The Caged Birds of the Cape Flats – Urban Densification Done Wrong

Cape Town has just invited residents of communities like Delft to information sessions on leveraging their backyard space, building rental units for extra income, and, the city says, employment. I read that announcement twice, because the second time I wanted to be wrong about my first reaction.

If you had friends visiting Cape Town, and you couldn’t showcase the pseudo-European design language of the CBD and the waterfront, if you could only take them to the Cape Flats, where would you go to impress them? Where would you point and say: this is how Cape Town is solving its housing crisis, this is an architecture that reflects Cape Town and its people?

As a Capetonian, I’m ashamed to say I can’t think of a single place. Every option I run through makes me feel like I’d be driving people around a zoo. One would expect the feedback to be the inverted commerce: “these people are so resilient,” “they do so much with so little,” “they’re always smiling and so grateful for what they have.”

I’ve operated in the township tourism space. I’ve worked and made friends across multiple townships on the Cape Flats. My honest assessment, after all this, is this: The City of Cape Town is not leveraging the creative solutions of their own residents.
They are doing urban densification wrong.

A good idea, misapplied

About ten years ago I met a young man from Gauteng piloting a social enterprise built on the same core idea Cape Town is now pushing in Delft: using the backyard space of houses to build rental units, creating income for unemployed South Africans. His financing structure was genuinely innovative. I was overjoyed. It helps people leverage the one asset they have: their land.

Spatial design shapes how people see themselves and their city. Apply my young friend’s idea in a concrete jungle like Delft, and the old saying applies in reverse: if you build it like that, they will come. Meaning gangsterism. Drugs. These ills follow places designed so densely, with so few outlets for young people to develop or relieve stress, that they end up on street corners; open prey for illicit activity.

I know Delft well, so it was no surprise when I looked up its population density against the rest of the city. Delft runs between 18,000 and 22,000 people per square kilometre, on average plots of 120 to 160 square metres. Plattekloof, by comparison, sits at around 1,500 people per square kilometre, on plots averaging 800 to 1,200 square metres. If an area is that dense, that void of trees, with no parks or open space, would any parent let their child walk around the corner?

A city with a size problem

Cape Town is boxed in- mountains on one side, sea on the other – and further throttled by a self-inflicted policy of selling public land to private owners instead of developing it for public good. Housing the working class, let alone the poor, is already a hard problem here.

What I find hard to sit with is how many times this city has been told, by how many voices, that it’s heading in the wrong direction, and how consistently it gets it wrong anyway.

Where does council plan to fit these additional backyard units, when in many homes there isn’t even space to walk from the front of the house to the back without cutting through it? The idea is wonderful. The application on the Cape Flats is simply cruel.

There’s nothing wrong with urban densification in principle. What I can’t understand is why council has chosen to give special attention to more densification in an area that’s already overcrowded. If I’m honest about the intentions behind that, what conclusion am I left with, other than that it’s designed to both maintain and contain poverty and gangsterism, not solve it? And then blaming the police for not devolving powers to the city when crime results is disingenuous. You cannot design the conditions in which crime flourishes and then blame others when it does.

The double standard, in infrastructure – Apartheid Spatial Planning

Let’s put the facts together: cramped input – minute plots stacked with tall houses, narrow, inaccessible access roads, no tree cover, no shade, no green space – produces predictable output. That is the design brief for gangsterism, and Delft has been built exactly to that brief.

And yet the city announces backyard rental units as the solution to poverty and crime. It may work elsewhere. It will not work in Delft or Khayelitsha, areas already overpopulated.

The City of Cape Town’s latest urban densification plans will only serve to further entrench the effects of its inistence on the continuation of Apartheid Spatial Planning policies.

Applying further Urban Densificaton in the highest density areas

In the highest density areas with the smallest plot size and lowest number of open spaces The City of Cape Town wants to densify. And you wonder why people in such cramped circumstances resort to crime?

Delft:
Between 18,000 and 22,000 people per square kilometre
Average plot size: ~120 to 160 square meters
Khayelitsha:
Between 15,000 and 25,000 people per square kilometre
Average plot size: ~100 to 160 square meters
Elsies River:
Between 10,000 and 12,000 people per square kilometre
Average plot size: ~200 to 300 square meters
Mitchell’s Plain:
Between 9,000 and 11,000 people per square kilometre
Average plot size: ~150 to 250 square meters
Plattekloof:
Around 1,500 people per square kilometre
Average plot size: ~800 to 1,200 square meters
Newlands:
Around 1,500 people per square kilometre
Average plot size: ~700 to 1,000 square meters

Two commutes, one psychology

Imagine the person living in this grey concrete jungle who works in Plattekloof, at a house with a massive plot, two to four people living across three bedrooms, surrounded by parks, mini nature reserves, tree-lined streets.

What does navigating those two worlds, every single day do to a person’s psychology? It’s cruel. It’s undignified. And it lets the council quietly shift the burden of well-located social housing for the poor into areas like Delft, where it becomes invisible.

This article, Governing Urban Density: How Policy Shapes Uneven Densification in Cape Town, South Africa, explains how the current housing policies of the CoCT are simply a continuation of Apatheid Spatial Planning.

The caged bird

Writing this, I keep thinking of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The caged bird was Angelou herself. Applied to Cape Town, the Cape Flats is the cage. The bird with clipped wings sits inside it.

In my experience, the Cape Flats is crying out for dignity; the same dignity afforded to Capetonians who can rent a so-called “affordable” studio in the CBD for ten thousand rand a month. Council just isn’t listening.

I’m waiting for the day the caged birds start to lament in the streets. Maybe that’s what it will take for council to finally hear them.

Persistent Spatial Inequality in Cape Town Deeply Unsettling

About Johan de Meyer
Johan de Meyer is a journalist who has worked for major publications, an activist, a changemaker and a life coach. Originally from Pretoria, Johan has been living in and actively been a part of the community of Elsies River on the Cape Flats for close on two decades.
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