Difference and Disparity in Cape Town

Today was a pretty nice stroke of luck. The Wi-Fi connection was very much non-existent and my guidebook fairly dire, therefore I was quite at a loss with regards to where to wander. Cape Town has large highways and is much bigger than many of the cities I have visited on my travels. I also arrived in the middle of the night and couldn’t quite get my bearings in terms of where I was in relation to the centre. I wandered out of my room with a blank expression on my face and bumped into Jhono and Jack. Both, along with Sophie were the team running the workshop over the next two weeks. We all went for breakfast in Observatory, which was a first glimpse into my surroundings and my first meeting with the team I am working with.

Observatory seems like a very much a gentrified part of town. The place we had breakfast in was also a bookshop and there was coffee shop after coffee shop with hipsters and artisan blends. In the evenings, trendy bars would fill up with young people and the town has a buzz to it. This is my home for the next two months. As someone who is very well travelled and has extensive experience in east Africa, Cape Town scared me. Not for reasons such as crime and violence which exists everywhere to different extents, but more because it is one of the most unique places I have ever been to. It is a place of extreme wealth and extreme poverty with a tumultuous history so evident in its urban order and form. I had absolutely no idea as to what to expect, but it has been a very different experience in comparison to my visits to other African cities.

After, we went to the DAG office to finalise some workshop documents. Sophie ran the seminar and is someone I have been in close contact with over the last few months so it has been great to meet in person and to also learn more about Jack and Jhono. I find it so exciting to meet development practitioners (a term I learnt today. Architects/urban people who work in the development sector). We all got on immediately. I had a conversation about how falling into this niche line of work was a moment where my passions for working with community and my youth work aligned with my career and it all clicked. My friends will know it as the moment where ‘I get that fire in my belly’. I have and still do everything I can to have positive effect in my community and am inspired by the youth that I mentor and work with. My upbringing and my environment has defined me, but to be able to combine that with my practice… that’s the golden ticket. I had a good conversation with Jack who works in rural areas. He has gone back to the area he grew up in, fostering relationships between community, municipality, architects and civil bodies in order to push forward in development. We were talking about the difficulties of going to an area you are connected to, but also the advantages in terms of access to community and local knowledge. He showed me some of his farming schemes and a project for a borehole as the area is so disconnected from infrastructure and collecting water was the most laborious task of the day.

Jack and I also looked at a workshop called Play the City he ran in Khayelitsha, with street vendors and traders, municipal representatives and architects. It was a workshop which uses gaming with pre made models to engage multiple stakeholders in resolving complex urban challenges. Play Khayelitsha is a 'negotiation game' designed to help transform the centre of South Africa's second-largest township, a neighbourhood in acute need of development. In khayelitscha land is contested, and many of these people have been on it for so long and want a right to it rather than foreign investors who have never stepped on it. He said much of the power was purely in all these bodies having the opportunity to be in the same room and fostering more human relationships. It’s something that I have also found so important, both in architectural work and in the youth work I have done. Whilst Sophie and Jhono were finishing off the presentation I chatted to Jack, made some terrible coffees and was teased heavily for my Doc Martens. I like these people.

We then dumped our bags at the hostel and met my new colleague Ryan. I will be working alongside Ryan at DAG. Ryan much like Johno, Jack and Sophie is a force. They are all such intelligent people with such a profound knowledge for culture, politics, environment and people. Ryan has just finished a masters at UTC, the Cape Town University. Ryan described how the university is predominantly white, and that for young people in his town it was quite a radical thing to see a ‘coloured’ person from the same background go to such an institution. Ryan is an urban planner and has always been interested in the social and policy side of things; the things which inform the Architects. It is his knowledge and ability to pull the many different strings belonging to so many different hierarchies together which makes his role so important. Ryan also does a lot of youth work and sees the value in the connection between future city making and the youth of Cape Town which are not being listened to at policy level.

We piled into Ryan’s car and he drove us through town to Hout bay and Muizenburg beach. Hout bay is possibly the most beautiful place I have ever been to. The sea was beautiful and the skies turned pink during the sunset, reflecting off the water. We were surrounded by mountains and I was captivated by Cape Town. Jhono said ‘this is what draws you in!’ in a warning tone. If you looked to the left there were enormous houses nestled into the mountains overlooking the water. Most owned by rich Europeans and all very gated and luxurious. To the right were informal settlements densely nestled against each other. Along the way we had also come across a site which had suffered a bad fire and the community had been rehoused by the government in these sterile, metal clad boxes lined rigidly. They looked like silver shipping containers and were about the same size spaced far too evenly on a grid. They were people’s homes for years yet they looked like rapid relief accommodation you would see on TV meant for short periods of time. And again you would drive down the road and see the most luxurious properties and beautiful restaurants and hotels where even celebrities would frequent.

After having burgers which would make your heart squeeze in horror we went for a walk down the beach and then piled in the car again. We drove to Lavender Hill, a township in the Capetown Flats, and Ryan was telling us about the gang violence and the territorial nature of the area. Driving down the highway blank walls line the road which the guys said was an after effect of apartheid segregation. Cape Town municipality are very against street activity such as vendors which is often what provides life, culture and identity to the city, instead we are met with blank walls. It’s uncomfortable, and from a visual perspectives makes towns feel more isolated. We drove past some social housing and also some apartheid housing which Jhono said was immediately recognisable because of the roofs. The different typologies were starting to make sense to me. Cities are overwhelming anyway but Cape Town especially. Call me clichéd but there are so many layers from an urban perspective and apartheid planning meant that infrastructure such as pipelines and highways were used as a method by government to separate. It reminds me of a lecture at Cambridge where the lecturer spoke of Israel and Palestine and how large highways were used as a way to separate communities so that they could never meet or cross paths. She argued that it was essentially a breach of human rights as it was a political enforcement through a tool (the built environment) which people could not control nor explicitly be aware of. Walls and buffer zones are complex and often so implicit.

We drove to the ‘Waterfront’ to pick up some documents from the printers and took it as an opportunity to go for a walk. The Heatherwick building which I had no idea existed was there. I had to admit, I became a fan after hating the man for so long (more for the garden bridge Conservative politics than anything). I need to stop being such an angry anarchist sometimes… anyway, we walked through very much a tourist zone. The scale was different, it was loud with lots of lights and an enormous Ferris wheel which was overly priced. Everything was nestled around the largest shopping mall I have seen in a while with big brands and again lots of lights. Ryan was apologising for not taking us to the flats before sundown however Sophie made a good point. She said often going through a city and driving past informal settlements is the most useful way of experiencing its urban order. Informal or ignored settlements are often very dark compared to the areas that are seen to have more value to the city such as this shopping district we were in (which was blindingly bright). Johno spoke of the ‘Apollos’ which were the single tall light that Sophie was referring to. This single light is expected to light the whole area, they looked a bit like one floodlight. Johno was referring to the Greek god Apollo and his blinding light. It sounds so minor, but these are all indicators of connection and disconnection to the city, infrastructure, value… so much. The conversations through the day were blowing my brain a little. But not in the way I hated when I was working in professional practice. Not like watching grand designs on a Saturday (now my worst nightmare). These conversations felt normal, it was talking about the environment around us and I didn’t feel shy to contribute nor to listen. Golden ticket moment.

We were all in scruffy jeans and a bit windswept guzzling down hot coffees in an incredibly posh restaurant. I thoroughly enjoyed the day, I felt like I had seen and experienced so much. This urban fabric is dense and complex. I was starting to break it down and to understand it. I felt thankful for Ryan and he had promised to box with me. My next two months will be brilliant and completely immersive. Africa is too enticing for me. Three generations of my family are born in east Africa and Tanzania is my motherland. I am falling in love with Cape Town a little. But it’s only been one day, lust perhaps? We piled back into the car and headed to the hostel. My internet is still down, and I can hear all the workshop participants outside my room. I have accidentally written almost four pages and am not quite ready to face all the eager faces. Today has been chilled with beach, beer and food and I have had to process a lot of information from my colleagues. I feel like I’m on the right path and being mentored by people I really admire and respect. I still feel some fear with regards to not following the banal path of qualifying as an architect in the UK but this to me is still architecture and these are architects. These are issues I fully engage with and see value in. the mortgage can wait.

P.