Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa Real Estate Investor Magazine - May 2017 | Page 46

URBAN RENEWAL
Taking the
High Road Down
Reimagining Cape Town’s Foreshore
BY BRENT SMITH
T
he Cape Town CBD’s elevated “road to
nowhere” is regaining a sense of purpose in
the 21st century.
While Table Mountain is Cape Town’s most
famous landmark internationally, for many locals it
is the unfinished Foreshore Freeway. This concrete
monolith, oft criticised for cutting off the Central
City from the sea, features an elevated section as well
as incomplete road “stubs”.
It has been this way since construction halted in
1977, a monument to an era of car-centred urban
planning. Lying around and between the freeway
lanes, however, is six hectares of valuable, under-
utilised City-owned land.
Built on land reclaimed from the sea in the 1930s,
the Foreshore itself is being reclaimed for a second
time, as greenfields developments and refurbishments
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MAY 2017 SA Real Estate Investor
bring people to its streets. As the value of the precinct
has risen, so has the urgency to “deal” with the freeway
and surrounds, especially in light of Cape Town’s status
as the most traffic-congested city in SA.
If completed, would the freeway solve this problem?
Or is it time to look at it with new eyes? Proponents of
so-called new urbanism cite the benefits of walkable
neighbourhoods and globally advocate for the removal of
such “overbuilt” infrastructure.
There is even evidence to suggest doing so lessens
traffic, a phenomenon known as “reduced demand”. The
theory goes that if a road closes, travellers will adjust
their behaviour to compensate – as long as there are
alternatives.
To this end, in 2016, the City of Cape Town’s
Transport and Urban Development Authority (TDA)
launched the city’s first transit-oriented development
www.reimag.co.za