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(W)Escaping the Challenges of the City: a Critique of Cape Town’s Proposed Satellite Town

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Abstract

Much of the current planning discourse has come to reject master planned ‘new cities’ as both unrealistic and undesirable. However, with growing urbanisation challenges in the Global South, master planned cities, suburbs and communities have come back on the agenda driven by both public and private interests. This paper explores the WesCape Development (WD), a proposed satellite suburb to be located north-west of Cape Town, South Africa. Situating the WD in a longer lineage of utopian and new city planning approaches, I argue that the proposal is deeply flawed. Rather than being the solution to the urban ills facing Cape Town, it is an ‘anti-urban’ strategy which supports suburbanisation and assumes a particular and problematic urban growth scenario. It relies on ‘environmentally deterministic’ assumptions and depoliticised and deinstitutionalised designs. Ultimately, it tries to escape, rather than confront, the operational, political and social challenges of the city leading to the devaluation of planning instruments and citizenship engagement. The WD highlights the importance and power of radical and utopian thinking as well as the necessity of grounding and situating these impulses in the specificities and complexities of the city.

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Notes

  1. This is based on transcriptions from the ‘Presentation and Discussion on the WesCape Development Proposal’, on May 15th, 2013 at the Cape Institute for Architecture.

  2. The WD is often referred to as a ‘new city’. This is in fact not true as it would be part of the Cape Town metropolitan region and would fall under the City of Cape Town administration. ‘New city’, perhaps sounds better than new suburb. This content is based on the WesCape proposal as it is explained in 2 Billion Strong: A Regenerative Solution to. Building Sustainable African Cities and the unpublished fact sheet which was given to the author by the developers. It is also based on personal communication with CommuniTgrow representatives.

  3. This is for a range of reasons. Many of the large tracts of land are tied to the asset books of parastatals and government departments. Smaller infill sites tend to be burdened by planning constraints such as infrastructure capacity issues.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express gratitude to my colleagues, in particular Sue Parnell, Vanessa Watson, and Robert McGaffin, for essential insights during the drafting of this paper. However, all faults and criticisms are the responsibility of the author alone.

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Correspondence to Liza Rose Cirolia.

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Cirolia, L.R. (W)Escaping the Challenges of the City: a Critique of Cape Town’s Proposed Satellite Town. Urban Forum 25, 295–312 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-013-9212-2

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