TWO RIVERS URBAN PARK

Cape Town, South Africa
DHK Urban, Japuka Architects and Urban Designers, H+N+S Landscape Architects, Witteveen+Bos

Cape Town created a boundary edge around the city in the early 2000s in an attempt to end urban sprawl in the periphery of the city. Cape Town is the second least densely populated city in Africa, due to Apartheid policies, including the Natives Act of 1923, which declared urban areas exclusively for whites, and the 1950 Group Areas Act which made it illegal for black people to own land in these white areas. This legislation pushed the settlement of non-whites outside of urban areas, building a low-density policy based on structurally racist policies. Today, the boundary edge demarcates the limit of city services and infrastructure, and highlights the challenges in un-doing the land-use planning of the twentieth century. The site of Two Rivers Urban Park, at the confluence of the contaminated Liesbeek River and the Black River, was used as a buffer zone to separate black and white settlement during Apartheid. In 2014, an open call was published for firms to propose schemes for city densification to prevent further urban sprawl. Two Rivers Urban Park was born out of this design call, as a park that creates connections across the rivers and protects the city from flooding. The plan analyzed the frequency of flooding across the park, and spatially organized the design by this frequency. The river bed is extended in areas of intensive flooding, and contaminated water is held, filtered and discharged in stages. The housing around the park is a part of the strategy, in which 50% of the housing in the park is developed as social housing, while the other 50% is general market housing, and the urban areas to the east and west of the park are connected with bridges that emphasize that connection is both a literal and psychological concept against the history of the buffer zone.

1998 - 2003
593 acres
20 feet above sea level

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