Here is another great article published in yesterday’s Cape Argus (Sept 9, 2010) by my colleagues, Lorelle Bell and Alexandra Jongens, in support of Cape Town’s bid for the title of World Design Capital 2014. Through the WDC bid process, we are asking the question: how do we use design and design-thinking to make Cape Town a better city for all its citizens?
In this regard, Lorelle and Alexandra emphasise the importance of designing good public spaces: “Defined public spaces help to create a sense of permanence and belonging in communities. In poor areas where the absence of land rights, permanent structures and services had underlined the tenuous nature of people’s existence there, the issue of place making is particularly important. As citizens of Cape Town, we need to get behind the public spaces programme: challenging and supporting the City to ensure that this programme fulfils its potential as a mechanism for addressing equity, connecting communities and transforming townships into towns.”
All I would add is: how do we design and implement a better public space management system? It’s no good designing physically attractive public spaces that are not then properly managed and maintained, and which do not have a variety of activities and functions to sustain them. There is nothing so sad as a beautifully-designed public space with no people using it. To date, we have not been able to come up with an appropriate management model that is replicable throughout the city. Any ideas?
Claiming the city’s urban landscapes: Safe, attractive public spaces are vital in changing how we experience the city, by Lorelle Bell and Alexandra Jongens, Cape Town Partnership
When the Green Point Park opens in the near future, all Capetonians will benefit from a 12.5 hectare urban public space, at the heart of the Cape Town stadium precinct, every element of which seems to have been designed to delight and inspire.
The use of local stone links the park through walls and benches along the fan walk to the slave memorial in St Andrews Square and, historically, to the Castle, the city’s oldest building. Visually, the park connects the mountain and the city through a central waterway to the sea, a connection designed through offsetting the stadium from the centre of this precinct.
Playing with contrasts, in the textures of the materials and the natural elements, every sense is catered for. The rough stone walls are set against surfaces of smooth pavers, dressed stepping stones and pebbles. Gates of rough gum poles contrast with the contemporary lines of timber beams used in the pergolas. Indigenous plants, wild grasses, and low shrubs, are set against a formal lawn, and separated from the greens of the golf course by the vlei. The sculptural drinking fountains combine smooth, polished surfaces of the shallow double basins held in the rough, dull texture of their exteriors.
Water is a recurring theme and the park design includes a series of waterways made up of lei water slote (channels), rills, fountains, reflecting pools, and streams.
Significantly the waterways are nourished by Cape Town’s original and forgotten water source – a fountain on Table Mountain. This secure water source has allowed the new park design to include dams and wetlands, and Johan van Papendorp of landscape architects OvP Associates in an interview with Urban Green File points out, “ At the point where the water emerges from the underground pipe, it wells up to resemble the source of a river …. City children can learn about nature …. A waterwheel showcases the possibility of alternative power sources by generating enough electricity to operate the wetland pumps. A turbine driven by the gravitational pressure of the water supply will, in future, supply electricity to the planned eco centre.”
Designed as a multifunctional park, Green Point Park includes an amphitheatre and adventure playground for children, a biodiversity show garden, an eco centre and tea room. The playground includes specialised equipment for children with disabilities, while paths and ramps are wheelchair friendly.
According to Urban Green File, “Never before has an urban park in South Africa been designed on this scale and to this detail – and, and as a result, Cape Town will be much better off for many years to come.”
During the completion phase the park has been in use by cyclists, walkers and picnickers and its proximity to possibly Cape Town’s most popular public space, the Sea Point Promenade, bodes well for its continued use by a diversity of people from all over the peninsula.
But the beauty of this project lies not only in the design described above. More importantly it is found in the glimpse it gives us of the City’s continued commitment to the creation of public spaces for people and to place making, particularly in underserved communities.
Green Point Urban Park at night. Photo courtesy of Kiriakos Roussopoulos http://www.flickr.com/people/15132403@N02/
The profile of the City’s public places was elevated during 2010. Those in the CBD like the Fan Walk, Stadium Forecourt, St Andrew’s Square, Waterkant Street, Station Square, the Grand Parade, Riebeeck Square, Green Market Square, St Georges Mall, Church Square, Company’s Gardens, Thibault Square, Heerengracht Centre Islands , Pier Place and Jetty Square and Riebeeck Street, featured heavily in the mainstream media as places where people revelled during the World Cup.
But there were many others across the metropolis that formed part of the City’s Quality Spaces programme, located in communities stretching from Atlantis to Mfuleni to Houtbay and including communities in Kasselsvlei, Elsies River, Belhar, Goodwood, Kleinvlei, Scottsdene, Belville, Khayelitsha, Guguletu, Langa, Philippi and Kuils River.
The City’s Directorate of Strategy and Development, then led by Steve Boshoff, had leveraged the infrastructure investment for 2010 to ensure that a number of areas would benefit from new or upgraded public spaces for use as public viewing spaces.
As the City’s manager of Urban Planning Cedric Daniels points out, while there were insufficient resources to realise the initial vision of 70 or 80 public spaces spread throughout the city, it helped to register, “the claim of public space as an important issue on the agenda.”
The City has placed public spaces on the agenda since 1998 through a design-led public space initiative and has, in the face of competition for resources, inadequate allocation for maintenance and the need to hear the needs of people more clearly, continued this programme since then.
Introduced as the Dignified Places programme, the provision of public spaces was aimed at people living in the poorest, most underserved communities in the city, to provide positive places where they could rest in comfort, meet, trade or gather, places with a sense of dignity.
Vibrant public spaces are critical in the creation of a sustainable future for Cape Town. These are not only necessary supports in a programme of densification that needs to be escalated to cope with increasing urbanisation and diminishing energy resources. They are vital in linking communities and addressing issues of equity and social justice.
Barbara Southworth, architect, urban planner and former director City Spatial Development, writing in Counter Currents says the public places programme, “presented … a concept of equitable access … to public transport and to the resources and opportunities of the city, as the basis for spatial equity and integration.”
The City’s Spatial Development Framework she explains, “… prioritised urban public spaces – streets, squares, and promenades – as the most important form of social infrastructure in urban settlements, connecting communities and becoming part of the people’s mental map of the city.”
Southworth points to the particular importance of public spaces for people living in underserved communities where they are an extension of domestic dwellings, “providing space for social and economic activities and accommodating the informal events that are central to the process of urban living; economic production, socialising and courtship, informal theatre and so on.”
So as part of the Dignified Places programme the City developed a network of public spaces. Among these are public spaces in Hanover Park, Browns Farm, Guguletu Gateway, Washington Drive, Oliver Tambo Drive, the improvement of public spaces in Weltevreden Valley and Langa, as well as the Nyanga street markets and bathhouse, and the Manenberg Play Park.
A series of public spaces also form part of the Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrade (VPUU) project in Khayelitsha, initiated as a partnership between the City of Cape Town and the German Development Bank.
Harare Precinct 3 Square in Khayelitsha
Harare Precinct 3 is one of them. A two-storeyed multi-purpose community facility defines one boundary of the square, providing a landmark in the area as well as safe spot where people who feel at risk can find safety. Located on the spot where there was once just a detention pond, this well designed space addresses the stormwater as well the recreation needs of the community. Raised walkways offer residents safe passage through the square when the lawn-covered detention pond floods in winter.
Community members were trained by ceramic artist Lovell Friedmann to create the murals which lend colour and content to the public walls. Local welders, assisted by designers, crafted the decorative burglar bars. Playground equipment and a small astroturf soccer pitch, a legacy of the 2010 Football for Hope project, provide extensive play areas. Tall lights, 10 metres high, define the pathways and remain on in the square till nine o’ clock at night to ensure the safety of children and adults using the park till then.
The community, benefited from skills training and economic opportunities in the development of the space and were closely involved in its design and development by the project team which includes landscape architects Klitzner Anderson Landscape Architects and urban designers Jonker & Barnes. As a result the space feels truly owned and well used by the community.
Defined public spaces help to create a sense of permanence and belonging in communities. In poor areas where the absence of land rights, permanent structures and services had underlined the tenuous nature of people’s existence there, the issue of place making is particularly important.
As citizens of Cape Town, we need to get behind the public spaces programme: challenging and supporting the City to ensure that this programme fulfils its potential as a mechanism for addressing equity, connecting communities and transforming townships into towns.
Lorelle Bell and Alexandra Jongens
Alexandra Jongens is an intern at the Cape Town Partnership.
Yes, let’s applaud calls for “defined public spaces”, but also acknowledge the muddy undefined public space which is both more prominent, and more prevalent in South African townships. I am talking about the street – which becomes a football pitch when the kids come out of school. The street which doubles up as Gathering Place for funerals, weddings, protests. The street which acts as front room, youth centre, women’s group, creche, counselling rooms, garden, gym, kitchen, market. Streets make up an estimated 25% of public space, and they need to be designed and managed in a way which reflects their multiple usages. This means moving beyond the efficiency-of-movement paradigm for streets, whilst also acknowledging that role for streets too. Yes we need Dignified Urban Places, but perhaps even more we need Respectful Roads and Streets too.
Respectful Roads and Streets – excellent!
As Lisa says, a focus on streets and the transportation paradigm cannot be separated from a public spaces agenda. To allow new public spaces to truly connect communities and address equity the street is the greatest limiting factor as well as the largest opportunity.
When cities have taken on public space programs that celebrate design and “open space” first, the spaces tend to fail as community places that truly attract people and build communities. This has ultimately relegated the role of design in cities to create left over space and isolated statements, rather that truly shaping cities and communities through a more organic and holistic placemaking process.
Design will become more important when it becomes a servant of communities and places, rather than the current dynamic where designers are their own audience. Unfortunately, the increasing role of public spaces in cities is perhaps most threatened by the narrow vision through which well-intentioned design programs are being carried out. This is clearly an opportunity to get it right and certainly seems to have all the right intentions.
I couldn’t agree with you more! We have examples in Cape Town where we (unfortunately, but for all the right reasons) have redesigned and upgraded public spaces, which are then are not really used. This is partly because we do not have a good public space management system in place, to mediate the sometimes conflicting uses and to market (or in the words of Jan Gehl, ‘issue an invitation’) the spaces. However, the main reason is that we often don’t understand the economics of public spaces, i.e. what people want to use them for, so while they are well designed aesthetically, they still do not fulfil a socially useful role.
Come on City of Cape Town we saw how the public can make Cape Town safe by occupying its public spaces during the World Cup. Lets create spaces that people will enjoy and that will allow us to get to know and love each other.
We generally recommend starting public space planning with how it will be used, including how it will be managed and programmed. It is often hard to avoid the urge to jump to the design solution. But focusing on use and management with communities and engaging them as experts is usually the most effective way of developing a program that can draw the most creativity, and ultimately success, for designers. engaging the Communities are usually very good at this (they are not usually very good at design).
Fred Kent (PPS president & my father) is giving a closing keynote for Seoul’s year as World Design Capital soon. Other PPS staff have been working there recently and have told us that they are quickly realizing that the celebration of design alone has not gotten them the desired results. Apparently this is why they are having Fred close the year to suggest a new way forward.