Urban Forum (2007) 18:125151 DOI 10.

1007/s12132-007-9012-7

Reanimating a Comatose Goddess: Reconfiguring Central Cape Town

Gordon Pirie

Published online: 29 September 2007 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract Central Cape Town is no longer a tawdry, unsafe provincial enclave of day-time office workers, commuter shoppers and public administrators. After the decline since the 1980s due to suburban flight, a privatepublic partnership has improved the downtowns state and image. Capitalising on spectacular heritage and location, property developers have been transforming work, residential and leisure spaces. Massive private investment in new and converted buildings, and in public space, is reconfiguring the old central business district (CBD) into a post-modern space of high-end production, service and consumption that is aestheticised, commoditised and historicised. Investors, young professionals, day visitors and tourists benefit more than the peripheral metropolitan majority. Despite inclusive rhetoric, the Africanisation of post-apartheid central Cape Town is less evident than its glocalisation. Keywords South Africa . Urban regeneration . Glocalisation . Publicprivate partnerships The heart of South Africas Mother City, Cape Towns CBD may become one of the worlds leading urban regeneration success stories (Business Day, 4 February 2005).

Introduction Directed urban revitalisation is a feature of the new century in South Africas principal cities. In central Johannesburg, the heart of the nations core metropolitan area, commercial and cultural projects and private survival initiatives have been changing the function, face and feel of the old downtown (Rogerson 1996; Dirsuweit
G. Pirie (*) Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535, South Africa e-mail: gpirie@uwc.ac.za

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1999; Rogerson 2001; Gaule 2005; van der Merwe and Patel 2005). The citys 30year plan to revitalise the inner city is partly a bid to re-order and re-control resource, and partly an effort to rebuild after the suburban flight of old financial and social capital during the last 30 years (Tomlinson 1999; Bremner 2000; Gaule 2005). The emergence of Sandton City as Johannesburgs satellite, and then its equivalent and dominator, is echoed in some measure in the Durban metropolitan area. There, Umhlanga has become a powerful rival to the old central business district (CBD) where urban revitalisation is also active (Grant and Scott 1996; Khosa and Naidoo 1998; Maharaj and Ramballi 1998). In Pretoria (see Donaldson et al. 2003) the Kgabisa Tshwane Project is intended to transform the old city centre over the next 14 years. Cape Town, South Africas oldest city, and its third largest, has not lagged behind in inner-city redesign and reinvestment. On the contrary, central city change in Cape Town may be more evident and advanced than in Johannesburg and Durban. One view is that although local authority commitment to rejuvenation is superior in Johannesburg, urban renaissance is a decade ahead in 14-times smaller central Cape Town (Financial Mail, 23 August 2005). Arguably, developments at the heart of the nations Mother City are also the most poignant. Certainly, this is the view of Andrew Boraine, the chief executive of Cape Town Partnership (CTP), the citys privatepublic redevelopment agency. In undated (c. 2004/5) remarks on his organisations website, he insisted that no other city in South Africa so personifies both the countrys troubled past and its newfound confidence (Cape Town Partnership, undated). A settlement of 350 years duration can be no stranger to change. For hundreds of years, Cape Town has been regenerating itself, passing through phases of Dutch and British colonial control and postcolonial reclamation. The urban fabric has been shaped by state and private initiatives; civic planning interventions have co-existed with organic change. In the 20th century, directed change included population removals (motivated by public health concerns and racism), construction of dormitory black (African and Coloured) townships on the Cape Flats, and suburbanisation of workplaces and residences north and south of the CBD along tram tracks, railway lines and motorways (Cook 1991; Bickford-Smith and van Heyningen 1999; Wilkinson 2000). In the process, the historic centre of Cape Town became increasingly off-centre geographically, and was reduced to a parcel of land occupying less than 1% of the metropolitan area and housing a negligible proportion of the metropolitan population. Changes to the central city skyline and developments along its shoreline indicate that the place has not been sclerotic, however. Instead of being reduced to an urban wilderness, the inner city responded to pressures in the commercial and residential land markets. It survived ill-advised assaults on its economy and social ecology, was alert to competitive forces, and capitalised on new opportunities (Jenkins and Wilkinson 2002; Liebenberg 2002; Dewar 2004). Now, in the 21st century, central Cape Town has acquired qualities that make it a compelling destination for work, personal business, shopping, eating, living and leisure. Suburban retail and office competition remains intense. In the northern suburbs, the N1 City Mall received a R100 million upgrade. The R4.3 billion of investment in 14 new major commercial and residential projects at Century City includes the sold-

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out R350 million Estuaries office park (Business Day, 10 November 2005). In the southern suburbs, the Claremont Improvement District Company (established in 2000) is shepherding privatepublic capital investment of approximately R1.8 billion into office, retail, residential and infrastructural development (Property Magazine, February 2007). And, although the Cape Town metropolitan area remains highly unequal (Abbott 2000; Turok 2001), the polarisation of shopping opportunity as between the old CBD and the southeastern Cape Flats townships is less than it was five years ago. The Vangate Mall on the old Athlone golf course (150 stores) and the Khayelitsha Retail Centre (17,000 m2, 51 shops) both opened in 2005. Since 1999, there has been approximately R14 billion of private investment in Cape Town central city. Identical to the state funding in Pretorias Kgabisa Tshwane Project, this amount is the capital value of current leases, new developments, investment purchases, upgrades and renewals (Cape Town Partnership, undated). The value of non-residential building plans passed in central Cape Town between January and August 2004 was 103% higher than in 2003. The value of residential building plans passed in the same period was almost 50% higher than in 2003. This scale of development should help slow if not reverse the R80 million (50%) per annum loss in municipal revenue since 2000 (primarily from commercial suburban flight; Cape Town Partnership, undated).

Agency The buoyant South African economy, post-apartheid inward investment, domestic inter-city competitive pressures, and profit-seeking investment opportunities have all contributed to the renaissance of central Cape Town. Government strategies (notably the young ANC governments 1995 national urban development initiative) also spurred and channeled change. Private sector initiatives in Cape Town had not fared well. Starting in 1987, three efforts made by local retail interests to revitalise the CBD and combat decentralisation flopped; one such effort was the 1990 Inner City Task Group (Levitan 1995). When, finally, apathy and inadequate funding were overcome, it was due in some measure to public rhetoric about the alleged ineptitude of the ANC city government in its maiden term of office after the municipal elections in 1996. In a city of delicately balanced political loyalty, press headlines and reports screamed about the collapse of policing and cleansing in the CBD, the difficulty of using pavements occupied by hawkers and vagrants, and problems driving and parking in streets jammed by lawless traffic (Nahnsen 2003; Dewar 2004). The litany has a global ring. Violation of persons and property were among the encounters and experiences reported. Visceral reactions to these episodes are said to have compounded white peoples discomfort over loss of political control and cultural hegemony, and their dismay over blurred lines between private and public spheres that are so strongly inscribed in western European urbanism. Evidently, re-appropriation and redesignation of public space from European/modernist to African clashed with the pleasantries of window shopping, strolling, and sipping cappuccino in pavement cafs. Street colour had become offensive: people had begun to use public space in the central city informally and in ways that established interests regarded as

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unsightly, threatening, polluting and contaminating. Sanctuary from public sleeping, cooking, feeding, washing, urination and defecation would be sought in more tightly managed suburban shopping malls and office parks (Nahnsen 2003). Riding a wave of (white) public anxiety about crime and grime (blamed on homelessness, vagrancy, informal trading, opportunist parking attendants, and traffic congestion), a privatepublic partnership was formed to take appropriate action. The globalisation of diagnosis and response is striking. Validated by government encouragement of sharper civic management, the partnership arguably rested also on a discursive link between informal activities and crime that paid too little attention to the difference between petty and serious crime (Nahnsen 2003). The Cape Town Partnership, a non-profit urban renewal and management agency, was established in mid-1999. Its specific purpose was to secure the citys future by articulating better the interests of the City Council, the Cape Metro Council, the South African Property Owners Association, private businesses and their representative organisations (the CTPs 34 corporate members include two oil companies, six major retail chains, nine property companies, six financial service companies and three hotels). Unlike in central Durban and Johannesburg (Maharaj and Ramballi 1998; Tomlinson 1999), elite interests were not challenged by civic, labour and community organisations, and consultation has been less extensive. In keeping with practice in Business Improvement Districts in many other cities (Lloyd et al. 2003; Hoyt 2004), the CTP is a kind of shadow local government. Neighbourhood and ratepayer-based, it is funded by a levy on central city property rates. The levy generated R17 million in 2004/05. Ploughed into projects for the local common good, the funds are supplemented by property rate receipts that the CTP persuaded the City Council to ring fence for local application. The prescription came at a key moment when a newly established single metropolitan civic authority (mandated to implement anti-poverty measures) might have wished to redistribute a proportion of central city revenues into civic projects in the black townships. Coupled with substantial re-rating of newly capitalised central city properties, longoverdue property tax reform in Cape Town (van Ryneveld and Parker 2002) will generate considerably more funds for future CTP expenditure. High among the CTPs priorities were economic growth and job creation, building strong trading communities, delivering equitable and effective services, and fostering a creative city. After proudly announced studies of central city revitalisation in the USA and UK (references to Johannesburg and Durban are not mentioned in CTP publicity), the CTP set out rapidly to enhance the security of businesses, workers and visitors, and to provide a clean environment free of litter and graffiti. The modus operandi involved identifying and monitoring 30 guaranteed services, stipulating baseline levels of delivery and performance, and offering remedies for breaches (Dewar 2004). The CTP began its practical interventions in November 2000 in the Central City Improvement District (CCID), an area equivalent to the old CBD. Confirming the need for defensive action, its inception coincided with the opening of a giant retail mall a mere 15-min drive from the CBD (Marks and Bezzoli 2001). The R2.4 billion, 260-ha Century City development (matching the size of Cape Town CBD) offered parking for 10,000 cars when its Canal Walk shopping-leisure complex (the

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largest in Africa) opened for business at the end of 2000. Without hoping to match this glut, the CCID set about trying to upgrade its own domain. In 2001, almost three-quarters of the CCIDs R14.6 million budget was devoted to security (49%) and cleansing (22.5%). The security expenditure put 183 extra security personnel on the streets. The cleansing budget doubled existing City Council capacity, and was directed partly at removing illegal posters and graffiti, and combating illegal dumping. Marketing (10.3%) and operating (13.4%) expenses accounted for a negligible share of the budget (Nahnsen 2003). Early in 2002, a survey of 500 business leaders, shop owners, office workers, commuters, tourists and informal traders in central Cape Town revealed considerably improved opinions about levels of crime, cleanliness and safety. Higher CBD office rentals and occupancy rates reflected the improvement (SA Property Review, July/August 2003: 4142). Vigorous programme development increased the cleansing bill and enhanced levels of security. Cleansing expenditure of R300,000 a month doubled since 2003. By 2005, CCID security comprised two permanent security managers, 160 private security officers (24 hours), six mobile patrol vehicles, 10 mounted patrol officers, 68 parking marshals. Security officers are linked to the citys 72camera CCTV network and cooperate with public law enforcement agencies. Office vacancies declined from 60% in 2001 to 10% in 2005 (Property Magazine, May 2005). Whereas the CTPs success has fanned out in the creation of new operational precincts in and around the central city in the Gardens, Green Point, and Oranje-Kloof there are, of course, critics. As is the case overseas, privatepublic partnerships that have been installed as quasi-urban government are not always welcomed. In the Cape Town case, concern has been expressed over whether the CTP can serve the interests of informal entrepreneurs and homeless people (Nahnsen 2003). Anecdotally, these overlooked persons rage about a return to civic regulation that is as onerous as apartheid policing. Anxiety has been expressed about the displacement of crime into neighbouring districts. The prominence of established commercial interests in the CTP raises queries about the commodification of heritage and property, and also about the narrowing of public policy debate and the ending of meaningful public participation in service delivery. Already there is worry about the sale of municipal assets and functions, and about the increasingly powerful role of private consultants and commercial interests in urban affairs (McDonald and Smith 2004). The interiorisation of previously public realms is not to be taken lightly in the South African context where political inclusion and accountability are still only budding. At least one commentator reads the emergence of the CTP as the result of a weak city government abrogating its civic responsibilities in the face of private pressure (Low 2003; see also Miraftab 2007).

Commercial Space Retail Partly as a result of the CTPs efforts, trading in central Cape Town has been buoyant. Average prime retail rentals have risen. In 1999, prime rentals were R70/m2;

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in 2005 they reached R250/m2. Less than 20 shops out of an estimated 1,225 wholesale and retail outlets in central Cape Town were vacant in 2005. In addition to department stores and retail multiples, and the ubiquitous general and service stores, the mix includes many speciality stores. Among them are 34 jewelers, 20 antique dealers, 23 African art dealers, and 56 motor cycle dealers. The boutique and speciality stores serve Capetonians as well as the booming numbers of tourists for whom a cleaner and safer central city has become a space to see, experience, eat in, and photograph. Estimates are that 90% of tourists spend some time in the central city for heritage and cultural purposes, and for shopping. Compact and suited to strolling, the city offers a diversity of architecturally arresting accommodation, facilities, attractions and sights. In the CBD alone, there are an estimated 58 hotels and guest houses. The 252 restaurants, bars and cafs include many of the best in South Africa. Two hundred central city shops are targeted for upgrading or conversion by 2006. In a striking move away from white hegemony, 300 central city shops are now black-owned. Far more Africans trade informally from small pavement stalls. In May 2004, an estimated 2,200 traders worked in Greenmarket Square, on pavements along Adderley Street (the citys original spine of formal retailing), and on the railway station forecourt and roof deck (Cape Town Partnership, undated). The new retail economy of central Cape Town is variegated, melding with creative industry. This restructuring is mainly a west-side phenomenon. Shops along upper (south) Long Street sell funky clothing, curios, world music, beads, books, refreshments and adventure holidays amid a quirky mlange of backpacker hostels, hairdressers, internet cafes, locksmith, bookshops, ethnic and fusion-food outlets, and scooter rental agents. By night the street becomes a focus of club and bar life (Hogdahl 2004). Lower Bree Street has lost its dubious associations with gangs and substance abuse, and is shedding its primary identity as a strip of motor retailing. Its variety includes cafs, a leisure boating and yachting store, a cycling store, an art gallery and interior decorators. The Dutch owner of a designer-furniture store in a converted three-storey C19th warehouse there predicts that once-unfashionable Bree Street will become the design street of sub-Saharan Africa (Property Magazine, December 2005). Design has also spread beyond the old CBD. Victoria Junction (Fig. 1) emerged in the 1990s as a mix of design-orientated and telecommunications businesses on the site of the demolished Cunningham and Gearing Foundry. In a cluster of buildings named Sovereign Quay and Victoria Wharf, the restored 1903 Foundry building presents itself as Cape Towns design dynamo. A controversial African jewellery emporium and diamond cutting centre has been mooted for close to the CTICC (Cape Times, 6, December 16, 2005). An emergent design district on Upper Bree Street extends into the northern end of trendy Kloof Street along the old CBD panhandle. There, a complex of buildings that began life as the warehouses, plant and offices of the United Tobacco Company (1903) were redeveloped from 1994 (Quaghebeur 2000). The Longkloof Studios currently accommodate media and film enterprises. A film, television and multimedia college in the old office block draws students from the next door training college in the premises of the Westcliff School designed by the famous colonial architect Sir Herbert Baker. The Buitenkloof Studios are a nearby redevelopment project.

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Fig. 1 Recently constructed commercial buildings in central Cape Town, and landmark office towers in the old CBD

As in other de-industrialised, post-modern central cities (Hutton 2004), the agglomeration of creative industries in central Cape Town is striking. Hundreds of enterprising young people are nudging edges of the core out of their old industrial identity. Computer-related hardware and software service industries are reinserting small-scale design and manufacture into the central city. Technology-intensive filming, fashion and ornamentation industries are mushrooming in recycled buildings saturated with inspirational human and technical history.

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There are approximately 200 advertising, communication and design firms in central Cape Town. Media, publishing, film, architecture, performing arts, fashion, music, visual arts, literary arts and heritage enterprises are flourishing. Creative industry extends to pavement workshops and NGO factory outlets where artisans beat, wind and thread township tourist trinkets feverishly in recycled sheet metal, wire and beads. In April 2002, Newsweek magazine rated Cape Town one of the top eight creative cities in the world; a local cultural commentator reckons that the central city has the highest concentration of creative industry in South Africa. The corollary is that as a repository, creator and distributor of considerable inherited and new symbolic capital, central Cape Town can nourish spaces of consumption and production in which dialogue and hybridity are prized, and from which a new urban social conviviality and cultural topography can emerge (Minty 2005). Offices Suburban flight of offices from central Cape Town continued into the late 1990s: at least 20 regional head offices or central city branches of major businesses closed or relocated to new office parks in Century City and Westlake. Between 1995 and 2000, there was five times more office development in decentralised nodes than in the CBD. In 2000, CBD office rents were 30% lower than their 1982 peak and 25% lower than in Tyger Valley and Claremont. CBD office vacancies were double those elsewhere in the metropole (Turok 2001). Companies whose offices remained best situated in the central city near the harbour included staple port industries: fisheries, shipping services, freight forwarders, and construction, oil and gas industries. Two new office towers were built in the early 1990s: The Terraces (1992; 14 floors) and Metropolitan (1993; 28 floors). SAFMarine House, the 26-storey head office of the national shipping corporation, was built in 1993. Office decentralisation froze the corporate skyline of Cape Town after a spate of building in the 1960s and 1970s. The 22-storey Naspers (now media24) tower on the Heerengracht did not long remain the tallest building in Africa when it was completed in 1962, but it set the style. Having already suburbanised its own head office by 1956, Cape Towns home-grown Old Mutual Assurance Company demolished an existing building and invested in a 24-storey cube of general office suites in 1964 on an Adderley Street corner whose affectionate name, Cartwrights Corner, recalls a more personalised past. Two other insurance houses built office towers in the CBD. Renovated as The Pinnacle (R80 million), the 23-storey Santam block was built in stages from 1964 to 1978. The 28-storey Sanlam building (1978) perched on top of the Golden Acre shopping plaza on the old railway station site. Several multi-tenanted office blocks were placed on the Foreshore in the vicinity of Tulbagh Square: the ABSA tower (1970; 34 floors), Mobil Centre (1970; 24), 2 Long St (1971; 22), the BP Centre (1972; 32), the Reserve Bank (1975; 23), Shell House (1976; 29), Standard Bank (1976; 23). Flaunting successful indigenous (not least Afrikaner) commercial capital at the height of South Africas political isolation [and reflecting the corresponding absence of alternative investment outlets (Turok 2001)], the edifices dragged the CBDs centre of gravity north-west (Levitan 1995). Against the grain, in the mid-1990s two prominent retailers (Woolworths and Truworths) constructed squat national

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headquarter offices that cowered in the east end of the old CBD. Arranged around an atrium, the limited access, inward-looking corporate spaces turned their backs to the city. Recently, office block construction has resumed in central Cape Town, specifically on the Foreshore (Fig. 1). Excepting for some building east of the old CBD (Mediterranean Shipping Company brokers and agents, R70 million), most have been in Roggebaai on land flattened by the demolition of the thermal power station (1936). Cape Towns new powerhouse its new financial district is clustered around new streets named Jetty and Wharf, and in the vicinity of Pier Place and upgraded Jetty Square. Office buildings include Investec (merchant bank, R100 million), ABSA, Metropolitan (Assurance), Sonnenberg, Hoffmann & Golombik (attorneys, R80 million), Ernst & Young (auditors), South African Revenue Services, and the Vodacom telecommunications company. Ancillary services in the area include a gym and a computer store, markers of a new corporate landscape that lies where there was once a beach and fish market. A new convention centre, hotels and an apartment tower block (see later) complete the scene. Multistorey car parks have been concealed in the new buildings; overflow car parking is beneath the elevated motorway. In the Foreshore tradition, large city blocks, wide streets and street frontages without cafes and shops create a somewhat lifeless landscape. Away from the Foreshore, smaller office developments are rising on sites where redundant, low-rise CBD-edge buildings have been demolished (e.g. Cliffe Dekker commercial law firm). Several statistical measures confirm the transparent health of Cape Towns central city office sector. At 9.92%, commercial vacancies in 2004/5 were the lowest since 2000 when they ran at 60%. Office vacancy rates are approximately half the rate in Durban, and much lower than in Johannesburgs CBD (25%). Office vacancies are projected to decrease to 5% once residential conversions are stripped out (see below). Increasing rentals realized for top-grade office space also register the vitality of Cape Towns central city office sector. Rents realised for A-grade offices (less than 10 years old) were R25/m2, R43/m2 and R75/m2 in 1995, 1999 and 2005, respectively. B-grade offices (between 10 and 20 years old) rented at R22/m2, R31/m2 and R60/m2 in the same years. In finance and related business services, the count of businesses in the Cape Town CBD includes 30 banks and foreign exchange outlets, 65 accounting firms and 313 registered attorneys. In the property and design sector, downtown Cape Town hosts 56 property companies and brokers, and 400 registered architects. Many other small professional accounting, design, engineering, film, IT, video and media firms have opted out of office blocks and have snapped up and stylishly renovated small buildings (Cape Town Partnership, undated). Appropriate to a central city, the number, if not the mix, is unparalleled in any suburban development in Cape Town. Services Central Cape Towns contemporary service economy is moving away from stateprovided administrative and legal functions. Gains have been made in call centre provision: since 2004, R295 million of investment in 15 facilities has created 1,000 new jobs. Prominent among the service hubs to have emerged in the non-public

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sector is the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), a new magnet and visual beacon. One-quarter funded by an (off-site) casino operator as reciprocity for its monopoly licence in the province, the CTICC opened in June 2003. The R566 million complex draws to the west central city some of the functions for which the Good Hope Arena complex was constructed on the CBDs eastern fringe, namely, exhibits, trade and fashion shows, performances and conferences. In its first 6 months of operations, the CTICC held 196 events that attracted 290,000 visitors. The commercial ripple effect from the CTICC has been and will be considerable. During its construction, CTICC contributed R1.2 billion to the central city, and created 4,000 direct jobs (Planning, August 2003). Projections are that in the first 10 years of its life, the CTICC will inject R11.2 billion into the western Cape economy, and that by 2012 it will have yielded R1.03 billion in tax, created 15,000 jobs and generated R5.6 billion in indirect household income (CapeAfrica 2001). The direct and indirect contributions made by the CTICC to Cape Towns economy will be enhanced from early 2007 when exhibition facilities will increase by 1,200 m2. Space in the new interlinked 16-storey Convention Tower (R230 million; 17,500 m2) started selling at the end of 2005. Negotiation has started with government for acquisition of the nearby dockside Customs House, an austere 1960s office tower block on the port side of Table Bay Boulevard. Two hotels serving Foreshore entrepreneurs already existed near the CTICC, namely the Capetonian and the Tulbagh (now refurbished and renamed Hollow on the Square). The Cullinan and the Holiday Inn are two newly built hotels; they opened in 1998. Others have since been constructed, extended and modified: City Lodge, Arabella Sheraton (2003, R380 million, 500 beds) and three Protea hotels (North Wharf, Jetty Square & Victoria Junction). Since 2000, more than 1,000 rooms have been added to the stock of registered short-term accommodation in 58 hotels and guest houses in the central city (privately let self-catering apartments excluded). The range includes new boutique hotels in converted buildings (Metropole, Urban Chic, Cape Heritage, Hippo). Overall, hotel building has provided 39,000 construction jobs. These will be sustained by new hotels still in design in late 2005, namely St Georges (Cathedral Precinct) and one in the shell of the underutilized Huguenot Memorial Hall.

Residential Space The increasing proportion of metropolitan domestic space in central Cape Town is one of the startling features of the areas regeneration, and one of the reasons for the expansion of the central city service economy. Whereas, in 1985, when there was nothing left to do in the CBD except work (Vokaty 1986: 210), and the night-time city was deserted, poorly lit, depressing and dangerous, now life is returning. Grand old townhouses in the historic centre mark one stratum of past residence. In this category are the signature Koopmans de Wet House (C17th), Martin Melck House (1783, now the Gold of Africa Museum), Rust-en-Vreugd (C18) and Dr. John Philips house (18211846). Churches and relict working spaces (such as at Heritage

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Fig. 2 New build apartments and lofts in contemporary central Cape Town, and residential conversion of commercial and industrial buildings

Square) reveal the historic presence of other residents. Single- and double-storeyed Victorian houses in Gardens, Tamboerskloof and Bo Kaap (Fig. 2) index the progressive decentralisation of homes south and west up hill slopes. Construction of residential walk-up apartment blocks in the post-war years, especially in the 1940s to 1960s, in Gardens, Oranjezicht and Vredehoek further emptied the central city.

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These densely settled, wealthy suburbs nevertheless helped sustain the central city economy. Shopping malls and office parks have not and will not emerge on the steep slopes of these inner city suburbs. Similarly, there is a limit to how many more new places of work, shopping, recreation and cultural activity can be provided on the prosperous Atlantic seaboard littoral. In the 1970s, residential land use in downtown Cape Town stagnated. The remaining residents were predominantly poor Africans and mixed-race people who lived in substandard dwellings (Brand 1978). On the eastern edge of the CBD, tens of thousands of people were evicted from the infamous District Six. Thirty-five years on, under a new political dispensation, some of these ex-residents and their families are trickling back (Dewar 2001). In a different process, one that does not entail evictions, there is also a gathering movement of middle-class residents into the central city. Although perhaps not quite yet constituting South Africas equivalent of the fifth migration in the USA (Fishman 2005), this re-urbanism involves densification from new construction, conversions, and penthouse developments on the rooftops of commercial buildings. Cranes hover over shored-up facades behind which bulldozers and drills wreak havoc. The reconfiguration has been encouraged by declaration of the central city as one of the national governments specified urban development zones where private sector investment enjoys tax incentives to construct and improve building stock. The scheme aims to assist urban regeneration by paying accelerated depreciation allowances set at 20% for 5 years for refurbishment, 20% in the first year of new construction, and 5% for 16 years thereafter. Financial facilitation is but one force in a complex conjuncture of functional interdependency that emerged spontaneously or was engineered deliberately in the central city property submarkets (on this idea, see Beauregard 2005). The first office-to-residential conversion in central Cape Town involved the famously ornate 18-storey Art Deco tower block that stands across from the Grand Central Post Office (1940), itself reconfigured into retail space. In a project which the architect likened to reanimation of a comatose goddess (Planning, October 2003: 19), the Old Mutual building (1939) was converted into sectional title units from mid-2003 (and renamed Mutual Heights). Next door, the compact five-storey terracotta-faade building (c. 1902) that housed Wellington Fruit Growers since 1934 was converted into four residential units at the end of 2004. Old Mutuals drab 1960s office tower block on Cartwrights Corner was converted into 124 apartments and six penthouses in 2004. The most prominent and prestigious of the central city residential conversions is a R1 billion development at the southern end of St Georges Mall, a pedestrianisation scheme along the length of nine city blocks that was developed in four phases between 1986 and 1991 (van der Merwe 1991). Scheduled to open at the end of 2006, the project is being driven and funded by Eurocape, a new company with an Anglo-Irish parent. The project involves gutting six financial office buildings that were purchased in early 2002. Behind the facades will emerged a majestic 150-room hotel, 163 luxury apartments, and a gourmet retaillifestyle mix, including chocolatier and working winery. The buildings purchased early in 2002 were the old Reserve Bank, the Cape of Good Hope Bank, the Board of Executors building

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(site of the Dutch East India Company Hospital, 16971782), the Cape Times/ Syfrets and Nedcor Investment buildings, and the Caf Royale. De Beers donated its Rhodes building. The project includes three levels of retail (3,500 m2) and parking for 330 cars. The unique development twins a post-apartheid and an imperial icon into the name Mandela Rhodes Place. Nearby, five floors of apartments (The Piazza) are being added to the old Groote Kerk office building. Behind elegant historic facades fronting onto Adderley Street, former commercial space is being converted into a boutique hotel and 50 apartments. The Adderley Hotel comprises the old BoE building, the Pearne and the Fabian buildings (19031906). The 11-storey Guardian Life building becomes Adderley Terraces. To the rear, a skywalk connects parking garages to Mutual Heights. The two top floors of the Westminster Building (purchased by a foreign investor in 2006 for R10.5 million) will be converted to apartments. The momentum for residential conversions is likely to continue around Church Square after the sale of a vintage corner site building. Built in 1931 as Colonial Orphan Chambers, three-storey Creative House, headquarters of the Public & Allied Worker s Union, was sold to Italian investors for R9.9 million in 2005 (Property Magazine, October 2005). Elsewhere in the old central city, the 75-year-old Bill of Costs House opposite the Cape High Court and close to legal chambers in Keerom Street has been converted into 12 residential units. Conversions and additions have been completed or are underway along Bree, Loop and Long streets: R115 million was spent redeveloping Glaston House into 19 luxury apartments. Elkay House boasts three lofts. Other redevelopments are House Nouveau, 6 Pepper Street, De Oude Schoor and Manhattan Place. In the Greenmarket Square precinct, hybrid office-parking-retail-residential stacks have begun emerging from consolidation and redevelopment of office blocks now named Namaqua House (R15 million), The Decks (R80 million) and Greenmarket Place. Superior accommodation and extra car parking has reduced building vacancy and increased rentals in the area. Simultaneously, the central city is being re-socialised: 24- to 45-year-old professionals comprise the majority of purchasers of new central city accommodation. They are dissolving distinctions between living and working spaces. Adjacent to the conversions in Art Deco Bible House and Kimberley House on Greenmarket Square, 50% of the apartments sold in Market House were purchased by young women professionals, the majority of them women of colour (Financial Mail, 23 August 2005). Residential conversion and construction is also occurring around the edges of the old CBD. Some is on the Foreshore, where indigenous tree planting and a canalised water feature have enhanced the streetscape. The old mixed-use Art Deco Colloseum building that housed a cinema until 1973 is being converted into 62 apartments. A 1950s Medical Centre is being converted into a 160-room four-star hotel on five floors. Above, Fountain Suites will comprise 70 apartments and newly built rooftop penthouses (R100 million). Overlooking Riebeeck Square, 112 Buitengracht, a four-storey Art Deco building that successively housed a hospital, an advertising centre and an education college, has been topped out in a complex of some 52 apartments and lofts called The Studios.

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In the Roggebaai district, the new R390 million Icon building (a Black empowerment project) adds 200 one- and two-bedroom apartments and penthouses to central city stock. In an old warehousing zone on the southwest edge of the CBD, several buildings have been converted to apartments named The Edge, 11 on Buiten, West Side Studios and Bree Street Studios. On the northwest edge, apartment blocks are rising on vacant land and on land cleared of offices and light industrial structures in the vicinity of the new Cape Quarter at the new Soho Square building (the old Readers Digest building) and at Harbouredge, Metropolis, Rockwell (103 apartments) and Waterkant (incorporating the old Phoenix Hotel). The Harbour Bridge and Canal Quays developments provide new residential space along the Roggebaai Canal. The building creates a belt of almost continuous high-density residential space linked to the V&A Marina. Construction of this gated complex of six-storey luxury apartments nestling round the edges of the historic harbour started in 1999. After a R1.3 billion phase of development, civic authorities stalled progress until mid-2005. When finished in 2008 the 200-mooring yacht Marina will contain approximately 600 housing units, a 100-bed hotel with separate island chalets, and a time-share residential block. Comparable suburban projects include (lower price) upmarket apartments overlooking an artificial lake at Bellvilles Tyger Valley hub. To the east and southeast of the CBD, several office blocks and warehouses are being converted to residential use. The Harrington Square parking lot presents a golden redevelopment opportunity in the vicinity of several 100-year-old commercial buildings, notably the two-storey vacant Beikinstadt building (seller of Judaica books and religious articles), Woodheads leather merchandisers, and the two-storey Castle Hotel Nearby, in a district of clothing factory shops on Buitenkant Street, the failed retail venture at the Old Town Square is being redeveloped as an enclave of apartments. A four-storey corner warehouse (37 Buitenkant) has been converted into residential use and topped with lofts. The tower block on Roeland Street that previously housed the offices of the Cape Education Department was converted into the Perspectives apartments in 2003/4. Next door, two more buildings are being redeveloped. Dunkley Square has been gentrified, comprising townhouses adjacent to restaurants and designer studios. Further south, Victorian residential row houses have been converted into offices for architects and designers, and into restaurants. In the same urban fringe, changes have affected a light industrial district of motor-related activity (sales, repairs, parts, panel beating), printing and publishing, and discount factory outlets for clothes, household lighting and upholstery. Here, abutting a small area of public housing for fire station crews (and, in the past, prison warders), a range of building shells, foundations and cleared sites are in various stages of redevelopment. Schoonmill, Cannon Gardens, Trinity Gardens and the Four Seasons are multi-storey residential complexes. The Wembley Square residential development (R128 million) includes offices, upmarket food retail and a gymnasium. On the back of Cape Towns property boom, initial construction and conversion targeted wealthy people seeking to live downtown, and investors eyeing tourists wanting to rent interesting, smart self-catering apartments. Subsequently, developers have sold a mix of entry-level and loft apartments off plan to first-time buyers and to

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less wealthy investors hoping to rent into a local market. One target is young, single and partnered people doing well-paid work in the knowledge and technology economy who are seeking a toehold in the high-amenity lifestyle space of central Cape Town. Prior to the latest residential developments in the central city, entry-level apartments were clustered in nearby suburbs. In the CBD, one of the few blocks where there have been modestly priced apartments is Senator Park, a cheaply constructed early 1970s building dumped close to government offices for the convenience, initially, of low-paid civil servants. Offering affordable long-term accommodation (not least to African immigrant entrepreneurs working in central city arts and crafts, and as parking attendants), the hideous, shabby building comes closer than any other lodgings to being central Cape Towns sole inner-city multi-storey slum. Unlike in downtown Johannesburg, urban rejuvenation has not had to target unhealthy and dangerous tenements. The late 2005 log of residential conversions in central Cape Town records some 29 separate developments (96% sold) since 1999 when 340 units came onto the market. In 2004, 840 residential units were constructed. Estimates are that in 2006 approximately 2,340 residential conversion units will be built and transferred. Average floor size (bachelor, single, two- and three-bed apartments) is 96 m2. At prices between R5,000/m2 and R27,000/m2, the average selling price size has been R1 million per unit. The rate of construction is higher than in adjacent Green Point suburb (an established zone of high-density residential dwellings) where the number is expected to be 1,500. Between 80 and 90% of inner-city units have been sold to Capetonians and threequarters to owner-occupiers (Cape Town Partnership, undated). The developers are selling not just centrality to work, but also a lock-up-and-go lifestyle featuring easily managed, safe space. Chic apartments and lofts in modern or historic buildings that offer panoramic views are also marketed as offering secure off-street parking, and proximity to diverse cafes, restaurants and nightlife. An on-site gymnasium and plunge pool are common features. Opposite the historic Victorian-period Kimberley Hotel, the redevelopers of Temple House (45 apartments), a disused seven-storey factory building, sell a lifestyle featuring biometric security and a zen roof terrace and meditation area. Black enterprise is designing and marketing another redevelopment (Ilitha Lofts, 28 apartments) under the Afro-chic umbrella. The conjunction of redevelopment and residential gentrification in central Cape Town is a source of both pleasure and concern. On the one hand, round-the-clock activity in the central area should breathe life into expensive, unique real estate, and increase the number of taxpayer and consumer stakeholders. New residential developments that raise the central city population to about 55,000 will provide a more sustainable customer base for central city retail and entertainment, including the estimated 252 restaurants, food-to-go and coffee shops. On the other hand, in the new democratic South Africa there is inevitably dismay about centrally sited residential development from which the mass of daily downtown workers and shoppers are excluded by virtue of their poverty. Skin pigmentation no longer restricts the way that the majority of Cape Towns people can use civic facilities, but it appears as if apartheid red-lining on racial grounds has been replaced by a financially exclusive property market that entrenches prosperity and privilege, and

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extends it to foreign investors, business entrepreneurs, and vacationers. As elsewhere in the metropole, soaring residential property prices between 2002 and 2005 dashed hopes for a mixed-use, mixed-income, socially inclusive central city. The Provinces sale in 2006 of a residential home for the elderly, and the conversion of the building and valuable site into expensive apartments (The Orangerie; R220 million; 92 apartments, opening late 2008) shifts the profile of the central area in terms of affordability if not generationally. Moderating exclusionary residential development in central Cape Town is one of the aims of the CTP and other public bodies. Geographically, the provision of social (affordable) housing in the inner-city neighbourhood of District Six is not strictly a central city project, but residential infill there will ease criticism and consciences. Restitution of land to the victims of apartheid spatial engineering has had 66 claimants confirmed for 126 new maisonettes (Cape Times, 8 2006). In the absence of restitution claims in the central city itself, private ownership and high land prices are likely to curb residential in-fill by low-income housing. An extensive open-air government vehicle parking lot near historic Rust-en-Vreugd is ripe for redevelopment, possibly as a parliamentary village that will consolidate three dispersed suburban parliamentary compounds (Cape Argus, 24 January 2007). Gentrification in photogenic Bo Kaap suggests a trend that is inimical to reversing centripetal, exclusionary forces in the urban residential property market. With political will, vacant land in central Cape Town can still be acquired for low-income housing. Sections of underutilised space on the Foreshore, and on stretches of land on the eastern side of the old CBD, may be knitted into tentative 1996 plans for 2004 Olympic Games accommodation on 300 ha of underutilised brownfield ground at Culemborg railway yards (Hiller 2000). Mass settlement of the urban poor in the central Cape Town is utopian and empty rhetoric. It cannot merely be assumed that the prime solution to unequal life chances in greater Cape Town can be solved by having tens of thousands of seriously disadvantaged citizens living in the central city. Some social housing would certainly be desirable, not least for accommodating the growing number of people who work unsociable hours in the service sector. A practical way of making the central city more inclusive for the urban majority is to improve its accessibility to township residents who have day jobs there, who shop there, use the public services, and may like to spend more leisure time there. A key step is to upgrade Cape Towns ailing mobility infrastructure by commencing investment in rail and road mass transit that has been postponed for decades. The alliances and values restructuring central Cape Town have chosen to combat homelessness there before grappling with providing social housing. Partly because of its association with petty crime committed by boys and young men, the CTP has tackled homelessness vigorously. The cooperation of community courts has been sought to encourage community service sentencing. With the help of a full-time social development officer, the CCID has also linked up with NGOs to help street children in particular find temporary shelter, be returned to their families, receive alcohol/drug rehabilitation, and/or find casual or part-time work. By the end of 2005, 434 children had been placed in the City Mission and 1,381 homeless adults in Haven night shelters. The CTP has donated R1 million to a care and assessment centre for street children (Dewar 2004).

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Public, Cultural and Leisure Space Preserved, gracious old homes and grand old commercial buildings are among the key elements in central Cape Towns visually pleasing landscape, and they contribute to its distinctive atmosphere and history. Public buildings enrich the stock of cultural/historic capital. Many of the citys finest public buildings are clustered around the Companys Gardens (Fig. 3). Tuynhuis (1701), a presidential residency, was declared a national monument in 1993. Other notable buildings are the Slave Lodge (1679), the SA Museum (1825), Parliament (1885, declared a national monument in 1993), Hiddingh Hall and Library (1911), the SA National Gallery (1930) and the SA National Library (1860). Adding to a zone marketed in Cape Town as South Africas premier cultural precinct, several prominent buildings cluster around Church Square: the Civil Service Club (18661976), the National Mutual Life Association of Australia building, South Africas first Congregational Church (1821), and 5 Corporation Street. The city centre is also dotted with historic places of worship, namely The Palm Tree Mosque (1807), the Groote Kerk (1841), St Georges Cathedral (1901) and the Great Synagogue (1905). St Stephens Church (1838) began as the Africa Theatre (1797), and was declared a national monument in 1965. The street-level presence of foreign consulates (e.g. French, Netherlands, Italian and Belgian), which own and occupy their own historic buildings, adds a refined, cosmopolitan air to the landscape. The US Embassy has moved to Westlake suburb. Only a small proportion of inner-city land is devoted to education: the facilities are the Technical College (1923), Good Hope Seminary High, Gardens Commercial High and St Marys Primary. Few private institutional buildings have been constructed in Cape Town for decades; the SA Jewish Museum & Holocaust Centre (1999) is an exception. Far more government-use buildings have been remodelled or newly erected. In the former category, the Roeland Street prison was converted into an archive depository and reading room. The Edwardian premises on Victoria Street vacated by the Cape Provincial Archives quasi-reverted to its original educational function (the University of the Cape of Good Hope, 1913) and became the Centre for the Book in 1998. In the 1960s and 1970s, new local, provincial and national government buildings altered central Cape Towns skyline significantly. Not unlike their commercial counterparts, the tower block developments were oversized, obtrusive, and architecturally meretricious. Erected with the help of height and setback allowances that overrode town planning restrictions, the slabs were insensitive to the grain, scale and charm of adjacent and nearby buildings. Their brutality and size overwhelmed nearby structures and public squares, helped destroy public street life, and created domineering, alienating and blighted spaces. One offender is the old City Council office block (1969: seven floors of offices above six floors of parking) City Park was recently converted and renamed Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital. Other offenders are: the Provincial government building (1974; 20 floors), the new Foreshore Civic Centre (1978; 26), the Reserve Bank office tower, the Parliamentary office block (1980: 24), the SA Revenue Services (1985; 14 since relocated to Roggebaai) (Townsend 2003). Reckless building in central Cape Town by the highly centralised and authoritarian apartheid state was indicative of skewed power relations; even elite

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Fig. 3 Existing landmark public buildings and the (re)construction of public space in twenty-first century central Cape Town

local voices and public agencies were emasculated. Their ineffectiveness was matched by carelessness or unconsciousness about urban heritage. Indeed, a preservationist public culture emerged late and slowly in Cape Town. Before 1950, the only declared national monuments in the city were a church, three grand houses, and two government buildings. By 1975, a mere 15 buildings had been declared national monuments (Townsend 2003). Fortunately, private money and

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patronage preserved some urban heritage. The Simon van der Stel Foundation was prominent. The Rembrandt Foundation restored and redeveloped 1416 Keerom Street as the Five Flies restaurant after it had been a private home (1741), the Nederlansdsche Club, a bank, and the German Consulate (pre-1939). The emergence of central Cape Town as a stunning goddess has not happened just in the last 3 years. On the contrary, it took years of struggle to preserve the citys rich architectural heritage. Agents of urban governance (including the Cape Institute of Architects) effectively became sensitive to conservation in the mid-1970s. The City Councils A City for the People Report (1975) helped root urban conservation, and the publication 3 years later of an inventory of historic buildings advanced the process. Urban conservation awareness was translated into action in the late 1970s over plans to extend Table Bay Boulevard south as an elevated freeway over Buitengracht Street, and to create a 2,000-car park adjoining Riebeeck Square. The term boulevard dignifies the elevated car conduit that separated and alienated the city centre from its harbour and the sea, and was arguably the single most significant and dramatic urban design intervention in the citys history (Townsend 2003: 123). The Boulevard plans blighted a run down area, but civic opposition led to their reversal. In the 1980s, a public furore about proposed developments in and around Greenmarket Square (including an underground car park), saved key buildings, sightlines and heritage, while allowing creative re-use of utilitarian space. After the City Councils 1985 proposal for a CBD pedestrian network (that eventuated in St Georges Mall), the formation of its Urban Conservation Unit in 1986 gave further impetus to urban conservation. The Cape Town Heritage Trust (1987) achieved rapid success in the area between Greenmarket and Riebeeck squares. In 1990, after a decade of squabbling, a town planning regulation finally enabled control or influence over development of conservation-worthy buildings and the design of new buildings in central city conservation areas. The 15-year-long process (19791994) of designating conservation areas culminated in 1997 with the consolidation of approximately 40 separate such spaces into one unit covering the entire historic city centre. In place of a parking lot for 2,000 cars, refurbishment of buildings dating from 1771 (creating Heritage Square) was completed in 1998 after 30 years of endeavour (Townsend 2003). Recently, in an era of heightened heritage awareness, the Alliance of Inner City Civics has mobilised to pressure observation of urban zoning (including building use, bulk and height), and alignment with provisions for public consultation and greening that are stipulated in the 1996 metropolitan spatial development guidelines. Moderate success was achieved by concerted neighbourhood protest in 2004/05 that succeeded in saving the faade of the old Phoenix Hotel on Chiappini and Strand streets. Site excavations for the flurry of building in central Cape Town have spawned interest in archaeological conservation. Thirty years ago, care was taken to preserve (and display behind glass) the historic water well discovered during the digging of the subterranean concourse of the Golden Acre shopping centre. Subsequently, the Chavonne defensive gun battery (1724) was uncovered at the V&A Waterfront when sinking foundations for the new BoE building. There is more publicity about this relict structure than about the ships anchor displayed in the basement of the Arabella Sheraton Grand Hotel. Hopefully, the C18th brick wall preserved in Mandela

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Rhodes Place is not in a corner that effectively conceals from public view another treasured fragment of Cape Towns neglected maritime past. Heritage is reconfiguring central Cape Town in a major way as a result of the potent, serendipitous archaeological find in central Cape Town during excavations in mid-2003 for the Rockwell apartment block. The digging unearthed over 2,000 human skeletons believed to be of the citys C17th/C18th poor and underclasses such as sailors, servants, slaves and indigenous people. Public outcry failed to prevent exhumation of the unmarked graves, but work was suspended and a conservation zone thrown across blocks abutting Prestwich Street. After a lengthy process of appeal and public consultation, the proposal is to honour early citizens in a R4 million commemorative project on the edge of the old CBD. Prestwich Memorial Place will comprise re-interment in St Andrews churchyard, upgrading of formless and forlorn St Andrews Square into a memorial square, and erection of walls of memory/interpretive panels along an upgraded and partially pedestrianised route leading past nine forgotten C18th/C19th church cemeteries to the site of the old Amsterdam Battery. In a post-modern atmosphere of diversity and pluralism, the intellectual consciousness that has grown in the last decade about the extent, visibility, fragility and power of public history has come at an auspicious moment for central Cape Town. It is plain that the place that has been the epicentre of 350 years of white supremacist rule has in fact been central Cape Town; this is the sacred ground where white western culture and power have been exercised and reproduced relentlessly (Nahnsen 2003). The sense that architects, architectural ideas, developers, planners and public discourse have controlled, legitimated and reproduced white (European) space and culture is widely shared, if not always in the finest detail (Coetzer 2003). Mosques and synagogue aside, cultural incursions into the cityscape that could not be secreted indoors have been treated as nuisances and marginalised. Apart from middle-class black professionals now living in the city centre, and those working and shopping there, most Capetonians of colour possess nooks in the central city only briefly and sporadically during evening shopping under Christmas lights, a twilight run, the International Jazz Festival, and the century-old annual minstrel-parade through the CBD at New Year (Martin 1999; Baxter 2001; Minty 2005). Deeper comprehension of the cultural dimensions and significance of all cities coincides with the desire to make South African cities places where the new democracy can have palpable meaning and impact, where social heterogeneity is encouraged. Thus, in 1996, Cape Towns planners sought professional advice on places of African cultural significance in the city (Robins 2000). The sentiment behind the year-long One City Many Cultures project in 1999 resurfaces in acknowledgement that the central city especially can be both a positive and negative symbol of Capetonian identity. As Boraine remarked in undated (c.2004/5) commentary on the CTPs website, the CBD is the geographical and spatial starting point in our attempt to redefine common culture, values and experiences. It is our Ground Zero where we must deal with collective and selective memories of a city founded on 500 years of dispossession, slavery and racial discrimination. As in any city, government and other institutional buildings and spaces in central Cape Town were never merely functional. Rather, they became artefacts that carried a shifting symbolic charge. Corporate buildings flaunt commercial muscle and

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values; commemorative plaques stake out capitalist industrial history (e.g. a plaque at 1 Thibault Square, for instance, marks the site of the towns first (1845) gas lighting company plant). Similarly, state buildings in a government district perform a law-and-order role in a precinct of power. For the entirety of Cape Towns history except the last decade, public buildings, squares and statues constructed an ordered, ceremonial landscape of white male settler and then white nationalist male dominance. Concretised in European architecture, the design and names of major state buildings and streets commemorate a selective past, one that many citizens experienced as hostile. Likewise, overbearing public statues in central Cape Town pay homage to European founding fathers, colonial overlords, and Afrikaner nationalist heroes: Bartholomew Diaz and Jan van Riebeeck; Queen Victoria, Edward VII and Cecil Rhodes; Louis Botha, Jan Hofmeyr and two of Jan Smuts. In a city where recent transformation has been driven mostly by colonial and (white) postcolonial political desires, and by commercial pressures, anxieties and money, the task of using the remodelling of the mother city to help rebuild civic society remains a major challenge. Reversal of the de-democratisation of central Cape Town has started tentatively with actions that undercut its political and socioeconomic exclusivity. In a spirit of tolerance, there has been no iconoclastic removal or mass toppling of public statues, but, as part of symbolic reparation, some have been imaginatively and temporarily re-contextualised (Minty 2006). There has been some judicious renaming of buildings. The old Supreme Court building/Cultural History Museum has been renamed Iziko Slave Lodge (and the museums myopic artefacts and references widened). Parliaments signature apartheid building (HF Verwoerd) has been redesignated. The Nico Malan Theatre Centre (1971) on the Foreshore has been renamed the Artscape Centre. Apartheid-era street names remain. In the future, the celebratory totems of white heroism, conquest and rule will probably be counterbalanced by giving more prominence to sites that mark black subjugation, misfortune, dispossession and resistance. Presently, only an inconspicuous plaque commemorates the site of the tree under which slaves are reputed to have been auctioned; it is located on a traffic island in a busy side road where pedestrians seldom venture. An unmarked oak tree nearby commemorates the emancipation of slaves in 1834, an event that was announced in Greenmarket Square. The name of Riebeeck Square (declared a national monument in 1961) commemorates a white founding father, but obscures its place as a site of farm trade (Boereplein) and then public floggings (Hottentot Square; 18091842). Any future redevelopment of the notorious apartheid detention and torture centre at Caledon Square might avoid the mistake made at the V&As Breakwater Prison (1859): the place that, between 1926 and 1989 was a hostel for black dock workers is transformed, but as a business school and hotel, not as a cultural centre that reflects on a dark past. Representations of the way in which masses of ordinary people experienced the Grand Parade should be incorporated into its redesign and re-use: it was the end-point of many anti-apartheid protest marches and gatherings. Similarly, sight should never be lost of sanctuary, vigils and protest at the Peoples Cathedral, St Georges, whose seldom-used full name appropriately includes the word Martyr . Central Cape Town contains many reminders of contradictory urban experiences: privilege, prosperity and freedom contrast with repression, imprisonment, torture and

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resistance. Next door to the parliament that legislated apartheid is the cathedral where opponents met illegally. Across from the imposing Caledon Square police station and gaol (1928) where apartheid prisoners waiting trial were incarcerated, the District Six Museum stands guard triumphantly over the wasteland of dispossession behind it. At a key junction between Cape Towns past and present, the deconsecrated church, which houses the Museum, has been the venue for vigorous debate about whether and how to reclaim this section of the central city as the spiritual home of thousands. Its strictly commemorative work almost complete, the Museum is transforming itself into a welcoming urban cultural space for 12,000 returning ex-residents. Urban renewal on the eastern fringe of the CBD lends itself to the project. After the East City Investment and Development Conference in October 2004, the old Sacks Futeran wholesalers store at 15 Buitenkant Street is being converted into the Homecoming Centre comprising a 220-seat theatre, restaurant, exhibition and educational spaces. Shops will sell indigenous crafts and foods, and display and merchandise indigenous knowledge (District Six Museum Newsletter, December 2004). Symbolically, in the post-apartheid city, the Museums activist role is switching: the original campaigning slogan Hands off District Six is changing to Hands on District Six. The mission of stopping removals and destruction was succeeded by a phase of preserving public memory, and that phase is evolving into one of rebuilding and reconciling. As such, the D6 Museum is ideally suited to watch over future urban residential exclusion and dispossession in Cape Town, however subtle and surreptitious. In mid-2005, the very public eviction of squatters from unoccupied D6 land set aside for resettled families was a test of integrity and strategy. Rejuvenation of public open space in central Cape Town is marginally less problematic, but zealous management of informal trading in cobbled, bustling Greenmarket Square and on the Grand Parade can easily be mistaken for a wish to de-Africanise the city and demean the livelihoods earned there. Other public squares need enlivening. For years they have been disconnected from each other, have had no amenity value, have made no reference to their origins, and have been devoted to car parking (accounting for up to a third of all designated parking in the city; Daniels 1973). Riebeeck Square, for instance, presents itself merely as a car park; the historic Africa Theatre (1797; St Stephens church from 1839) stands on one side unremarked. The transformation of open public space in central Cape Town from hollow vacancy to space of dialogue, memory and creativity (Minty 2006) may be expected to make a major contribution to democratising the city. Preliminary discussions are underway for Parliamentary extensions whose design will reflect democratic rather than colonial and supremacist governance (Sunday Times, 11 December 2006). Already, the free annual outdoor concert fixture in the Companys Gardens on the national Day of Reconciliation eases its staidness, and has created a sense of widened public ownership and entitlement, albeit momentary. Enticing any form of life onto the windswept checker-board deck spanning Hertzog Boulevard will be a very different project to transforming space on the railway station roof and forecourt where throngs of hawkers and taxis jostle for space. A R90 million upgrade of the railway station has been mooted to include non-market housing on the deck whose span is equivalent to 22 city blocks. Investment at the railway station, the first for

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forty years, will complement transformation of the Grand Parade. A public consultation process ending in mid-2006 will shape reuse and redesign of the dominant mast-lit car park to the side of which is a bus terminus and a 100-year-old open-air fresh produce market. As at Durbans Warwick Junction and Johannesburgs Metro Mall and Muti Market, accommodating and retaining a vibrant local market atmosphere would be a way of upgrading and creating truly public space. The Parades historic function was capped in February 1990 when it became the site of Nelsons Mandelas public reception and his first public address after his release from prison. In May 1994, on the occasion of his becoming President, he addressed the nation again from the balcony of the 1905 City Hall (declared a national monument in 1985), squaring up to the statue of King Edward VII opposite on the Parade. Being used as the venue for the 2006 Homeless World Cup street soccer event will further help strip the Parade of its militarist associations. Conversion of the nearby Drill Hall into a municipal library is advancing the process of substituting places that have narrow sectional associations with places that are an open resource. Taking over the Castle of Good Hope (1679) from the military would help. The spirit of change has been captured by one of several business leaders, citizens and developers in the Concerned Citizens Group, which is trying to reclaim public space in the vicinity. Conceding that the city centre was formerly the plaything of the white community, he recognised the need to involve all stakeholders, to make it their city, and to make us all proud citizens of Cape Town (Property Magazine, May 2005: 36). Pursuant to ordered inclusiveness, two new public open spaces are emerging on the west side of the Foreshore. Both are some distance from the principal pedestrian paths in the central city and are in places that the majority of Capetonians probably have not yet visited. At the V&A Waterfront, where presentation of public history has tended to be selective (Worden and van Heyningen 1996), a formal, democratic, contemplative (if not celebratory) space was unveiled on the Day of Reconciliation in December 2005. Enveloped by the paraphernalia and whiff of high-end consumerism, stately Nobel Square honours the countrys four Nobel Peace prize winners. Statues there depict Albert Luthuli, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, and ex-presidents Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk. In an unusual gesture, a sculpture honours womens part in South Africas political struggle. Another proudly South African public place is scheduled for Roggebaai on a vacant block of land wedged between the CTICC and hotels. The new Desmond Tutu Peace Centre will be a rare institutional building project in Cape Town. The complex is planned as home to a leadership development school and a museum of peace. A public square is intended to facilitate social mingling; a design less forbidding than the walled forecourt of the CTICC may indeed help ordinary citizens feel an affinity for a new, inclusive city. There is certainly a need for a healing arts and culture environment where a sense and practice of common humanity in communal spaces can foster understanding and togetherness, affirm and dignify all citizens, and loosen if not rupture class and cultural barriers (Minty 2005). Yet, the rivalry for affection and attention will be hard: Overlooking the Centre, the Cullinan Hotel is one of the distracting fictions that have erupted in metropolitan Cape Town. The extruded block of pastiche classicism is a utopian, neo-colonial design that affirms only one civic past that violates, denies and

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conceals other heritage and values, and that breeds nostalgia and amnesia (Marks and Bezzoli 2001: 43).

Conclusion The identity of Cape Town as national matriarchal city resonates with origination and affection. The metaphor is also one of bounty, embrace, care and respect. The image of goddess adds lustre and power. Mortal decay is not normally scripted into the personification. Nor is rebirth. But in the 21st century the face and heart of South Africas Mother City is being remodelled. Readmitted into global circuits of investment and consumption, and favoured by a strong national economy, the historic hub of one of the worlds most magnificent small coastal cities is regenerating. The current transformation of central Cape Town is but a phase in centuries of urban evolution. The novelty is not the event as such, but its context, speed, content, agency and outcome. The emergence of central Cape Town as a vibrant, spectacular, multi-functional, post-modern space has been made possible by massive private local and foreign investment in physical rehabilitation. This eye-catching process has been facilitated by post-apartheid hope and commitment, by heritage consciousness and legislation, by investment tax incentives and by a robust privatepublic urban management partnership. Commercial and cultural renaissance is occurring in new retail, production, performance, convention and museum venues, in new offices, hotels and apartments, and in historic buildings converted to work studios and residential lofts. In the process, a new urban aesthetic is emerging, one sensitive to and proud of the urban past. Central Cape Town 2 km2 of precious earth thrives despite competition from suburban shopping centres, office parks and gated residential estates. More than just being prolonged and resurfaced, however, the old urban core is being reconfigured. Structurally and spatially, it is no longer the central business district in the metropolis. Not only is considerable business conducted elsewhere in greater Cape Town, but the commercial component of the CBD is no longer primarily about commodity trade. Instead, it is shifting toward investing, services, and creative industry. The new speculation and capitalisation is in property, heritage and panoramas. The re-spatialisation of the central city also involves loss of identity. The palpable and mental boundaries of the old downtown are dissolving: it would be difficult indeed to justify repeating the exercise 45 years ago of delimiting the Cape Town CBD (Davies 1965). The task of rejuvenating central Cape Town is not as demanding as in places where suburban flight left the inner city derelict. Rather, the task has been to reverse loss of some functions, embrace a new role and plug future decay. The challenge is also to validate and cultivate priceless fixed assets such as architecture, cultural capital and an exquisite locale, all of which create an eccentric gravitation. First-time utilisation will constitute part of the renewal in vacant modernist space on the Foreshore. Unlike in the Johannesburg-Pretoria megalopolis where Sandton emerged as intervening central node, the Cape Town metropolis is more self-contained. The pressures and platform for creating an African city are not the same as in

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Johannesburgs historic core, and the transformation is likely to be more customary to western eyes. Reinvigoration of central Cape Town has not repressed anxiety about profit-led renewal, or about the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of reclaiming and reconstituting the central city for all citizens of the polarised metropolis. There is a discourse and spirit of civic inclusiveness among the institutional agents of transformation. There has been employment generation, and black elites have invested in property, but there remains some way to go in leveraging a deep socioeconomic transformation across the entire metropolis, let alone a new sense of urban citizenship and community. It would be unfortunate if central city rejuvenation were to accentuate the glaring disparities that already exist in the citys resource opportunity and prosperity profile. How ironic if the central city that once overlooked a fortified island of diseased and then political outcasts was itself to become an island fortress in a sea of alienation and poverty. Developers who have participated in and stand to benefit from central city revival have already donated to the upgrading of public space, and/or to social development and social housing programmes. Inclusive and reconciliatory urban design is another way of sharing the fruits of central city rejuvenation. But the debate about precisely how much the so-called central city itself should shoulder the burden of enriching, pluralizing, democratising, integrating and uplifting the entire metropolis has scarcely begun: central city and citywide regeneration are easily elided. The political, economic and symbolic obligation on the core of the provincial capital may be large. But central Cape Town is not geographically central in the metropolitan space economy it succoured. Nor is it not predominant in that economy (it accounts for 33% of metropolitan business turnover, 25% of formal and 10% of formal and informal metropolitan employment, and 20% of metropolitan property rates income). Instead of percolating through the entire metropole, the reverberations of reconstituted power, finance and semiotics may leapfrog the outskirts of Cape Town. The foundation of South Africas Mother City may be embarked on restoration whose scale, sensibility and significance are less metropolitan than they are localised, nationalised and globalised.
Acknowledgement Thanks to Vanessa Watson for reading a draft, and to Philip Stickler for cartography.

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