Take an Urban Park, consulted on from 1998 to 2003 and adopted by the City of Cape Town as the Two Rivers Urban Park based on the approved Contextual Framework and the TRUP Management Plan.
Add the 2014 Table Bay District Plan that refers to the TRUP as an important Park that is a Natural Destination like Signal Hill and Table Mountain.
See the range of Planning policy that speaks to the Rivers, the Conservation of the Environment, the extensive research on the significant Heritage of the TRUP!
Note the fascinating work done by Centre for African Cities, Density Syndicate and Newtown Institute on TRUP and surrounds that preserved the Floodplains as wetlands and showed extensive potential for high-density well-located development on largely underutilized lands around TRUP that would be in line with good planning policy to benefit our City!
Observe the extensive consultation with broad public participation between 2015 and 2017 when the City after offering to add Ndabeni Triangle to the Park, even though it is not part of TRUP, gave it a new name “TRU[e] Park then instead of a scheduled all day Co-Design workshop, shut it all down, having announced that River Club had been sold to private developers and that it would be a game-changer to TRUP!
Note how Heritage Western Cape had noted the dual process and the lack of Heritage Grading for the significant Heritage sites, the recent high grading of SAAO hill and the need to Provisionally Protect River Club Site, that is under threat of development that appears to be disregarding heritage impact.
Note how the City of Cape Town who owns 53% of TRUP grants a private developer (who is proposing a seriously non-compliant massive development ) an extra 6 hectares to their non-compliant application with a condition that the developer apply for permission to build a highway across a sacred ancestral confluence site… destroying the original cultural landscape and the original Liesbeek River in the process, ignoring all opposition and objections and clear policy guidelines in all established LSDF and District Plans etc.
Be amazed as a new magic trick is performed where, overnight, the Urban Park disappears and a new name is given to this special place now suddenly no longer an Urban Park and where 21 years of consultations and policymaking can be disregarded with neglect and abandon!
Such skill in deception, one has to wonder how long it may take to sell TMNP ….Table Mountain (Its no longer a National Park! It’s been transformed! Now NP actually stands for Nothing in Perpetuity… or is it Noticeable Profit? )
Who removed INTEGRITY from our beautiful City?