Cape Town's largest and best-known township, Khayelitsha, presents a bleak face to the outside world. Grim lines of shantytown border the N2 Highway and, once inside, the picture is not much more inspiring: wide roads, with only churches and the large concrete Oliver Tambo Recreation Hall for landmarks. There are only three exit points, despite the area’s size, and rumour has it that the township was specifically laid out for ease of riot control. The bad old days indeed.

A peculiarly South African phenomenon

The township is a peculiarly South African phenomenon — the deliberate use of urban planning to alienate communities; the designing of cities to foster disunity and distrust among its citizens; the use of roads and residential areas to make life and work harder, not easier, for its inhabitants. Because that is precisely what townships do, and solving inner-city — and for that matter intra-city — conflict requires us first to address the township question.

Despite the initial impression visitors gain, many inhabitants live in formal houses — the infamous 'matchbox houses' of the 1980s, and, increasingly, the more recent low-cost RDP homes. Khayelitsha (meaning 'New Home') was built during the 1980s to house the city's 'legal' black population, and sprawls across on a flat plain covering 15km², far from the effortless beauty for which Cape Town is famous. It is home to a steadily increasing half-a-million people, and — as with all townships — there’s not nearly enough to go around.

Unemployment, which hovers around the 80 per cent mark, is of the structural kind: too many people with few marketable skills and even fewer opportunities to gain them. In summer the wind is relentless, the sand is everywhere, and so are the tourists (see box).

Townships vs suburbs

Townships tend to strip inhabitants of their dignity, whereas suburbs aim to create pleasant spaces in which to live and work. Suburbs are convenient, with supermarkets down the road, schools nearby and easy access to transport. And while township residents depend on other areas in a city for work, suburbs are, to some extent self-sustaining, with jobs available close to home.

Director of the property development company Futuregrowth Wayne van der Vent believes it's imperative to transform townships into suburbs and he'sputting that belief into practice with Khayelitsha. A Mitchells Plain boytjie himself, he's ade a career out of building shopping facilities in South Africa's poorest areas, and he's a strong believer in creating the structures for economic upliftment.

Futuregrowth together with the Cape Town City Council, financiers Rand Merchant Bank and the Public Private Partnership have joined forces to develop the Khayelitsha Business District (KBD) — one of the first major mixed developments planned for a South African township.

Transport, shopping centre and new homes

Stretching across more than 80ha, and incorporating a cricket oval and an Olympic-size swimming pool left over from the city's dreams of Games glory, it's an ambitious project. In an area which already houses offices for the new department of home affairs and social welfare, the development will take three to four years to complete and entails building a new transport interchange, a shopping centre, and up to 1200 middle-income houses.

Most housing currently planned for townships is of the low-cost kind, for low-income occupants. But there's a chronic shortage of housing at all levels. If you're poor, you can get a housing subsidy and an RDP home. If you're wealthy, you can afford to take your pick of high-security townhouse developments. But if you're just an ordinary middle-class person somewhere in between, the house you need just isn't there. Especially if you happen to like living in the township and would prefer to stay within your community. So the houses, priced between R60 000 and R150 000 and planned to overlook the cricket oval, are expected to sell very quickly.

Futuregrowth's commercial development is valued at R87-million, Rand Merchant Bank has underwritten long-term funding developments of R300-million, and public sector funding of R50-million has already been invested in the area. Government funding worth R100-million will also be made available during the course of the project.

Open air mall

The plan is to build an open-air high street mall ("think St George's Mall, not Cavendish," I'm told). The one-storey shopping centre with its 17 500m² of gross lettable space is designed to attract pedestrian traffic and, situated between the train station, planned new taxi and bus ranks and the municipal offices, it could hardly be more strategic.

The shopping centre is planned as an empowerment tool. It's built on land purchased by the Khayelitsha Community Trust, and the trust will own the completed centre, so, this time round at least, the profits really will go back to the people. The KBD development will function as a job creation initiative. Futuregrowth has made a commitment that all the construction jobs will go to local people, except where specialised skills are required that the township labour pool can’t supply. But it’s one thing to make a promise and quite another to be able to deliver on it, so for this reason a training centre runs courses in construction skills.

Zakhe Consulting, funded by the Council and headed by Khayelitsha’s former mayor Vuyani Ngcuka, a short, bearded man with a deceptively powerful handshake. Ngcuka is in charge of managing a jobseekers' database and organising short training courses in construction work. Registration for jobseekers is free and the KBD contractors have undertaken to source labourers from this database before looking elsewhere. Specialists, however, are in short supply.

"We have plenty of labourers, but artisans are a problem," confirms one Zakhe manager.

Creating jobs and training

"We're hoping that if 1 000 are employed (on the centre construction), 2000 will be trained. They might not have a job, but they will be employable… Over time, we’re hoping to create a level of employment that’s a little more than just one job," says Van der Vent.

Once the centre is completed, it's expected that most of the retail jobs will eventually also be sourced from Khayelitsha residents. "There is a clear understanding that they (the retailers) will draw staff from the area," explains Van der Vent, "and in our other centres we have found that tends to happen."

Logistically, at least, it makes far more sense to employ people who live close by, and it makes business sense for employees to understand the location's dynamics.

Nearly three-quarters of the retailers will be national brands such as Edgars, Shoprite Checkers and Spar. "No one wants to feel as though they're buying a low-cost product," says Van der Vent. "That's why offering the same shops as other malls is important. If people feel they're being offered a different product just because they’re poor, they won’t buy it — and they'll shop somewhere else."

"Remember, people want to shop for the things they see advertised. (They’re) already shopping at Edgars. We need to supply to them what they want."

The big four banks — Absa, Standard Bank, First National and Nedbank — have also come on board and will be opening full-service branches. "That’s important, because if people have to travel to do their banking somewhere else they will also do their shopping there. (And) previously in townships, you only got ATMs," says Van der Vent.

A new optimisim

These days there's a new pride, an optimism, about the townships. The film uCarmen eKhayelitsha, featuring the home-grown talents of the Dimpho di Kopane lyric theatre company, took the Berlin International Film Festival by storm, scooping the Golden Bear award and turning lead actress Pauline Malefane into a star. The concept is brilliant in its simplicity: take the popular operatic story of Carmen, mix with African choral tradition, and translate the story to a local setting. Slowly, we’re starting to find a South African way of doing things, and with that, we are rediscovering the long-neglected places where our people truly live.

You can't help wondering why it is that the plans for Khayelitsha's revitalisation should be so revolutionary. As Van der Vent says, it’s all about treating people as people. Building a shopping centre to serve a population of 500 000 people — not to mention the surrounding areas — should be a no-brainer, just like the provision of middle-income housing to people ready and willing to pay for it. But then, we sometimes seem to delight in not doing the obvious.

This article, for which Jocelyn Newmarch won a Mondi Award, was orginally published in The Property Magazine.