FACING THE POLITICAL, ECONOMIC REALITIES UNDERLYING CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA (2024)

Such were my thoughts in May during a week-long visit to Cape Town, South Africa, a beautiful but beleaguered city at the southern tip of the African continent. And to my surprise, I discovered that what's occurring today in Cape Town is relevant to current realities of the city of Washington.

Cape Town was a surprise. It's by no means a town. Rather it is a sprawling, densely and diversely populated urban agglomeration, home to millions of South Africans -- blacks, whites, Coloreds (people of mixed race) and Indians, to use the four racial designations officially recognized by now defunct apartheid policies and laws.

At the southeast corner of the Atlantic Ocean, greater Cape Town is situated in a landscape akin to coastal regions of North Africa or Northern California. Parts of the city are reminiscent of Hong Kong, Sausalito and Hollywood Hills, Calif., Gibraltar, Spain, or the Amalfi coast of Italy. With a mild, Mediterranean climate and reasonably well-protected anchorages, it was a logical choice in the 17th century as a port of call where Dutch ships, navigating between the Netherlands and the Far East, could reprovision.

Cape Town is a dramatic marriage of cityscape and rocky, Cape of Good Hope peninsula topography. Facing north, not south, at the site of the original 1652 Dutch settlement, central Cape Town sits in an amphitheater-like plain sloping upward with increasing steepness from the curving shoreline to a crescent of soaring ridges and mountain peaks. The most prominent is flat-topped Table Mountain, the city's natural landmark and logo, towering 3,500 feet above sea level only a mile or two from the sea.

Elegant and expensive residential suburbs with lush vegetation have grown up over the east, west and south facing escarpments of these mountains, many with spectacular views of the Atlantic Ocean or the city spread out below. The buildings, as well as the people who occupy them, are predominantly white. Farther south, the scenic, less urbanized peninsula narrows and, 30 miles from historic Cape Town, it terminates at Cape Point, the rugged tip of the Cape of Good Hope.

By contrast, on relatively flat land to the east and northeast of central Cape Town, numerous satellite suburbs resemble suburban communities and commercial strips that could be in Florida, Texas, Arizona or Southern California -- except that one drives on the left side of the road. South Africa's hilly wine country, first cultivated by immigrant French Huguenots and replete with charming, Cape Dutch architecture, is only a few dozen miles farther east.

But some peripheral communities are what South Africans refer to as "informal settlements." Separated from arterial roads by concrete fences, they consist of acres and acres of shacks and shanties erected on unused property without "formal" land planning or previously engineered infrastructure: no water or sewer lines, no storm drainage, no electrical or telephone networks, no platted subdivisions or dedicated streets, no systematized transportation, no schools, no clinics or hospitals, no trash collection, no public safety services, no organized retail shopping facilities or other urban amenities found in even the poorest of American slums.

The exact populations of these dense, informal settlements are unknown, but estimates for the Cape Town area alone range in the many hundreds of thousands. Some believe that such estimates are too low, that more than a million people may inhabit Cape Town's squatter communities.

Calling the informally built dwellings "shanties" is no exaggeration. Cobbled together of scavenged pieces of wood, sheet metal, corrugated plastic or broken bits of masonry filled in with mud, many of these shacks are no bigger than packing crates. Few are square and plumb -- some seem on the verge of collapse -- and none are fully enclosed or weather-tight.

And these informal Cape Town settlements are exclusively built and occupied by blacks, whose unemployment rate is said to be close to 50 percent. They are a visible part of the legacy of apartheid, the consequence of urban in-migration by rural blacks searching for scarce jobs in a society that valued them only for their labor.

However, other communities, also occupied by non-whites, were "formally" planned and engineered explicitly by the government during the apartheid era. These rigidly bounded containments at least included basic urban services, and the dwellings, no matter how simple, legitimately could be called "structures."

Thus Cape Town, notwithstanding its picturesque qualities, is a microcosm of South Africa and the daunting problems it faces: a wealthy, up-to-date, first-world civilization living cheek-by-jowl with a severely disadvantaged third-world culture.

Unlike U.S. cities -- in which a minority of have-nots inhabiting the core are surrounded by a majority of suburban haves -- metropolitan Cape Town's poorest citizens, the majority, occupy small, marginal areas while the more affluent minority reside on the majority of urban, suburban and exurban land.

South African land use and urban settlement patterns, based solely on race, were established as a matter of overt government policy and regulation, as convincingly explained by a current exhibit at Cape Town's Castle of Good Hope. On display are city plans, subdivision layouts and hundreds of official documents gleaned from municipal and state archives and dating from the apartheid era as well as from the British colonial era at the end of the 19th century. They graphically illustrate how racial separateness was explicitly translated into urban spatial form, "establishing control over the movement and space required for regimenting the rapidly emerging urban African working class."

A handout summarizes the exhibit's intent: "to expose the underlying interconnection between power, control and urban space in entrenching segregation in Cape Town.

"Through urban strategies of isolation and division, the lives and identities of the people of Cape Town have come to re-enforce {sic} the official classifications and spatial hierarchies. These are enduring connections and persistent patterns which continue to tear the city apart."

In a counteracting effort to pull the city together, the Mandela "government of national unity" has proposed to reconfigure the boundaries of regional and urban voting districts, merging into single electoral and taxing districts previously separate enclaves and townships within the Cape province. For the first time, racially distinct communities would be integrated politically and, it is hoped, economically.

Not surprisingly, this African National Congress policy is opposed by the traditionally Afrikaner National Party, whose constituency of whites and Coloreds resist shouldering the fiscal responsibility for communities of impoverished black voters.

Does this sound familiar? Imagine reconfiguring or eliminating the jurisdictional boundaries dividing the District of Columbia from its Maryland and Virginia suburbs in the hope of unifying the region politically and economically. Imagine proposing to increase interdependency between the citizens of Anacostia and Alexandria. The din of opposition here would be at least as loud as that heard in South Africa.

But this is what South Africa must do: Remove boundaries -- physical and political -- that have historically separated 80 percent of its citizens, the blacks with little wealth, from the 20 percent of the people who control all of the wealth.

Unfortunately, while political boundaries may be redrawn in the short term, it will be much more difficult both to change long held attitudes and to fairly redistribute the country's great wealth. Indeed, to truly unify Cape Town as a city, and South Africa as a nation, will require generations, and it will be a stressful process.

But at least the arduous process has been started by cautiously optimistic South Africans of all races. And by willingly confronting their agonizing past, they just may succeed in building a promising future.

Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect and a professor of architecture at the University of Maryland.