Estate Living Magazine #liveyourbestlife - Issue 46 December 2019 | Page 53

L i v E
CMAI Architects, as the company is known now, began
applying for the development more than 10 years, Dr Mulder’s
intention being to put into practice the things he’s learned
about our connection to the land, and to the food and
livelihoods – human and animal – that come from it.
Lost links to the land
When people first began aggregating into settled communities
all over the world, we built hamlets that fed villages, and
villages that fed towns – with agriculture at the core of their
economies. Even as the size of these settlements grew, their
physical centres remained within spitting distance of the
farms (or forests, or oceans) that supplied their people with the
nourishment that allowed them to thrive. But that’s no longer
the case: most city dwellers today have no links to the land that
feeds them.
The rise of mass transport had a lot to do with that, of course.
But in South Africa, the Apartheid government’s habit of
building townships many kilometres from urban centres –
basically, dumping people miles out of town, and far away
from meaningful economic opportunities – exacerbated the
problem.
Cognisant of the plight of people in villages like Thornhill (a
close neighbour of Crossways, but not of either Port Elizabeth
or Jeffreys Bay, where Thornhillers might have looked for work),
Dr Mulder turned to an idea first mooted by thinkers like the
founder of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard, who
advocated for utopian cities in which people live in harmony
with nature.
Nevertheless, the status quo sent Dr Mulder searching further
afield – and he found his opportunity in the Eastern Cape when a
successful dairy farm close to the Van Staden’s River Bridge (and on
the old Apple Express narrow-gauge railway line) became available.
Crossways Farm Village
CMAI’s design ethos has always sought to build environmentally
and economically sustainable communities by creating networks
between people of different incomes, and by creating links between
human settlement and the natural environment – so Crossways was
always going to be a perfect fit.
He said that land use can be divided really only into three
categories: conservation, agriculture and human settlement
(which latter category he calls ‘uitvalgrond’ – that is, land that’s
suitable for human settlements because it isn’t required by or
has to be preserved for conservation or agriculture).
‘These regulations weren’t intended to have this effect, and Western
Cape Premier Alan Winde has recently tasked his officials with
finding a solution to the situation because it stands in the way of
the national priorities for food security, rural development, poverty
alleviation, and job creation and training.’
P R
This interest was informed by his background: for his doctorate
in environmental planning and urban design at Texas A&M
University, Dr Mulder studied the difference in land use
legislation between the states of Florida and Hawaii in order to
understand the impact that land use legislation has on natural
systems.
Given this knowledge, Dr Mulder and CMAI spent years attempting
to create New Rural developments close to Plettenberg Bay, Cape
Town, Velddrif and Montagu – and the Apartheid-era villages situated
within their jurisdictions. But he came up against the Subdivision of
Agricultural Land Act and the phenomenon of ‘urban edges’, which,
in the way it was applied in the Western Cape, prevented him
from proceeding. The province’s regulations, he said, forbade the
creation of mega, agricultural-based projects like large residential
developments outside of described urban edges.
‘This was known as the New Urbanism – but instead of
urbanism, I became interested in the New Ruralism because of
the opportunities it could create for South Africa.’
S M A R T