Business

Cape Town to pilot high-rise 'towns'

21 August 2009

The City of Cape Town is looking at sites for a pilot high-rise "town", comprising apartment blocks of up to 14 stories grouped around shops, schools, community centres and recreation facilities, in order to test a high-density solution to the city's housing shortage.

City housing director Hans Smit told a media briefing on Thursday that very high-density "towns" worked in other cities in the world, and "we would like to test it in Cape Town."

He said the city was steering clear of the massive 40-storey buildings erected in Hong Kong, where the micro-climate experienced by residents at that height had "some fairly negative effects".

"You can imagine, with 40 stories, here in Cape Town you'd be in the clouds a lot of the time," Smit said.

Beijing, on the other hand, had been putting up a mix of buildings of five to six stories and of 12 to 15 stories. "It works very well in Beijing. It also gives the kind of environment in which people are happy and communities seems to grow."

Smit estimated that building for the pilot project would start in four or five years. The planning process was complex, he said, involving not only design and construction, but funding and social aspects.

"We have to do our job properly," he said. "We can't make a mistake in putting something [like this] together."

He said there would be about 200 housing units per block, and from 5 000 to 6 000 units per high-rise "town".

"They'll be vibrant areas where people can actually live and develop as communities," he said.

"This is not pie in the sky," Smit added. "It's something that we definitely want to test, and the mayor is very keen to go along with us."

The city was looking at a few possible sites for the pilot high-rise town, some of them in potential development corridors towards Atlantis and Malmesbury, but also in the eastern part of the city, in the Khayelitsha or Blue Downs area.

"When we actually put this town up, we want a model that can be tested with all different communities," Smit said.

A senior city housing official, Basil Davidson, told the briefing that Cape Town's housing backlog now stood at 400 000. Another 18 000 to 20 000 families were seeking accommodation every year, while the city was currently building 10 000 units a year.

Smit said that, at current building density levels, 10 000 hectares of land would be needed to eliminate the backlog. "If you look around the city, I don't know where anyone's going to find 10 000 hectares for housing development," he said.

Sapa