Abstract
Cape Town’s Green Point Park is a legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup, built on the former, dilapidated Green Point Common. Initially heavily contested and situated in an area marked by issues of public access and land use, it is a beautiful, popular, and well-used public space. Drawing on archival data and park observations, as well as qualitative interviews with city planners, park management, service providers and the public, the paper first reflects on the park’s conflictual period of planning. It further reflects on the daily operation that is, today, key to the park’s success and maintenance. The paper observes what could be considered the city’s planning ‘by exception’ and ‘governance by spectacle’ that has resulted in a public-private management vehicle central to what keeps this park running. It is proposed that this neoliberally planned and managed park produces a paradox: it has turned the once unsafe and unused space in Green Point into a privately maintained and expensive, yet usable and accessible, free public resource. This research challenges a literature that assumes neoliberal forms of planning and management limit or destroys public space, resulting in a type of tragedy or end. It suggests a need to rethink parks and their planning and regulation in contemporary urban and neoliberal South Africa.
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Notes
The Green Point Common developed an unfavourable reputation during the mid twentieth century as it became associated with broken fences, glass, potholes, squatters, drug lords and prostitutes (KLF interview 9 February 2016; PVH interview 23 February 2016).
During the Anglo-Boer War, 1899 to 1902, Green Point Camp was erected as a military camp and used for Prisoners of War. It was also used for other twentieth century wars (Bickford-Smith et al. 1999).
This included a R22 million reduction of the metropolitan golf course, as well as a project to redirect water into the park. Water from underground ‘grachts’ now reaches the lakes in the park and golf course from an underground pipe (Van Papendorp 2010b). The investment further stimulated regeneration of the inner city, public infrastructure and also boosted local residential property values (PVH interview 23 February 2016).
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This paper is a product of the Master’s thesis titled: A ‘Paradox of the Commons’? The Planning and Everyday Management of Green Point Park, completed in 2016 in the Department of Environmental and Geographic Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
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de Vries, L. A ‘Paradox of the Commons’? The Planning and Everyday Management of Green Point Park. Urban Forum 30, 325–339 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-019-09362-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-019-09362-8