Rethinking Urban Density New Towns or Old Towns?

Now that urbanisation is spreading quickly across the world, a question is becoming increasingly important to answer: How do we accommodate so many people? For the urbanisation caused by migration from rural areas, there will be large numbers of cheap housing needed for the lowest income groups. But how do you build cheap housing (without government-sponsored social housing) in a market economy? For obvious reasons, this simply isn’t happening at the moment. What are being built are new cities — hundreds of them: in China, Korea, India and increasingly in Africa.

Often, it’s the growing middle class who flee the clamour and insecurity of the existing cities and prefer the comfort and facilities of the New Town

Who are these new cities intended for, if not for incoming migrants? Often, it’s the growing middle class who flee the clamour and insecurity of the existing cities and prefer the comfort and facilities of the New Town: electricity, water and other public services, better quality housing and public space, more security and police, better schools and shops. Lavasa near Pune is a good example as are the New Towns surrounding Shanghai or Konza City just south of Nairobi.

Building on a greenfield site outside the metropolis has an important advantage: all the red tape and inertia associated with a brownfield site is avoided. The organisation is easier and the costs are lower. Therefore, the less reliable and slower the government, the more attractive it is to build a New Town. In this sense, the latest wave of New Towns is understandable. However, there are also disadvantages, especially for the existing city. New Towns may lead to increasing segregation between the (upper) middle classes in the New Town and the migrants in the old city, physical deterioration and reduction of the existing city’s financial foundation.

Cape Town, South Africa, is one of many cities that have grown over the course of the 20th century according to the principle of repeatedly adding separate neighbourhoods and New Towns on greenfield sites. The city has a huge footprint, consisting of a series of introverted white, coloured and black neighbourhoods, separated by inaccessible and unusable zones. The problems created by this urban sprawl are endless: spatial, economic, ecological and social. People waste hours on their daily commute, jobs are inaccessibly remote for the poorest, air pollution from traffic is abominable and segregation leads to constant unrest.

Even though it has been 20 years since apartheid was officially lifted, Cape Town is still the symbolic capital city of segregation; apartheid is set in stone and poured in concrete. The question in Cape Town today is: How can city planning contribute to a sea change in the reality that it first helped to create? How can the infinite sprawl of the segregated city be unified and opened up?

Cape Town can no longer afford its usual expansion policies

Facing the prospect of significant population growth, with current housing shortages already between 200,000 and 400,000 homes, Cape Town can no longer afford its usual expansion policies. Although plans for a New Town called Wescape were recently approved, paving the way for private development that will build a city of 500,000 people in the agricultural region north of Cape Town, the well-trodden path of the tabula rasa urban sprawl is apparently hard to abandon.

Recently, the city has put the concept of ‘density’ on the spatial planning agenda. This is not solely limited to the customary definition of increasing the floor-area ratio. Cape Town primarily expects to achieve social and societal effects from increased density: a mixture of income and ethnic groups, better integration and use of infrastructure, better connections between neighbourhoods as well as literal and figurative bridging of distances.

Recently, the results of the Density Syndicate*, a South African-Dutch think tank, were presented in Cape Town. The designs show a wide range of possibilities that can be achieved by densifying the existing city and making it more compact instead of building a New Town and further increasing the city’s footprint. Underused stretches alongside highways can be turned into housing areas and public parks, connecting the surrounding neighbourhoods. Barren terrain next to train stations can be built up to house people and offices. Informal settlements can be re-blocked to increase the size and quality of the houses. The advantages of a higher density seem obvious.

The designs show a wide range of possibilities that can be achieved by densifying the existing city

However, the ‘easy’ tradition of greenfield extensions is solidly grounded in intricate regulatory frameworks that make mixed-use development and higher densities more difficult. The same challenge exists in other metropolises in India, other parts of Asia and Brazil. In Cape Town, it is becoming apparent that a different relationship will have to be achieved between citizens and the government, in which the government does not organise everything from the top down but instead seeks to achieve maximum engagement and self-reliance among its citizens. To improve the quality of life in future cities in the Global South, the strategy of increasing density in the existing cities is more difficult but will ultimately prove a more rewarding strategy than only building New Towns.

*The Density Syndicate is an initiative of the African Centre for Cities, the International New Town Institute and the City of Cape Town. 
See: www.newtowninstitute.org, www.africancentreforcities.net