The story of Princess Vlei, one of the wetlands that makes up our Ramsar Wetlands City, is a quintessentially South African story, encompassing violence and dispossession as well as hope, healing and harmony… and some very feisty women.
In December 2022, the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DFFE) issued coastal sewage discharge licenses for Cape Town’s three marine sewage outfalls, but has re-opened the public participation process due to public pressure and a number of appeals. Find out what you need to know to make an informed comment.
The Kuils River rises in the Kanokop Hills of Durbanville just outside of Cape Town, as a trickling stream. Looking at where it originates, one would never imagine the multiple beings and things it affects, nor the deep vast history this river has, not only in shaping Cape Town’s landscape, but also the politics, infrastructure technologies and economics of the day.
Urban river management in Cape Town is dominated by scientific and engineering approaches and solutions to water quality and quantity problems which emanate from what are claimed to be “objective” standpoints. However, these are not neutral, but are a result of a social, political and cultural imagination of the urban rivers as an extension of Cape Town’s sewer network, and the interventions on the rivers for improvement are done by just attending to technical aspects.
Prevailing environmental management policies should be re-examined to protect communities and their environment as much as possible. We explore how certain areas are regarded as cheap and disposable in the interests of economic and political opportunity. These spaces become ‘sacrifice zones’ where the well-being of people and the environment are side-lined in the name of ‘economic development’ and ‘progress’, often brought about by technical proposals and responses assumed to be objective and neutral.
The community living along the banks of the Kuils River paid the price of the upgrades of the river infrastructure and, particularly of the Zandvliet Waste Water Treatment Works. But there was also a cost to the endangered sand dunes of the False Bay coastline, which have been mined for decades to manufacture the cement that has built South Africa’s colonial and current-day architecture. These mineral-rich dunes have been extensively depleted, leaving a fraction of what was previously there along the coast.