Joburg is a warning to Cape Town

In an article for the Financial Mail, Geordin Hill-Lewis outlined the City’s plan for Cape Town, saying, “It is not feasible to keep expanding outwards — the city must densify.”

It is correct to say that the City of Cape Town has adopted a spatial strategy focused on promoting a more compact, transit-oriented urban form. Through its Integrated Development Plan (IDP), Cape Town aims to shift growth inward as the mayor himself said, “the city must densify.”

The Spatial Planning Collective highlights Cape Town’s move toward densification, emphasizing well-located housing, rental-focused multi-unit development, and planning tools such as SDFs, corridors, nodes, and mixed-use areas to enable a compact city model.

This is exactly what leaders in Johannesburg pushed in the 1990s, which ultimately contributed to the region’s broader collapse in road, water and electricity infrastructure as well as a rise in crime.

Joburg’s densification

In the early 1990s, urban planners, civic bodies, and policy thinkers in Johannesburg began to articulate a new spatial vision. The goal was to move away from sprawling form and instead build a compact, integrated city. Planning proposals promoted densification, mixed-use development, and the linking of areas through transport corridors.

While the vision of building a compact city was ambitious, it belonged more to dreamland than to the real world. Utopian in nature, its implementation led to the deterioration of Johannesburg’s inner city, a decline that has since spilled into surrounding suburbs.

If Cape Town’s leadership persists with the unrealistic plan for a compact city, it will fail as Johannesburg did. The city will develop multiple high-density centres that will eventually bottom out, creating a donut effect, spreading outward, ultimately overwhelming Cape Town’s roads, water, and electricity infrastructure.

What then can the ordinary person do?

Residents of Cape Town must move forward with a two-pronged approach:

1. Establish independent oversight committees in local areas to act decisively in the interests of your family and neighbours, focusing on green spaces, business, security, education, media and resources.
2. Use your vote wisely.

A picture of the decay in Joburg