Estate Living Magazine Precinct Living - Issue 33 | Page 10

Then there’s Woodstock,
one of the oldest suburbs
in Cape Town that is
reinventing itself as an
edgy, hip neighbourhood
bustling with a blend of
food, fashion, art and
design – many old factory
walls now sport vivid street
art. Its renovated Old Biscuit
Mill is now home to weekly
markets, cool design stores,
designer fashion, African handicrafts
and street food stalls. Here on the Upper
East Side is the DoubleTree by Hilton, where one
moment you’re a conference delegate and the next you’re
sipping coffee at one of the local cafés – with the locals, as they
take a break from the surrounding textile factories. And there’s
Salt River, an area earmarked for residential developments
with its easy access to the CBD. From a transport perspective,
Cape Town’s CBD has the well-functioning MyCiTi Integrated
Rapid Transport system, which ensures that residents, visitors
and commuters alike are able to access these ‘new’ precincts
with relative ease.
It is crucial for property developers, whether they be in Durban,
Cape Town or Johannesburg, to work closely with their local
municipalities, to be part of the joint planning process so as to
plan around, and help facilitate, infrastructure development – to
help ‘work towards a joint vision where public transport, or non-
motorised transport, is dominant, and where it’s possible to walk
to work,’ as Wilkinson says.
But it’s not all about work and how to get there. For any new
development area to be a success, there needs to be space
for human recreation, be it restaurants and food markets, open
spaces for walking and jogging, or planned events. There need
to be greenery, trees and relatively ‘wild’ places – it is said that
earthing (walking barefoot on grass, soil, sand or any other
natural surface) has several health benefits. Whether that’s
true physically or not is moot, but anyone who has ever walked
barefoot on a beach can vouch for its psychological efficacy.
Cape Town and Durban have their extensive beaches and
promenades, hiking trails and nature reserves. Johannesburg
has … parks – lots of them, and nature reserves too.
The other benefit of new developments and precincts is the
ease with which services can be provided. No more long-
distance journeys from suburb to waste dump site when the
economies of scale make recycling more viable and waste-
to-energy production an option to consider. Which leads
to other environmental initiatives, from renewable energy
to water recycling. Which brings us back to Durban where
Tongaat Hulett Development’s proposed urban development
project, Ntshongweni, is set to challenge the paradigm of urban
development by seamlessly combining logistics, industrial,
regional retail, commercial and residential opportunities in
line with government’s Strategic Integrated Project initiative.
This is likely to be the first of many such projects countrywide.
Maslow’s hierarchy might have started purely as psychological
observation, but as each one of us would know, the basic human
need for physiological wellbeing, safety, love and belonging,
esteem and self-actualisation is very real. Smart city planners and
developers know this, plan around this and ultimately deliver
spaces for us to work, live and play in an environment th