Athlone Towers – a giant new opportunity for a different approach to city building?

When our boys were small, their name for the Athlone cooling towers was the ‘giant’s coffee cups’. Located near the N2 highway out of Cape Town, the ‘coffee cups’ usually signified the start of a holiday weekend out of town, or the end of a long tiring journey home.

The Athlone Towers - start of a journey (picture: Trevor Sampson)

For the children, the cooling towers represented a place of imagination and wonder: `If the coffee cups are so big, think how big the giants themselves must be?’ they would surmise.

I also remember a very different interpretation, this time from a colleague of mine during the 1980s. A former resident of District Six, he once remarked bitterly: `When they kicked us out of District Six, they took us away from Table Mountain. And what did they replace the mountain with? The f***ing cooling towers, that’s what. They are the only bloody things we can see from the Cape Flats’.

The Athlone Towers in relation to apartheid group areas in 1979 (Map adapted from 'Homes Apart - South Africa's Segregated Cities', edited by Anthony Lemon, David Philip Publishers, 1991, p.31

The Athlone Power Station, with the prominent cooling towers, for many years signified the apartheid divide – the end of `white’ Cape Town and the start of the Cape Flats – dumping ground for tens of thousands of black Capetonians.

So will their demolition on Sunday change anything? Does the 36ha site that will become available offer an opportunity to bridge the historical divides in terms of space, race and identity? And what new symbols will be created?

There is a great deal of consensus about the strategic and symbolic significance of the site. Almost all commentators refer to the fact that it touches Pinelands, Langa and Athlone. A recent Cape Argus editorial put it succinctly: `whatever the project, it has to have an eye on bridging the divides between the neighbourhoods that grew up under the shadow of the towers’.

Athlone Power Station site

We know that apartheid was based on years of racially-segregated spatial planning. We tend to imagine (or hope) that non-racial spatial planning can somehow desegregate the city.

But what can really be achieved on one relatively small site? The danger is that if we load these expectations on to one site, no matter how strategically located, we may be sorely disappointed.

Athlone Towers (Picture: Trevor Sampson)

What we need is a systematic and citywide approach to ‘undoing’ the apartheid city, rather than a property by property approach. For example, the City of Cape Town has recently indicated that it wants to embark on a city development strategy (CDS) process as a way of building consensus around our future as a city by 2040. This is a good starting point.

What sort of vision should we set ourselves as a city? In previous CDS-type discussions, there has sometimes been a tendency to focus on the global environment. As a result, our city goals have tended to be framed in terms of the way we want external communities (tourists, visitors, investors, analysts, `best of’ lists, media, etc) to see us or rate us as a city. We then end up trying to organise Cape Town to be the next best global thing.

I have nothing against taking our city’s comparative competitive advantages into consideration when framing city economic policy. And as Rory Williams and Mokena Makeka recently and correctly wrote in their `Men about Town’ column in the Cape Times – if you don’t define your own city brand, others will do it for you, usually negatively. However, our city vision must start right where the problem is: unemployment and inequality. My suggestion for our CDS 2040 goal is straightforward: `The next generation will not be poor’.

How do we achieve this? Professor Ivan Turok, Deputy Executive Director at the HSRC, recently put forward a coherent case for focusing on three things that can make a difference to the `spatial mismatch’ of our city (Why transport is not the only way to get our cities moving, Business Day, 19 May 2010):

• Improving personal access and mobility through safe and affordable public transport
• Bring the people of the Metro south-east nearer the jobs (building affordable housing on well-located vacant land rather than the periphery), and,
• Bring jobs to the Metro south-east

Note: it’s not transport, or housing, or jobs, but transport and housing and jobs. This integrated approach also assumes the following:

• A much more proactive land market policy and system of land use planning to direct development (the current approach simply reproduces the status quo)
• Promotion of far higher development densities (Cape Town currently ranks as one of the least dense, and therefore, least sustainable, cities on the planet)
• Far more coordination between departments and spheres of government

When in the next few years we look to the Athlone Power Station site to achieve city integration, let’s also look at all other strategic pieces of public land, for example, the Provincial Property Project in the Central City, underutilised Intersite land near railway lines and stations and the Transnet land in Culemborg, amongst others.

In future, citizens living in the Metro south-east need to be able to look at a new development on the Athlone Power Station site and see a symbol of inclusion, not division, not the start of the Cape Flats, but a route-map back into the economy.

In other words, let’s say goodbye to the ‘giant’s coffee cups’ by replacing them with giant new opportunities that help to set our city on a new, more equal, development trajectory. And then lets apply the same criteria to all other unutilised and well-located pieces of land in the metropolitan area.

Athlone Towers (Picture: Trevor Sampson)

Athlone Towers at the start of the Cape Flats