If you’ve been in Cape Town during peak season, you may have noticed the peculiar closures of one of the city’s busiest streets. As part of a social experiment, Bree Street was turned into a pedestrian-only area every Sunday to showcase how we can adapt our city to work for people — not cars, not infrastructure — but the communities and people that the city is meant to serve.
This experiment was hosted by the Young Urbanists South Africa — an organisation dedicated to bettering our cities for the people and the environment. ‘The Young Urbanists is made up of a diverse group of people, coming together to dream about our city,’ says Roland Postma, the managing director of Young Urbanists South Africa. Each week, the street transformed into a hub for communities to come together for activities such as picnics, silent reading, and mending clothes. By creating these car-free zones, the Young Urbanists hopes to promote safety for people, reduce reliance on cars, and open up spaces for recreation.
Urban utopia
This utopic vision for Cape Town brought about new ways of thinking through cities and reimagining how spaces can be utilised for community engagement and leisure. ‘We need people-first neighbourhoods,’ says Roland. He goes on further to note that we need affordable housing that is liveable, well-situated with access to amenities, and, alongside that, reliable public transport to connect our city.
As part of an ongoing movement to create better cities, SPACE10 published research on what constitutes an ‘ideal city’. After studying 53 cities in 30 countries, the researchers defined an ideal city as one that is safe, resourceful, accessible, inclusive, climate resilient, and most importantly, desirable — a place where people enjoy living. Establishing multiple hubs of activity within a city leads to a dense and decentralised urban layout that reduces everyday travel around the city. Part of this concept of better urban planning is creating what is known as a 15-minute city. This is where everything a person needs to survive — shops, schools, recreational spaces, work — is within a 15-minute walking distance.
The spaces between
The Bree Street experiment was about more than just challenging our reliance on cars; it was a way of pushing for more urban spaces that enrich our city’s landscape and offer greater connection for building a sense of community.
‘We can’t build something without the right land-use integration, and that’s where urban design comes in,’ Roland explains. ‘What’s missing is looking beyond buildings and focusing between buildings — coffee at, say, Paulines, taking the kids out to Greenpoint park, or walks along the promenade — these points of connection are very important for making cities liveable and desirable.’ He explains that we need more of spaces like these, especially outside of the city bowl.
Strategies for improving cities are centred around balancing the built environment with the urban landscape. A large part of the work that the Young Urbanists engages in questions the layout of our city and pushes government, civilians, and architects, to think through our city and (re)imagine our cities as liveable, equitable, and nature- and people-friendly.
Centre-periphery integration
‘We need to densify in a sustainable manner,’ Roland explains. In the context of Cape Town, this means addressing the legacies of the past, which haunt the city’s landscape. With the housing market pushing people further and further out onto the periphery, while work and education remain centralised in the city centre, Cape Town’s spatial planning echoes the discriminatory sentiments of the past. These segregationist policies during colonialism and apartheid divided the city to limit access and movement; its spatial results continue to cut people off from the centre of activity.
People living on the outskirts are forced to be dependent on movement to and from the city centre. Increasing mobility with advanced public transport systems is part of the organisation’s mission of supporting accessibility and promoting sustainable development. Recently, the Young Urbanists integrated the railway (PRASA) timetable with Google Maps. In rethinking and reimaging our city, transformation needs to occur from all fronts, where we challenge inherited legacies of apartheid spatial planning and focus on building the contemporary African city. And, as our cities grow, design needs to consider people, embrace nature, foster connection, and inspire communities. Our city is made up of so much more than infrastructure — it’s community that forms the heart and pulse of the city.
