Lost Highways: Cape Town's Unfinished Flyovers

The conception and development of Cape Town’s Foreshore can only be described as a leap of the imagination. To begin with, the land on which it is built had to be physically reclaimed from the ocean. In 1936, an arduous land reclamation scheme began in order to accommodate rapidly-expanding harbour traffic: blocking tides, raising the sand bank and building over the available space.

By the time the land was reclaimed, cars were the future – the guarantors of efficiency and progress. The design that followed harboured high hopes of a Modernist utopia, with tall, glittering and geometric buildings, wide boulevards and circles, taking inspiration from both Haussmann’s Paris and Le Corbusier’s Modernism.

These two influences were appealing not only because they were the height of fashion in Europe, but because both were useful to authoritarian regimes: Le Corbusier’s “surgical method” advocated the demolition of a city’s more unfavourable elements – literally replacing the old city with the new. Haussmann, under the power of Emperor Napoleon, famously demolished poor, overcrowded and disease-ridden neighbourhoods, replacing them with wide boulevards, parks and squares. Similarly, Cape Town city planners conceived of a grand boulevard cutting across District Six and Woodstock – ironically, it has since been renamed Nelson Mandela Boulevard.

The plan did not turn out the way its visionaries had imagined. The spaces between the buildings were too large, the boulevards too wide, to offer shelter from the Cape’s furious wind and rain. According to the research of Nicholas Michiel Botha, a history scholar at the University of Cape Town, developers’ enthusiasm waned and activity in the area stood still until the 1970s, when the Brutalist Nico Malan Theatre and Civic Centre were built. “The association of this building style with the brutal, authoritarian regimes of the 20th century would be an enduring legacy in the popular imagination,” he writes.

The infamous raised flyovers also made their appearance in the 1970s, which were conceived to connect the harbour with the historical western district, forming a ring road around the entire city. Fortunately the plans were abandoned due to their controversy, and Cape Town was left with no less than eight “lost highways”, the stubs of flyovers that lead to nowhere.

Reinventing today’s Foreshore will take just as much, if not more, imagination. Planning in an age obsessed with the car – with freeways and wide avenues – did everything to encourage driving and just as much to discourage walking. Today we see the results. Most people experience the Foreshore almost exclusively in transit, as its many lanes congest with daily traffic.

And of course, where there is driving, there is pollution — and parking. The Foreshore is one of the few areas near the Central Business District (CBD) where parking is ample, inexpensive or free. During the day, multi-coloured pools of cars, glittering in the sunlight, collect on its vast, unused stretches of land. At night these spaces are deserted and unsafe.

Efforts have been made to turn the space into an international meeting place, a hub of recreation and community involvement, with the opening of the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) in 2003, which hosts the Design Indaba and the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, among other high-profile events. What used to be the Nico Malan has been renamed the Artscape Theatre Centre, enjoying continued redevelopment to the tune of R1, 5 billion. These centres have had a considerable impact on the economy of the Foreshore and surrounds. According to the State of Cape Town Central City Report 2013, the Jazz Festival contributed R522 million to the Western Cape’s GDP, and the Design Indaba R329,8 million.

The CTICC has also been progressive enough to provide bicycle racks for its users, and bicycles are available for hire from some of the surrounding hotels. However, these cannot be used until the fundamental design of the Foreshore – the use of its streets and public spaces – is changed. Street culture remains almost non-existent, due to harsh winds, a lack of decent walkways and the fact that, historically, the area has consisted predominantly of office blocks that clear out at the close of business each day, leaving the area a dead zone at night.

For those less privileged who have come to seek refuge in South Africa, the Foreshore is associated with queuing for legitimacy at Customs House – another imposing, Brutalist slab of concrete between Nelson Mandela Boulevard and the port.

“Land reclamation and the freeways have cut us off from the sea,” Western Cape Public Works MEC Robin Carlisle commented in an article for Times LIVE last year, adding that the demolition of the elevated freeways would reconnect the CBD with the Waterfront and port, boosting the city’s economy and providing the area with necessary revitalisation.

Carlisle’s thinking is no doubt influenced by examples of success stories from around the world. Cities like San Francisco, Seoul and Madrid have removed varying portions of their freeways and experienced economic revitalisation as well as greener, more efficient and more pedestrian-friendly cities. In the case of Seoul, the removal of the freeway exposed a forgotten waterway. The creek has since been naturalised and the area has become a green walkway, causing the overall temperature of the inner city to drop, and birds and fish to return to the urban centre. In Madrid, the leftover space was turned into a 300-acre park, including walkways and bicycle lanes, skate parks and 17 recreation centres.

Perhaps most relevant to Cape Town is the example of San Francisco. Where we have unfinished freeways, they had broken ones – destroyed by an earthquake in 1989. Instead of replacing the freeways, they saved the construction costs and established a pedestrian and bicycle-friendly boulevard, thereby attracting businesses and increasing the value of property in the area.

The completion of Cape Town’s “lost highways” would require extensive revenue – funds that could be redirected towards improved public transport. Not only would funds be wasted on infrastructure that only accommodates an unsustainable mode of transport, but traffic congestion would remain the same. The“induced demand” theory says that traffic congestion maintains an equilibrium: the more space is available for cars, the more traffic is generated. The less easy driving becomes, the more alternatives are discovered.

The World Design Capital and a recent partnership between the City of Cape Town and the University of Cape Town’s Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment has brought renewed attention to the Foreshore. However, the fate of the area remains contentious. Architect Neville Adler has argued that the unfinished freeways should not be demolished; rather, they should be approached in a creative way. “I’m not one for demolition and doing away with infrastructure, they should rather try and turn it into an opportunity.”

A futuristic Foreshore?

R1, 5 billion is being spent on the expansion of the Artscape Theatre Centre, which will include modernisation of the existing building, an arts academy for 300 students, a concert hall with a 1500 seat capacity, a drama teaching studio, a rigging studio for the Zip Zap Circus, four seminar rooms and three dedicated dance rehearsal spaces to accommodate different dance styles. R832 million has been set aside for the expansion of the CTICC, which will include 9600 sqm of additional exhibition space, meeting rooms, a proposed tower and a skybridge connecting the current centre to the new one. A multimillion rand development of a new Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital is under way in the space in front of the Media24 offices, previously used as a parking lot.

In its current form, the Artscape Theatre Centre has already provided 116 skills development opportunities to staff, seven technical training programme attendances, 14 internships and attracted 309 717 visitors during the course of the 2012/2013 financial year. The number of permanent residents in the CBD, which includes a section of the Foreshore, is also on the rise – increasing from 1570 to 5286 in a decade. The residential complex, Icon, is no doubt a considerable factor to the Foreshore’s contribution to these figures, which, one hopes, will begin to increase nightlife in the area.

R832 million has been set aside for the expansion of the CTICC.

The positive impact of these developments on the Foreshore and the wider city is undeniable. However, they do not solve the problem of the segregationist design principles that underpinned the planning of the precinct.

Representations of cities in 20th Century pop culture – Blade Runner’s Los Angeles and Batman’s Gotham City, for example – have had us believe that futuristic cities are dense blocks of steel and glass, interspersed with stacked, convoluted highways of cars and hovercrafts: unyielding, throbbing blurs of light and motion. In the 21st Century we are realising that the most sophisticated cities are the ones that have downsized to a pedestrian scale – connecting human bodies to the natural geography of the city. They are pragmatic; they are green. They use what we have, and don’t waste what we don’t.

Can a more accessible coastline and port revitalise Cape Town’s Foreshore? Will it dramatically decrease the city’s carbon footprint? The examples from the First World seem to suggest so, but if there is one thing Cape Town has learned it is that we cannot import a European or American system wholesale. The distinct and diverse lifestyles of Capetonians must be central to our planning. Our limited public transport and funds must also be considered, as well as our environment and weather. For now, the forecast for the Foreshore remains unpredictable.

For The Cape Town Partnership, 2014