August 2019 Report on TRUPA

from: Marc Turok

The Two Rivers Urban Park is a declared park, based on a consulted vision that took 5 years to achieve – the TRUP Association has its Contextual Framework LSDF and its Management Plan endorsed and adopted by our City who assisted to make this healing process real and formally adopted in law. The Park, like the Two Rivers, has been real since the origins of conscious time. No single party can make it disappear! The Rivers keep on flowing, need to be heard and need to be cared for!

They have been subject to hectic abuse and are severely threatened with extinction of all normal ecologically sound life as habitat is replaced by obsessive negative sub-humane habit patterning and degradation. The Park extends everywhere, up to the hills and from the peaks, down the valleys and across the oceans the impact extends beyond time and space.

The Lifegiving rivers flow through and we are a witness and it witnesses us!

It needs our broad support and we need to work for it, inspired by its indestructible ever-transforming, flowing water.

TRUPA has a very central and important dominant focus that is a cutting edge HERITAGE focus for our City and our Planet. We as THE PEOPLE are the Democratic Community and our values, our goals and our heritage are important! We preserve our heritage as part of who we are (a range of interlinking identities) and also who we aspire to be, as we transcend and share our heritage with our future generation…

We are still suffering from the crime against humanity that was much of the colonial exploitation and the theft and the cruelty driven by strange quests with disregard for ordinary people who were made slaves, degraded and dislocated. Apartheid set up as a legalized illegal society based on lies and fictitious rules that broke and subjugated others and took advantage by way of disadvantaging all others.

An essential part of that heritage is our ENVIRONMENT and… we see and know that the obsession with modern progress, the motor car-mad world of industrial madness has polluted and disrupted and destroyed the natural balance, our air, rivers, and sea is choking sick!  The mad obsessive ‘development uber alles’ to feed the tapeworm bottom line, is destroying the planet and needs to be STOPPED!  We know that we do not need highways across our park and we do not need to fill in our rivers and almost the entire confluence flood plain with undesirable shopping centers with huge parking areas with underground concrete basements in the wetland flood plain where water should soak into the aquifer to replenish the groundwater in our drought-stricken, not that resilient, southern Cape city.

Don’t we even learn from what happened just less than a year ago?

Civics and special interest groups need to be fully represented and should liaise to build up the flowing network that will be ever persistent and indestructible to keep moving to achieve the potential that can be reached as a dedicated continuous movement. Many drops make a river and rivers converge into oceans. There is a sustainable cycle that life depends on when balance can be sustained.

The long tradition of inclusive participatory consultation that follows our unfolding democratic quest has informed our planning, visioning and manifesto values for the last 21 years and miracle as it was, those were assisted by skilled planners who assisted to formulate them into a Spatial Development Framework that needs on-going creativity and participatory inclusive resilience to be truly sustainable. We need to continue to extend it to achieve greater success for our City.

TRUPA as a Representative body for TWO RIVERS URBAN PARK needs to be well managed and efficiently run so all aims and goals can be achieved.

Marc Turok
TRUPA – Deputy Chair