As 2014 rushes towards an end, I am reflective about the time and life of our city. It’s been a year of high activity on and off the streets of Cape Town.
As an organisation, the Cape Town Partnership has experienced astonishing moments of inspirational achievements, balanced – as life tends to be – with anxiety about tight resources, both human and financial. If you are a chief executive of a non-profit or an employee of one, I am sure that this is your reality too.
This month also marks my 10-year anniversary at the Cape Town Partnership. As I was reflecting on a decade spent with one institution, I was struck by how time had flown by and also how much things have changed.
Having joined as programme manager, becoming the deputy chief executive and then a managing director, and ultimately chief executive… I have had successes, learnt to face my mistakes head on, thrived on optimism and support from stakeholders and developed immensely as a person and a professional.
Throughout this decade, my passion for cities has remained unwavering and has been nurtured and grown through the partnership’s work.
Just take a moment to pause and reflect on where you were, and what Cape Town and the world was like 10 years ago. What advice would you give yourself and our Mother City of 10 years ago?
I think I might have said something about not getting too wrapped up in the issues and optimism of transformation, as to lose sight of the people, the humans of Cape Town.
As I have written before, cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure, economic and social parts.
Cities are places of “concentrated humanity”, which has become the guiding principle of the Cape Town Partnership’s current participatory, people-based strategy. This is the natural evolution of our initial property-first development approach that resulted in the cleanest and safest CBD in the country.
What excites me now, looking forward to 2015, is our next project that is the perfect synergy and embodiment of our 15 years of work.
By now you might have read about the City Walk, and I am tremendously grateful for the extensive media coverage it has received. If you haven’t, in a nutshell the City Walk will see the Cape Town Partnership reviving the energy of the Fan Walk, which we all remember from 2010 as a great moment of unified civic pride, and spreading it down St George’s Mall and through the Company’s Garden.
It will connect all the significant places and offerings along the route through storytelling, way-finding, public art, formal walking tours and a rich retail offering, bringing our safe and clean city to life. Although it will undoubtedly welcome tourists, I am personally motivated by what this experiential route through the heart of Cape Town can do for the common identity of us locals.
Streets are the ultimate public unifier after all, as I wrote in my previous column when, you may recall, I hinted at the City Walk project.
Streets are the base unit of public space that belongs to every single citizen. I felt that this needs to be emphasised because in many parts of Cape Town there is still a sense of lack of ownership – that the city belongs to someone else.
There are many stories about our Mother City, but there isn’t one narrative that pulls together everyone with all our different layers of heritage, storytelling, memory, public art, retail, infrastructure and events into one storyline.
A place where people can weave their personal stories together, to see how their strands come together.
A tying together the human fabric that makes up this city. A celebration of the collectiveness of all of us as Capetonians.
I realised that this story already exists while I was showing a New York Times journalist around. She asked where she could experience all the locals hanging out and interacting with each other as Capetonians. So I took her on a walk around our CBD, which is safe and clean, and easy to walk in. There are pedestrian bridges, street furniture and public artworks. Incredible food from across the world, ranging from street grub and markets to high-end restaurants, with eclectic retail offerings also varying from formal to informal.
This is why the CBD is a place where locals meet, but not only locals – a full spectrum of the diversity of people in our Mother City, including visitors.
It is especially true during events like the Switching on of the Lights, the Cape Town Carnival, the Summer Market and Infecting the City, but the plethora of historical sites and cultural experiences that showcase the rich heritage of our city add a legacy to our public spaces that makes them welcoming even when empty.
The City Walk will see us surfacing this cohesive storyline of an inclusive city, acknowledging the important role that history and memory plays in the life of our city, and will help citizens to find spaces to interact with these themes. The only way that such a feat is possible is through co-creating the City Walk as a shared platform for citizen stories.
This is why it is so important to me that collaboration lies at the heart of everything the Cape Town Partnership does.
Like all of our projects, the City Walk will begin by identifying relevant stakeholders, individuals, communities and other organisations with who we can partner to achieve the aims of the project, share knowledge, and help provide a safe space for debate and discussion. Together, in unearthing our unified narrative, we will be guided by the placemaking principles of preserve, repair and amplify.
Firstly, in preserving we will seek to maintain the authentic, inherent character of the Company’s Garden, St George’s Mall and the Fan Walk. This is the stocktaking and community engagement phase, and we must ensure that existing users are not excluded or pushed out. We are asking the questions of who is already using the space and for what purpose.
You may have been approached by one of our researchers as we have, to date, done a full inventory of users of the space, building owners as well as businesses along the way. If not, and you would like to be, now is the time to join the conversation through the e-mail address citywalk@cape townpartnership.co.za and on Twitter @ctpartnership #CityWalkCT.
Next, repair: infrastructure, relationships and public perception must be renewed and restored.
We are looking at signage and seeing how public art is placed and maintained. Issues of social development, homelessness and safety must be addressed. Dead zones along the way will be identified and interrogated through interventions.
Over the next while we will also be experimenting with small interventions that will breathe life into the space.
Treating the city as an experimental testing lab can lead to the generation of constructive and enabling policies, just as we did during the 2010 World Cup.
The first of these interventions is the piloting of free wi-fi at the top end of St George’s Mall with our partners Connected Space and the Taj Hotel, to see how people interact with the space differently. This area was activated last week, as well as the Company’s Garden at the beginning of the year, so do go log on. We plan to make the entire City Walk a free wi-fi zone.
Finally, in the third phase we will amplify the entire venture by creating an irresistible lasagne of all the different experiences and stories; this will be the unified narrative of all our citizens laced with our rich heritage and historical narrative. With the groundwork done and something to show, we will start cheering it by generating events, markets, performances, activities and media coverage, adding further layered narratives to appeal to people from all walks of life.
Barcelona has La Ramblas, London has the South Bank, Paris has the Champs-Élysées , Marrakesh has Medina, Tokyo has the Harajuku district and Berlin has Alexanderplatz. These urban destinations attract millions of visitors every year.
They are known around the world as places of “concentrated humanity” where those characteristics that make each city unique – the history, architecture, food and art – are most easily accessible to locals and tourists alike.
Similarly, the City Walk will be a place where locals and visitors intersect, a place where every Capetonian can see themselves – in the food, the music, the public art, the retail that is on offer in the space.
We passionately believe that a great place for locals will inevitably be a great place for visitors too.
l Makalima-Ngewana is chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership.