Cape Town Case Study

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1.1 ABSTRACT
South Africa is a country that has experienced many challenges and changes over several years. Cape Town’s CBD has emerged as a lively, flourishing urban space that embraces all its citizens, yet it once was a place where people of colour were just visitors. Even though the city has developed this distinct, vibrant fabric, most people disperse into different suburbs that they call home. Some people travel just over or around the mountain, whilst others go even further to urban peripheries. This is one of the key architectural issues that designers face today in Cape Town – a confusing and fragmented landscape due to urban sprawl. The apartheid government’s practices drove to divide humans and their settlements based on race and …show more content…

The discourse provides questions around what is existing, how it came to be and how do we move forward from this. However, some argue that this urban sprawl we see today is due to rapid influx of people moving toward the city for work opportunities, also commonly known as, urbanisation. Other people argue that the “poor” make a decision and choice to live in informality but it is usually not a choice, it is usually a sacrifice people make in order to live and acquire work in the city. On the other hand, developments such as Wescape, 40kms from Cape Town for 800,000 people with 25 % of housing being subsidized cements the idea that the city is reserved for the higher income group. Excluding the poorer communities to peripheral communes only isolates them further from economic, social and sustainable networks that will not help increasing the density of the city of Cape Town, but only spread it further and wider.
The challenges faced in many communities include substandard infrastructures, acute shortage and deterioration of housing, insufficient public facilities, unemployment as well as poor sanitation. Even though many responses such as housing schemes, construction of some public facilities and road expansions have been undertaken, many still live in extreme conditions and reside far away from work

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