Cape Town Partnership

But there have been unintended consequences to our exuberance and the rate of our success. We never saw ourselves as agents of gentrification, or thought of development as a tool for displacement. And yet that is how our work has been seen, and criticised, in some quarters. Looking back, part of our learning has been not to get so caught up in thin... gs - in urban upgrades, cycle lanes, cranes on the skyline, the idea of design, pursuit of titles like "world-class city" - that you forget about people. In trying to pave a road to our future, at times we lost sight of our past: parts of Cape Town might've transformed in the last few years. But others are still living out apartheid-era realities of a life divided and disconnected. Thinking of a city as an economic engine or an interconnected system had us thinking of people more as users or consumers of a city than creators of it. Today, we've come to think of cities as places of "concentrated humanity", networks of human connections, places created and sustained by people. That's why, for the next five years of the Cape Town Partnership and the remaining term of the Central City Development Strategy, our focus is on putting people first; on participation and people-based placemaking, not destination marketing. On dialogue and debate, not one-way conversation. At the heart of a city is people. And for it to work, its people, our people, have to work together. Where we're goingRead More