Cape Town – The Cape Town city council is inviting the public to help name five suburbs of Delft that are still known only by numbers nearly three decades after the impoverished area on the Cape Flats was established.
“Residents and interested parties are invited to make proposals that will commemorate the people and events that are inherent to Delft,” councillor Brett Herron, who heads the city’s naming committee, said on Friday.
Delft was established in 1989 on a farm situated next to the Cape Town International Airport and was home to some 65,000 people, at the last Census count five years ago. Most of its suburbs are named after Dutch towns, including The Hague, Roosendal, Eindhoven and Leiden, but as many as nine remain nameless.
“It is 27 years down the line since Delft was established and high time that we embark on a process to name the precincts of greater Delft,” Herron said.
“Names can have a powerful emotional effect and this naming process is part of our efforts to bring dignity to the people residing in these precincts, and to build an inclusive space where all of us feel at home.”
The naming of Precints 1,2,3 4 and 5 began this week and residents and other interested parties have until the end of the month to submit proposals at local libraries, sub-council offices, via e-mail, fax, or post.
There will also be open meetings on each Saturday of the month - June 4, 11, 18 and 25, respectively at the park in Bagzane Street, the open space next to the Symphony Clinic on the corner of Openiqui Road, Ahaggar Park on the corner of Ahaggar and Drakensberg Streets and Blessing Educare on the corner of Kouga and Selungwe Streets.
The City’s Public Participation Unit will then compile a shortlist of names which will be submitted to a second process of public participation.
African News Agency