And edgelands, by and large, are not made to be seen, except perhaps as a blur from a car window.109
In this chapter, I discuss the infamous ‘Unfinished Bridge’ as a very visible example of Cape Town edgeland space. I trace the history of the planning and aborted construction of the bridge, laying bare specific South African political circumstances that came to create pockets of urban wasteland – and the more recent political decisions that led to its occupation by vagrants and stowaways.
By reference to a variety of creative responses to this location and its inhabitants – from essayist Mike Nicol, novelist K. Sello Duiker, photographer David Southwood and journalist and author Sean Christie – I show how the presence of edgeland can reveal, in different ways to different careful observers, the hidden lives of others living unofficially within the official city, and how these edgeland spaces represent (or can be made to represent) the opportunity to transcend social and cultural barriers.
While the mountain looms over the centre of the city, downtown is dominated by Cape Town’s other most prominent edgeland space: it extends into the sky above one of the busiest interchanges in the city, where downtown meets the port and the highway leaves the CBD. The notorious Unfinished Bridge, or the Foreshore Freeway Bridge, consists of two sections of a highway, complete with road surfacing and white lines, that were never connected in the middle: they are separated by approximately 260 metres of empty space, and are a curious monument to hubris and poor planning. Begun in the early 1970s, the freeway was an expression of the contemporary desire of the then Nationalist Party (who came to power in 1948) for a modern, cosmopolitan face for the city, and to ease anticipated traffic overload. It was planned as part of the Eastern Boulevard110, part of a ring system of highways built to ease circulation of traffic
109 Farley and Roberts, Edgelands, p. 5.
110 Renamed the Nelson Mandela Boulevard, as the Western Boulevard was renamed the Helen Suzman Boulevard, in 2011. Babalo Ndenze, ‘Mayor to Unveil Helen Suzman Boulevard’,
in and out of the city centre. This was mostly completed, and is now the Nelson Mandela Boulevard that now connects the city with the more affluent southern suburbs, passing through Woodstock and the site of District 6, the location of one of the most infamous forced removals of the apartheid era.111 However, due to budget constraints, the bridge itself has stood in its unfinished state since 1977.
Its unused surface, and also the shady spaces beneath its supports, are classic pieces of fragmented, accidental urban wasteland: left to moulder, as on either side busy traffic lanes connect the CBD to the popular Waterfront, Convention Centre, and trendy Sea Point, and on the other to the affluent southern suburbs, the N1 Highway, and the rest of the country.
Figure 1. The Unfinished Bridge, Lucie Demoyencourt, 2016
Capetonians have a love-hate relationship with this eccentric piece of abandoned infrastructure. It is a site that provokes many conflicting reactions.
On the one hand, the bridge has become ironically iconic, even nostalgic.112
Independent Online, 2011 <https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/mayor-to-unveil-helen-suzman-boulevard-1172854> [Accessed 30 July 2018].
111 It also feeds into the N1 highway north, the topic of Chapter 3.
112 One such story is that the engineers had made a calculation error, resulting in the two ends not meeting. Another was that a disgruntled shop owner refused to sell his property in the path of the flyover.
Popular Cape Town artist Lucie Demoyencourt, for example, includes a view of the bridge in a series of scenic and nostalgically familiar views of the Cape Town City Bowl, available as prints. (Figure 1.)113 It’s a lucrative location for advertising shoots and movie locations: the empty stretch of highway, still serviceable but conveniently free from traffic, pops up in international shoots and movie sets, representing cosmopolitan urbanism with its backdrop of generic city high-rises.114
However, the bridge is also a relic of the 70s, associated with the oppressive atmosphere and authoritarian architecture of high apartheid. As such, it represents a particular South African narrative of bureaucratic blundering, ineptness and absurdity.
It has also been for many years a shelter, providing in its strange shadow a place where a community of homeless people have made their beds, metres from where the traffic rushes. This makes it a ‘home’ to some, but also a locus of fear and anxiety: for passers-by threatened by the sometimes unruly behaviour of the rough sleepers; and for the homeless people themselves, for whom it is a dangerous place that leaves them vulnerable to crime, drugs, and not least traffic accidents. The bridge has been the site of several rumoured falling deaths over the years – both gangland murder and suicide. Indeed, the Samaritans have painted a large sign (‘We Care!’) very visibly high up on an adjacent building, presumably for the benefit of anyone hesitating on the brink of the lopped-off highway. At the same time, the impoverished homeless population can look out over the several lanes of traffic at some of the most valuable real-estate in the city – luxurious new office-block and residential developments that threaten to erase the remaining edgeland spaces and their histories.
The bridge also occupies a historically loaded location, and is a part of the city that seems particularly haunted by the past. It is very close to one of the oldest parts of the city, housing some of its most painful history: the
113Lucie Demoyencourt, The Unfinished Bridge [artwork], Lucie Demoyencourt Fine Art &
Design, 2016 <luciedemoyencourt.com/#/50-x-city-bowl> [Accessed 31 July 2018].
114 Lisa Kane, ‘Building the Foreshore Freeways: The Politics of a Freeway “Artefact”’, Proceedings of the 30th Southern African Transport Conference (2011), p. 131.
(controversially disinterred) burial grounds of Prestwich Street, site of the pauper graves of the poorest and most exploited people in the colony, including a large population of slaves.115 Much of this history has been suppressed, deliberately or unconsciously, and is only now resurfacing into popular memory.
This area of town – the foreshore and Green Point – is currently particularly the site of commercial ‘heritage’ initiatives: not just memorial to the Prestwich Street dead, but also the revival of contentious ‘Cape Carnival’ celebrations; a recently instituted annual march to celebrate the liberation of the slaves; an urban park that consciously seeks to revive lost knowledge of indigenous plants; and a number of ‘urban exploration’ outfits that offer tours of hidden historical city infrastructure (especially buried watercourses).116
Lastly, the bridge lies on another crucial fault line of Cape Town’s topography: the area of land that was reclaimed from the sea in the 1940s, in one of the Nationalist urban renewal schemes of the forties and fifties. It sits in an ambiguous zone between the very old, public city, where the graves lie, and the
‘new’ harbour, which is a fenced-off, secured area. It is thus both a very old, and simultaneously very new part of the city – the ground beneath one’s feet has been there for less than a century. The Unfinished Bridge straddles the oldest ‘border’
of them all: the ancient line of the coast, now erased.
The construction of the highway bridge was the culmination of several decades of rapid transformation of this area of town, beginning with the radical reshaping of the shoreline, first mooted in the late thirties.117 Previously, the space had been occupied by the old harbour and pier. In 1940, much to the nostalgic sorrow many Capetonians – who, according to historian Vivian Bickford-Smith, would come to remember the pier as emblematic of a ‘pre- apartheid Cape Town in which remembered social relations were more friendly
115 Shared Cultural Heritage, ‘Prestwich Memorial Project: Greenpoint Historical Burial Ground’, Shared Cultural Heritage <sharedheritage.dutchculture.nl/en/prestwich-memorial-project-green-point-historical-burial- ground> [Accessed 30 July 2018]
116 See for example Tshego Letsoalo, ‘Cape Town’s Underground Tunnels: A place of sweet water’, Cape Town Magazine <capetownmagazine.com/cape-towns-underground-tunnels>
[Accessed 30 July 2018]
117 A reshaping that was to continue in the eighties with the establishment of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront Company, which transformed 83 hectares of the old harbour area, including the old pierhead, into the very popular luxury V&A Waterfront development. Bickford-Smith, Worden and Van Heyningen, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, p. 231.
and intimate, the pace of life was slower, and the town still in touch with the sea’118 – the pier was demolished. In its place would be implemented an ambitious, ideologically motivated scheme to reclaim new land (the foreshore) by dredging. This would allow for more motor traffic in the city, and a modernised harbour, the Duncan Dock, was opened in 1943 to accommodate larger ships.119
The scheme was glowingly proposed by the government of the day as a beacon of modernity, and for a while the project was named ‘Metropolis of Tomorrow’. As it was described in the Foreshore Joint Technical Committee report, 1940:
A vast area of original land has suddenly become available immediately contiguous to the seat of the city’s greatest difficulties … Here is clearly the chance to capture the lost ground (both physical and metaphorical) of the last century, and to re-create Cape Town for the needs of modern life whilst at the same time preserving and respecting its tradition of an earlier day.120
However, due to wrangling and disputes between different bodies such as the railways and municipality121, the reclamation project would not be completed until the 1960s, well into the apartheid regime. The resulting construction was ‘an unhappy compromise’, resulting in a blighted, dehumanised urban landscape that is recognisably the antecedent of the edgeland wasteland visible in the Foreshore area today:
Bored boulevards broke the foreshore up into wind- blown stretches of asphalt and concrete, filled with car parks and roaring traffic, inaccessible to pedestrians. Wind tunnels created by skyscrapers were fierce enough to blow over buses … Great concrete flyovers isolated the city centre and drove through the heart of the inner- city residential areas. The age of social engineering produced a sunless city centre, virtually lifeless after office hours.122
118 Ibid, p. 62.
119 Ibid, pp. 67, 149.
120 Ibid, p. 152.
121 These disputes are detailed in Kane, ‘Building the Foreshore Freeways’, pp.133- 134.
122 Bickford-Smith, Worden and Van Heyningen, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, p. 154.
Ironically, a scheme that was meant to open the city up, to emblematise the city’s role as ‘Gateway to Africa’, ended up being constricting and isolating, leaving the CBD physically, visually and socially segregated from the harbour.
This kind of segregation, control and authoritarian style was a reflection of the ideology of the ruling party. The foreshore scheme was intended as a propagandistic display of their power and economic confidence. As novelist Mike Nicol writes:
When the streets of the foreshore – Hans Strydom, Hertzog Boulevard, Coen Steytler, DF Malan, Oswald Pirow [all Nationalist Party worthies] – were named, the Nationalist Party had recently come to power and they were clearly making an attempt to lay claims to an historical authority both in terms of the recent and the distant past.123
Furthermore, the freeway scheme was implicated in one of the most brutal of all apartheid-era social engineering schemes: the destruction of the multiracial working-class suburb of District Six, with the intention of replacing it with an all-white residential area. The construction of the highway, opposed by the City for practical and budgetary reasons, but insisted upon by the National and Provincial government, ‘has the dubious distinction of being the cause of the first large scale demolitions in District 6, starting in 1960’.124
The construction of the flyover bridge was a late stage of this overall scheme, becoming a greater visual and physical obstacle between city and sea.
Ultimately, it was abandoned in 1977 due to budgetary issues and changing traffic requirements. In the modern view, the construction of the bridge did not take into account modern urban planning concerns. For some, the bridge’s unconnected sections are ‘acknowledged monuments to outdated planning practices and bungled city projects’125. Furthermore, the bridge and its surrounds remain a troubling and problematic reminder of the priorities of the previous regime.
123 Nicol, Sea-Mountain, p.70.
124 Kane, ‘Building the Foreshore Freeways’, pp. 137-138.
125 Matt Bevilacqua, ‘Sounding Off on the Future of the Foreshore Freeways, Cape Town’s Unfinished Highway’, Next City, 2013 <https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/sounding-off-on-the-future-of-the-foreshore-freeways-cape-towns-unfinished-> [Accessed 15 August 2018].
The seemingly neutral urban road infrastructure we now live with have embedded in them their social and political histories […]
these histories are not neutral, and they are not simple. In the case of the Foreshore Freeways they reflect the power politics of decades of negotiations, and so the conclusion is: the Foreshore Freeways have politics.126
The Unfinished Bridge encapsulates the ambiguous, uneasy but compelling nature of the urban edgeland. It illustrates the capacity of edgeland spaces to open up gaps in the fabric of the city, allow for curious juxtapositions and meetings across social, cultural and economic lines; to link geographical zones of a city in unexpected ways; and even to act as imaginative portals into past eras – however uncomfortable. In its current role, the bridge continues to demonstrate the uneasy politics of a deeply divided and unequal city: its chief function, until very recently, as with most of the edgeland spaces in Cape Town, has been to shelter the homeless. For years this encampment, bizarrely and perilously wedged between high-speed streams of traffic, was a familiar if troubling sight to Cape Town motorists. It is these compellingly strange urban- wasteland juxtapositions – of makeshift dwellings, brute architecture imbued with troubled history, and the mechanised frenzy of 21st-century traffic – that have particularly grasped the imagination of Capetonian creative writers and artists.
In my own 2006 essay about informal urban dwellings, ‘Five Sites’, I note this community living ‘under the snapped-off flyover on the Foreshore’, and recall how the ‘smoke from cooking fires came drifting up between the cars on the off-ramp during rush hour’.127 Mike Nicol summons up the particular quality of layered time present in the fabric of this particular part of the city, viewing it through the (closed) eyes of an archetypal homeless ‘bergie’ figure:
Apart from bergies, there are no pedestrians. No local would think to walk here for pleasure […] It is as it once was: an approach to the city that is now a transit zone of bridges, underpasses and railways lines […] On this mild winter day
126 Kane, ‘Building the Foreshore Freeways’, p. 138.
127 Rose-Innes, ‘Five Sites’, pp. 58-59.
before a storm, a man lies asleep on the grass of New Market Street, warmed by the sun. From where he is stretched out he would not be able to see the walls of the Castle through the stanchions of the flyover, yet the city’s oldest building is no more than three or four hundred metres away. At this junction, under the Oswald Pirow bridge and the Eastern Boulevard flyover, [is] an empty zone, damp and cold […] Under the flyover are signs of habitation: flattened cardboard boxes, tins, bottles, the remains of a fire.128
The eeriness and slightly ominous atmosphere is evoked also by Nicol’s careful mapping of the present-day topography onto the more explicitly savage one of the 17th-century city. As well as the Castle (with its dungeons and places of torture and execution), he notes that the old gallows were also in the vicinity.
These are the time slippages – the historical echoes – that may occur in edgeland spaces, revealing layers of time in the decay of their neglected, abandoned and unrenewed infrastructure. Even the traces of human settlement – the ‘remains of a fire’ – imaginatively recall a much older history, a time of hunter-gatherer encampments and, later, the anxious accounts of colonial settlers and explorers discovering the traces of the camps of outlaws and runaway slaves129.
Once again, it is interesting to contrast Nicol’s curious and slightly fearful white outsider’s gaze with that of writer Sello K. Duiker, from the other side of the racial privilege divide: In Thirteen Cents, discussed in Chapter 2, the street-child Azure lives for a while under the unfinished bridge, which offers relative sanctuary. It is ‘home’ in an otherwise hostile city:
I’ve been walking around town like a lost dog all day. Everyone seems to know where they are going except me. I ask someone for the time and decide to go home.
Blue, that’s my new name. The Bridge, that’s my new home. Out here the world passes you by if you don’t listen. It crushes you.
Go home, I tell myself. You are getting stronger.
Later, he explains in this conversation with a middle-class hiker he meets on the mountain:
128 Mike Nicol, ‘The City I Live in’, in Stephen Watson (ed.), A City Imagined (Cape Town: Penguin SA, 2006), pg 66-76.
129 See Chapter 1 for an account of the associations between fire, vagrants, edgelands spaces and colonial unease.
‘I live under a bridge.’
‘Which one?’
‘The one near Green Point.’
‘Oh, you mean the one that was under construction but never completed.’
‘If it is, I never noticed.’130
‘So what’s it like, living under a bridge?’
‘You see the stars at night. If you stand close to the fence.’
‘So what, you live with homeless people?’
‘We have a home. Its just not your normal kind of home with a kitchen and all that stuff but it’s still a home.’131
Nonetheless, this place under the bridge does not escape the ambiguity and eerie qualities that imbue edgeland spaces. The settlement is home to Liesel, Azure’s friend and comforter, but also to the domineering, frightening Gerald, who is Azure’s protector and tormenter both; a man who has an almost demonic whiff of the supernatural about him, with powers to read Azure’s past and to control him. Thus the home beneath the bridge is also a place where the real and the unreal overlap. (This is true also of the rough rock dwelling on the mountain, where at the climax of the book Azure steps over into the deep past and communes with the spirit of the long-dead Saartje Baartman.) This magical, slightly threatening quality is also revealed in the conversation with the hiker.
‘I’ve heard weird stories from there.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, there’s this guy who lives there, right, and he’s supposed to control the entire rat population of cape town. It’s kind of an urban legend.’
‘That’s nothing. I know a guy who lives there and he can make anyone, take you right, he can turn you into a pigeon or a rat.’
‘It’s probably the same guy I’m talking about.’
‘I doubt it. He never leaves that place.’132
In the novel, the homeless encampment is ultimately destroyed by the authorities, as it later was in reality, leaving nothing but ‘splinters of wood and
130Duiker, Thirteen Cents, pp. 137.
130Duiker, Thirteen Cents, pp. 137.