Foresight on the Foreshore

The City’s new plan finally links transport, land, housing and waterfront access. The difficult part starts where the renderings end.

The City of Cape Town has finally put a serious proposition on the table for its famous unfinished Foreshore Freeways.

The City’s vision, announced on 2 October, is considerably more ambitious than simply completing some concrete ramps that have hung over the Foreshore for half a century. It proposes a direct freeway connection to Helen Suzman Boulevard (M6), an outbound tunnel, the eventual demolition of one of the existing elevated viaducts (N1/N2), a new neighbourhood on roughly 15 hectares of land, affordable housing, parks and a promenade along the harbour edge.

Source: Cape Town City Council

That is encouraging, because the Foreshore has never really been a road problem in isolation. It is a city connectivity problem.

Over a decade ago, I wrote about five possible futures for the unfinished freeways. The first was the expensive answer: bury the infrastructure through the Foreshore and beneath Buitengracht. The second retained an elevated connection across Buitengracht and Walter Sisulu, but argued that if such a piece of infrastructure had to occupy one of Cape Town’s most important gateways, it should become architecture.

My wording at the time was fairly blunt: if you can’t hide it, flaunt it.

I argued that a taller and less purely utilitarian bridge could reduce the oppressive effect at street level, improve clearance and allow the space beneath it to become usable public realm rather than the leftover underside of a freeway.

Source: 34 Degrees Design: Feb 2013 Foreshore article

The City's current proposal displays an interesting relationship to both ideas.

Its concept renders show an iconic cable-stayed link across Buitengracht. The outbound movement, meanwhile, is proposed to move into a tunnel between the Port and Customs House before continuing alongside Duncan Road towards the N1 and N2 split. Once that tunnel is operating, the existing outbound elevated viaduct can be demolished. The inbound elevated freeway remains and is widened.

Source: Cape Town City Council

This is not the exact scheme I drew all those years ago, nor should it be. Cities and their needs evolve. What interests me is the continuity in the underlying problem.

I have four practical questions:

1. Can through-traffic finally be separated from city streets?
2. What happens to the viaduct that remains?
3. Can the released land become real urban fabric?
4. Can the promenade actually connect back into the CBD?

My succinct proposed solutions would be: divert through-traffic; hide or inhabit the infrastructure that remains; keep the new precinct porous; and make the north-south streets do the connecting.

Local and International Perspectives on the Freeway Problem

I returned to this problem years later in my graduate work on the Toronto CBD and lakeshore in Canada.

Toronto's Gardiner Expressway, Lake Shore Boulevard and rail corridor performed valuable metropolitan transport functions while simultaneously creating what I called grey ribbons of disconnect through some of the city's most valuable urban land. The infrastructure created distal connectivity, but damaged proximal connections.

I extensively studied cities around the world with this very problem and in a full-circle academic moment, Cape Town was among those case-studies.

Source: Linking the Lake | Toronto

Someone travelling between the N1 or N2 and the Atlantic Seaboard needs efficient metropolitan movement. Someone walking from Long Street, the Civic Centre or Artscape towards the harbour needs something more local and human-scaled.

The City's new proposal finally begins addressing both needs. Atlantic Seaboard-bound traffic would be able to bypass the surface-street network rather than funnel through Buitengracht. The City can then begin narrowing, calming and reclaiming streets below for public transport, pedestrians and the everyday business of the CBD.

Source: Foreshore Cape Town

However, a road diet only works once the traffic that has no business being on a city street has somewhere else to go.

The Viaduct that Remains

The outbound viaduct is proposed for demolition. The inbound elevated freeway is not. The City says it will be widened with two additional inbound lanes.

Source: Cape Town City Council

This means the proposed neighbourhood and harbour promenade will still sit on the opposite side of a substantial elevated freeway from the existing CBD.

This changes the barrier; it doesn’t eliminate it.

That places an enormous burden on the design beneath the retained viaduct. Those thresholds will need exceptional lighting, sightlines, active uses, passive surveillance and genuine urban interventions to become active spaces.

Where possible, the infrastructure itself should be inhabited. Small commercial spaces, civic uses and other occupiable programmes could turn at least portions of its underside into urban fabric, rather than residual land.

Which suggests another rule to sit beside the one I wrote years ago:

If you can’t hide it, inhabit it.

The Real Asset is the Land

The City's own language around the project is significant. It describes the existing infrastructure as having sterilised some of the last available land for the expansion of central Cape Town. Its vision is to unlock that land for housing, commerce, employment, public space and a new connection to the harbour.

Infrastructure should not merely consume urban land and public capital. Properly conceived, it can reorganise movement in a way that releases land, creates economic activity and improves the liveability and productive value of the surrounding city.

Cape Town has the opportunity to transform a place vehicles speed through into places people live, work and play in. That is a much more interesting and socioeconomically transformative project than finishing a freeway.

A promenade needs the city to meet it.

The proposed harbour promenade is appealing, but a line of trees beside the port will not create urban life as a concept. Its success will depend upon what it connects to and what feeds it.

Lower Long, Heerengracht, Jan Smuts, DF Malan and Christiaan Barnard already provide the bones of north-south connections from the old CBD towards the Foreshore. Today, several of them are poorly activated, windswept or dominated by vehicular movement. That has to change if the promenade is to become part of everyday Cape Town rather than a recreational route sitting at the edge of it.

Cape Town must be careful not to demolish one form of urban barrier and replace it with another. A superblock with an inward-looking podium, blank edges and private internal spaces can sever pedestrian movement almost as effectively as a freeway.

The new precinct has to be porous and extend the city as naturally as possible.

Frequent streets. Active ground floors. Multiple routes through blocks. Shelter from Cape Town's wind. Trees (and let’s refrain from Fever Trees as default) where pedestrians actually walk, rather than only in traffic medians. Buildings that address streets and public spaces rather than turning their backs on them.

There must be reasons to continue moving eastwards. The CTICC, Canal Precinct, Battery Park and V&A Waterfront already create considerable gravitational pull at the western end. The eastern Foreshore needs a lot of work.

Completing an Unfinished Piece of Cape Town

What exactly will public access along an operational port look like? How will the City and Transnet negotiate the interface with Duncan Dock? How will the surviving inbound viaduct be treated? How fine-grained and porous will the new development actually be? Can the north-south streets comfortably draw people from the existing CBD towards the harbour?

Those are questions for the design and public participation process ahead, but the starting proposition is thrilling.

For decades Cape Town has debated whether the Foreshore Freeways should be completed or demolished. That binary was always too narrow. The real debate is how can metropolitan-scaled infrastructure and locally-scaled urban place coexist.

Hide infrastructure where its urban cost is greatest. Where it must reveal itself, make it worthy of the city. Where it must remain as ordinary infrastructure, ensure that the city beneath and around it doesn’t succumb.

If the city gets that balance right, we will have done considerably more than complete an unfinished freeway. We may finally have completed a city gateway befitting a stunning city like Cape Town.