Conceptualising a 'living urban edge' for the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA), Cape Town

Chittenden, Tessa Rose

Conceptualising a 'living urban edge' for the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA), Cape Town

Thesis / Dissertation

2021

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment

Abstract

The PHA is a large tract of productive farmlands embedded in the Cape Flats district of the City of Cape Town. The farmlands are essential for the City's food and water security, local livelihoods, biodiversity, heritage and access to green space for poor communities. Despite a long-standing policy commitment to protecting the PHA through an urban edge, the farmlands are being constantly eroded by urban development encroachment, pressures and externalities. This dissertation will investigate why this is the case through critically interrogating Cape Town's implementation of the urban edge. Through this, shortcomings in the current approach are identified, and in response to this the author investigates how an alternative approach can be created. In order to identify why urban development encroachment has persisted in the PHA, critical discourse analysis of relevant policies, site observation, semi-structured interviews with spatial planners, and focus groups with the PHA Campaign are utilized. The author argues that the urban edge has failed to protect the PHA due to the political complexities of top-down implementation, poor enforcement of land use regulations and a lack of proactive and positive planning for the urban-rural interface. Following this, and inspired by theories of regenerative development and bottom-up planning, the author proposes an alternative novel spatial concept for safeguarding green space from urban development encroachment termed the 'living urban edge'. This concept is co-produced with the PHA Food and Farming Campaign (the PHA Campaign), a group of small-scale farmers and activists who are working tirelessly to defend the farmlands. To this end, focus groups with the PHA Campaign were used to generate design principles which aim to create a positive urban-rural interface for the PHA where urban development encroachment is discouraged. Beyond this, the 'living urban edge' concept proposes a buffer of small-scale farms and blue-green infrastructure positioned around the edge of the PHA which can create a barrier of bottom-up defense against the constant erosion of the PHA. The final product is a spatial concept, piloted in a portion of the western edge of the PHA, which hopes to inspire other cases where green space is threatened by urban development

Keywords

Architecture, Planning, Geomatics

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