Water-Sensitive Design for Climate Resilience: Grounded Lessons from Cape Town

Water Sensitive Design (WSD) has been around in some form at least since the early 1960s. A leading contribution to the field was Australia’s proposal for a transition framework for Water Sensitive Cities. This transition framework has been criticized as not taking full account of the unique challenges experienced in cities in the Global South. These challenges include poverty, governance problems, and resource constraints. These issues converge in Cape Town where they are amplified by entrenched redundant inequality arising from historic separate development during the apartheid era. South Africa’s new post-liberal constitution is founded on principles of social justice, basic human rights, and sustainable development. In the context of enduring water stress, episodic but prolonged droughts and climate change, there are efforts in academia, government, and practice to place South Africa urban areas on the trajectory to becoming water-sensitive cities. This contribution highlights the challenges, proposals, and practices in the highly unequal and contested City of Cape Town (CCT).</p

Towards Liveable Neighbourhoods by Redesigning Using Water Sensitive Design

This study was executed in Cape Town, a city that is arguably a microcosm ofcontemporary global challenges. Segregated apartheid colonial planning resulted in an atomised spatial geography. It is known that Water Sensitive Design (WSD) can regenerate urban catchments to bring multiple benefits, such as enhancing ecological health, securing water resources, increasing recreational opportunities, enhancing ecological and human health, reducing of urban heat island, mitigating floods and offering a range of economic benefits. But how can WSD spatially be integrated in an existing city setting given prevailing constraints? Located in Cape Town, the purpose of this study was to generate spatial WSD proposals that are responsive to the social inequity and informality challenges of a Global South city context. The empirical context of this study was Hangberg, a low income and informalising neighbourhood located at the edge of a biodiversity conservation area on the slopes of the Sentinel Mountain. Sandwiched between an artificial harbour and the nature reserve, the neighbourhood has limited land for expansion. In Hangberg, the above challenges are heightened, even as population increases naturally and by immigration. Hangberg neighbourhood is located in Hout Bay suburb. The history of Hout Bay suburb is centered around the Hout Bay River. Starting in the 1650s, the natural Hout Bay River Catchment was transformed through farming, lumbering and urbanisation. From the 1930s, advent of the private motorcar made scenic Hout Bay an attractive area for residential development. Hout Bay is today mainly an affluent residential suburb. The fishing, recreation and tourism industries are also important. But the river catchment and the bay are pressured by urban developed. Hangberg and Imizhamo Yethu are two low income enclaves in the otherwise affluent suburb. There have been many WSD studies in South Africa. The studies have come up with valuable fit-for-context WSD insights and solutions. But none of the studies have engaged with spatial integration of WSD solutions in a specific urban, environmental, social and legal-institutional context. The goal of this study was to create spatial WSD proposals that are responsive to prevailing contextual factors in a Global South city, including informality. The study intended to generate a set of spatially accurate WSD plans and a set of visualisations for a water sensitive precinct and neighbourhood. The study’s target was to formulate compelling and realistic proposals for water sensitive places in Hangbergand Hout Bay. This interdisciplinary study produced mutually supportive packages of knowledge from the fields of anthropology, hydrological engineering, urban planning, urban design and information systems. The study yielded the following key outcomes: (1) A hydrological model that demonstrates the flooding mitigating capacityof adding Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) in the Hout Bay Catchment (2) A Water Sensitive Spatial Planning (WSSP) proposal for the Hout Bay Subdistrict of Cape Town (3) Insights into how low-income residents in Hangberg experience water, space and urban living (4) A Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSD) proposal for Hangberg neighbourhood (5) An online Decision Support Platformfor Water Sensitive Places</p