our duty therefore to reduce these points of contact to the absolute

minimum which public opinion is prepared to accept.”

Bulldozers at work in District Six, Cape Town. The area was declared white only and 60,000

former residents were forcibly removed. Photograph: AP

While it saw the savage separation of mixed-race families, and the

wholesale demolition of non-white areas – such as Cape Town's vibrant

District Six, which still stands as an overgrown wasteland in the centre of

town – the Act only cemented a tendency of white settlers retreating behind

barriers that had been present in the Cape for over 300 years.

In the mid-17th century Jan van Riebeeck, leader of the first Europeans to

settle in South Africa, proposed the typically Dutch solution of digging a

canal across the Cape Peninsular to separate the white paradise as a self-

contained island, cut off from the rest of “darkest Africa”. Unable to realise

this ambitious project, he instead decided to plant a bitter almond hedge to

keep the “black stinking dogs” out of his settlement, accompanied by

brambles and thorny bushes designed to ward off this “savage set, living

without conscience”.

Systematic segregation continued into the late 19th and early 20th

centuries, when the British colonial government forcibly resettled black

communities under the pretence of curbing an outbreak of the bubonic

plague. Further acts of parliament prevented the acquisition of land by

“natives” and limited movement by a draconian system of internal

passports, preceding apartheid legislation by 25 years. The Urban Areas Act

of 1923 ordered the removal of Africans from desirable city centres to

“locations”, one of the first of which in Cape Town, Langa (which ironically

means “sun”), was sited right next to the sewage works.

Since 1994, when the African National Congress came to power and

apartheid was finally ended, South Africa has struggled to even begin to

undo these centuries of divisive planning. In some cases, misguided

initiatives have only served to strengthen it.

“The time to build is upon us,” declared Nelson Mandela in his inaugural

speech as president, launching what would become one of the biggest state

housing development projects in the world. The Reconstruction and

Development Programme (RDP) has seen over 3.6 million new homes built

across the country since then, provided free of charge to those on monthly

incomes of less than 3,500 rand (£200). But these have come with their

own problems: despite the improvements in individual living conditions,

there is a growing realisation that the RDP housing programme has

reinforced apartheid era segregation, continuing to consign the poor to

ghettos at the furthest edges of the city. Building is one thing, but time for

planning might have been helpful first.

Walking past these identical single-story sheds, marshalled into grim

repetitive rows (not nicknamed dog kennels for nothing), it is often hard to

distinguish the RDP buildings from the hated matchbox houses built in the

townships under apartheid. They have been thrown up quickly and cheaply,

and many have already come crumbling down, while their dreary layout

reinforces the sense of living in an open-air prison. They also have the

tendency to spawn their own informal buildings next door, fuelling the

development of choked streets of unplanned shacks.

A VPUU 'active box' in Khayelitsha. Photograph: Joy McKinney

“When many people finally get an RDP house, often after 10-15 years of

waiting, they realise it makes more economic sense to build a shack in the

backyard for themselves and sell the house,” says Pieterse. “They sell them

illegally for about 40,000 rand (£2,300), a third of what it costs the state

the build them, and then they can use this cash to set up a business from

the shack. It makes a lot more economic sense than living in the RDP

house, where you're not allowed to trade.”

Wandering the potholed streets of Khayelitsha today provides such a tale of

two cities, where the planned and unplanned jostle for position. On one

side of the road stands an orderly row of RDP houses, their gable ends

neatly rendered in pastel shades of peach and tangerine. But turn the

corner and a jumble of shacks spills out behind, an energetic collage of

corrugated sheeting held up with salvaged fenceposts. There are gates

cleverly constructed from plastic crates and mail boxes fashioned from a oil

cans, all liberally doused in bright blues and pinks, greens and yellows,

tying each assemblage into a carefully crafted home.

It is easy to romanticise this vibrant, makeshift culture – indeed township

tours regularly shuttle groups of tourists out here for a dose of shanty-town

chic – but the reality of life inside belies the picturesque surface and

beaming welcome. Over a quarter of households have no access to

electricity, while each outdoor tap is shared between around twenty

families, each toilet between ten.

Every plot, whether from the RDP programme or dating from when the

township was first laid out in 1984, is now often home to four or six other

dwellings, each sharing the minimal amount of electricity provided to the

original legal household.

“Sometimes my neighbours just turn off the power and hold me to ransom,”

says Panyaza, staring at a blank television in front of her sofa, the principal

possession around which the rest of her small home is organised. In one

corner of the room, a gas canister and pile of pots indicate the kitchen area,

while behind a flimsy screen of fibreboard panels are the two bedrooms,

each no bigger than a mattress. Possessions are piled in boxes and

suitcases, as if they could be ready to leave at a moment's notice.

“We've been forgotten,” says Panyaza, who built her home ten years ago,

when she first moved here with her family from the Eastern Cape in search

of work in the city. They have been on waiting list for an RDP house ever

since.

Nomfusi Panyaza in her home. Photograph: Joy McKinney

Their story is shared by thousands of families who arrive here each year

from the poorer eastern province, an influx that sees around 10,000 new

shacks built annually in Khayelitsha alone. Originally planned as a

community of 200,000, the population now numbers around one million,

half of whom live in informal housing, making it one of the biggest and

fastest growing townships in the country.

It is a speed of growth and level poverty, with over 50% unemployment,

that has also brought Khayelitsha one of the highest crime rates in the

country, and a reputation as a place ruled by gang violence. Police say they

deal with an average of four murders a weekend, while the local hospital is

overrun with stab-wound and gunshot victims every night.

“It's so bad in some areas that the police won't even go in,” says Sonwabile

Swartbooi of the Social Justice Coalition, a local community NGO focused

on improving safety and sanitation in the area. “Children are often too

scared to walk to school in case they get caught in crossfire.”

With a Commission of Inquiry under way into alleged police inefficiency in

Khayelitsha, there is little confidence in the justice system, and vigilante

mobs sometimes take matters into their own hands. “The mobs punish

suspected criminals with 'necklacing',” says Swartbooi. “They chase them

down and beat them, then trap them inside petrol-filled tyres and set them

on fire.”

It is within this fraught context that German urban designer Michael

Krause has been working since 2008 on a series of projects that aim to

tackle violence through simple improvements to the township's streets and

spaces.

“Our approach is to positively occupy places that are perceived to be

dangerous,” he says, standing outside a construction site, where local

workmen clamber atop a structure of bright red shipping containers and

rendered sand-bag walls, soon to be a new community centre. Across a

dusty lot sits a heap of scrap metal, patrolled by a couple of emaciated dogs,

while a toddler squats in the street, examining the sole of a discarded shoe.

“This used to be the site of an illegal chop shop,” says Krause. “Hijacked

cars would be brought here to be dismantled and sold on. The community

wasn't strong enough to stand up to the criminal elements, so we took them

through a leadership process to give them the strength to do it themselves.

The choice was either build a community centre, or be ruled by criminals.

That's sustainability.”

The centre is one of a number of “active boxes” that have been built in the

area over the last few years, conceived as hubs of 24/7 activity – part

community centre, part safe haven, manned by volunteers from the nascent

neighbourhood watch initiative. Each has a multi-purpose room, used for

meetings and youth groups, along with a caretaker's flat, as well as spaces

for shops and start-up businesses or a creche. Positioned every 500 metres

along a route through the township, with their slender red watchtowers

rising above the rambling rooftops, the active boxes now stand like a line of

proud church spires.

“They are like the blue cheese in a gorgonzola,” says Krause, walking

through a huddle of market stalls, where chickens are being plucked and

corn is roasting on smoking coals. “They are safe nodes, connected by paths

that thread their way through the township, from the market to the station

to the schools and so on, defining well-lit routes monitored by passive

surveillance.”

Leading the Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading programme, an

initiative jointly funded by the provincial government and the German

Development Bank, Krause and his team spent months working with the

community to map crime hotspots and work out the safer, regularly used

routes through the area. The active boxes are accompanied by a package of

public realm improvements, from street lighting to new paving and

recreation spaces, along with “active citizenship” programmes, empowering

residents to drive these projects forward themselves.

Khayelitsha township's library and youth centre. Photograph: Joy McKinney

It is a community-led approach that contrasts with the blunt hand of

previous top-down interventions, such as the Khayelitsha shopping mall, a

cluster of out-of-town retail sheds airlifted into the township in 2005, but

hopelessly cut-off, sited the wrong side of a railway line. “They call it our

new town centre, but it's in totally the wrong place,” says one local resident,

walking back across the bridge over the tracks. “It may be shiny and new,

but it doesn't feel safe to go there.”

Just a short way to the south, in the neighbourhood of Harare, the biggest

VPUU project shows how things can be done differently. In the centre of

the area now stands a tarmac square, lined either side with new red-brick

buildings, carefully designed to frame this new civic space with active

frontages. There is a big new library to one side (which now claims to be the

busiest public library in Cape Town) next to a building called the Love Life

youth centre. Lining the other edge of the square is a neat row of live-work

units, with what looks like the beginnings of a high street, complete with a

hair salon, internet cafe, co-op bank, TV repair shop, security company and

a restaurant – all things that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago,

when independent business was outlawed in the townships.

“It's completely changed the feeling of the area,” says 18-year old Bongi

Qwesha, walking through the square on her way back from school. “It

wouldn't have felt safe to hang around here a few years ago, but now we all

come here after school to meet in the square and go on the internet.”

Krause says there has been a 33% reduction in the murder rate in Harare

since the programme began in 2005, along with an increase in the general

perception of safety (if only from 2 to 2.8 on a 5-step scale), figures which

have seen the programme already expanded to other townships around the

city.

But it hasn't come without a fight. Krause's team, and those who rent the

new business units, face regular intimidation from the gangs, whose iron

grip over the local economy is being slowly displaced by these initiatives.

“That's why we never just wade in and move people on,” says Krause. “It's a

very long and intense process of giving the community the confidence to do

it for themselves. The city could just continue to airlift these spanking new

facilities on to empty sites around the township, but when we do it, we take

the time to make sure it's in the right place. It can take up to two years, just

to assemble the land for a small project.”

The VPUU's work has yet to reach the peripheral lanes where Panyaza and

her family reside, but she has heard that new flushing pubic toilets are on

their way, to replace the chemical portaloos – prone to being locked from

the outside and tipped over while someone is inside. “If they stop

overflowing, we'll sleep better at night,” she says. “But I'm not holding my

breath.”

Back in the centre of Cape Town, the World Design Capital entourage

returns from the Veuve Clicquot Masters Polo tournament, “South Africa's

most exclusive luxury lifestyle event,” where celebrities mingle with

designers in the impossibly picturesque surroundings of the Val de Vie

estate, in the rolling winelands to the north of the city. High on a cliff above

the city, a cocktail reception awaits at another hilltop mansion, where a

manicured lawn commands panoramic views across the bay – and from

where guests notice billowing clouds of smoke rising in the distance. “Don't

worry,” assures their guide, reaching for another glass of champagne. “It's

probably just a fire in one of the townships.”

Following Torino, Seoul and Helsinki, Cape Town is the fourth city to be

awarded the title of World Design Capital, an accolade bestowed by the

Montreal-based International Council for Societies of Industrial Design,

which charges a hefty fee to honour a different city with its logo each year.

Cape Town has pumped around £3m of public money into its year of

design, but it's hard to tell quite where all the cash has gone. There are craft

fairs aplenty, showcasing fine ceramics and bespoke furniture, and open

studios demonstrating bronze casting and elaborate taxidermy, but most of

the funds appear to have been directed at a launch event in London, a New

Year's Eve party, a gala dinner and a weekend conference. As a result, many

of Cape Town's more established designers and architects have decided to

boycott the bonanza.

Cape Town's central business district. Photograph: Eric Nathan/Alamy

“I am offended that the word 'design' can be used so loosely, without any

consideration for the damage it is doing,” says architect Jo Noero, who has

built a body of work across the country over the last 30 years that is deeply

embedded in serving the urgent needs of its poorest communities. From

schools and community centres, to low-cost housing designed to be

partially self-built and adapted by residents, his buildings are made “with

the same integrity in the townships as they would have anywhere else,” he

says. “Only that way will we ever begin to dismantle the idea of there being

two different worlds in South Africa. Buildings must be designed to engage

the enthusiasm and creativity of people – that's the only way a tradition of

fine building will develop.”

He says that apartheid utterly destroyed the capacity of people to think

about upgrading their own homes, and the reconstruction and development

programme is only doing the same. “The government is still very

paternalistic, so people expect it will provide everything,” he adds. “And

they still fear that the more freedom you give people, the less easy it is to

control them.

“In South Africa there is a horrible lack of imagination about the future.

There are grand plans to build whole new satellite cities outside Cape Town,

but they're following the same model of putting the poorest people furthest

away. It seems like we're just repeating all the mistakes of the past.”

A few streets away, Noero's former partner, Heinrich Wolff, sits at a desk

surrounded by a plethora of models of schools and housing projects, as well

as a scheme for a dramatic transformation of a dockside warehouse into a

new public-facing “innovation hub” for the university.

“We have massive spatial injustices in our city and we've just been sitting

and staring at it for the last 20 years,” he says. “When Mandela came to

power we had an incredible moment of change. Optimism gripped us all

about a future that would happen – through ongoing transformation, not

revolution. We are still busy with that project, but there is now a real

urgency.”

He says the voices calling for immediate change are fast growing in strength

and volume, with radical groups like Julius Malema's Economic Freedom

Fighters surging in popularity, as more and more grow disaffected with the

ruling ANC. The incendiary red beret-wearing politician, who fires up

frenzied crowds with his song “Kill the Boer” at township rallies, promising

to unleash a reign of violent retribution, is what keeps white South Africans

awake at night.

“Cape Town is a paradise for the minority, but I could hope for a city where

everyone has access to the same opportunities that I have,” says Wolff.

“Mandela may have postponed revolution – but for how much longer is the

question.”