Cape Town - As any map shows, Cape Town, like every other city, is knitted into an indivisible whole by thousands of streets – yet, with few exceptions, these are roadways that divide or isolate the people who use them and channel their lives in ways that seem immutable.
But what if they were deliberately opened to become contact zones between people rather than corridors of traffic? Might that be possible and would motorists or commuters be remotely interested, or at least be willing to try?
When she began thinking aloud about this a few years ago, one candid listener told Marcela Guerrero Casas it was a stupid idea that would never work. Roads were for cars and in Cape Town especially, if you wanted to get anywhere, you went by car.
Casas had no romantic illusions about that, but was undaunted.
“What he should have said was, ‘This is going to be really hard’, and it has been hard,” she acknowledged in an interview.
But, in addition to her own convictions, what the founder of the Open Streets organisation had in her favour was the lived experience of a profoundly humanising urban phenomenon that began in her home town as a weekend experiment 42 years ago.
Casas, 35, wasn’t even born when US-trained architect Jaime Ortiz returned home to the Colombian capital of Bogota determined to challenge the alienating tendency of modern cities to sprawl, granting pre-eminence to cars and freeways, and turning the thoroughfares of city life into hostile roadways that ferried people past one another in the soulless grind of the daily commute.
“One of his ideas was to shut down 15km of the streets as a one-off exercise and get people out on their bicycles, and he managed to convince the mayor it would be a great thing to do.” Ortiz had good relationships with the media, and everybody supported him.
“A lot of people came out, and it was a great success,” Casas said. But it didn’t end there.
Bogota’s Ciclovia is still going, but in dramatically expanded form: all of 120km of streets are closed to cars every Sunday and every public holiday, and more than a million people come out to celebrate, cycling, walking, dancing, doing aerobics. Once, Ciclovia hosted the biggest outdoor aerobics class with no fewer than 37 000 participants.
It has become Colombia’s most important recreation event.
Casas met Ortiz for the first time this year, an encounter that coincided with the consolidation of Open Streets as a fixture on Cape Town’s changing urban scene.
It’s been a long journey for the girl from Cota, on Bogota’s periphery, who grew up relishing those vivid Sundays of many-peopled streets. The engaging, energetic Colombian’s unlikely trajectory, however, began with a talent for tennis.
Her court skills in 1997 earned her an athletics scholarship to the US, where she graduated with a master’s degree in public administration and international relations at Syracuse in upstate New York.
From the start, she was determined to make a difference in the world, to travel and seek opportunities in the NGO sector, but admitted wryly: “For nine years, I attempted to do that… unsuccessfully.”
In 2006 she came to Africa, based in Joburg to begin with, where she was engaged in NGO projects with a continental reach, yet still lacking a sense of vocation. That changed when a friend urged her to “look closer to home”.
“He said, ‘Stop looking elsewhere… there’s something special about changing where you live.’ This helped me digest the idea of what Open Streets could be, and gave me a sense of purpose.”
She had moved to Cape Town by then and had met people in the cycling fraternity, among whom there was a shared sense of the difficulties, but also the potential.
It was in the wake of the 2012 Cycle Tour that Casas decided to share her thoughts on the possibilities in a newspaper article, reflecting on the Colombian experience and venturing a view that the same ought to be possible at the southern tip of Africa.
“That was the beginning of something that has taken me and others on an extraordinary journey over the past three-and-a-half years.
“The more people I spoke to about the idea of Ciclovia – now adopted in many cities around the world as ‘Open Streets’ – the more convinced I became that it was a good idea.”
Casas, however, was encouraged to discover when she made contact with someone at the city’s central transport agency, Transport Cape Town (TCT), that “they knew about Ciclovia” and were well disposed to the concept.
Planning began in late 2012 for the first event a year thence, a car-free Saturday in Observatory. TCT was keen, volunteers were enlisted and a permit sought. “It was the perfect place to try out the concept,” Casas said. “We thought that if we got 100 people there we could tick the box and reckoned on around 500. On the day there were at least 5 000. It was amazing.”
The challenge, then, was to consolidate the project and expand it. Open Streets – having succeeded in gaining Mayor Patricia de Lille’s endorsement, and in building a collaborative relationship with TCT – has expanded and become a widely recognised agency in the broader project of making Cape Town a safer, more integrated, liveable city. Public spaces are the key to it for they define the city everyone shares.
There have been signal successes with Open Streets events in Bellville, Bree Street and Langa, attracting many thousands of people and, Casas believed, shifting public consciousness towards the benefits of a different way of using shared space.
Every “demonstration” reinforced the advantages of viewing – and using – streets differently.
A signal instance was the two Open Streets events in Langa this year. Casas said when the idea was first mooted, “a lot of people said, ‘Look, doing this sort of thing in the CBD is fine, but you’re naive if you think you can go to a township and make it work’.”
“There were a lot of sceptics, but we were lucky to have good relationships with people in Langa, and the community respected the initiative. The results were amazing.”
There was initial resistance from the police, “and it took us a few meetings to assure them that our plans were in place”.
“They weren’t altogether convinced, but they said, ‘Ok, let’s see.’ On the evening of the event, I got an SMS from the senior officer in Langa to say we had done ‘an amazing thing for Langa’. There wasn’t a single incident of crime. And that doesn’t mean that Langa is suddenly safe, but it demonstrates that there is something about this platform that creates really positive and unexpected things.”
In a Tedex talk in 2012, Casas underscored the essential point that the city’s streets “belong to us, we all have access to them, they are our streets, we own them”.
And she said while Open Streets events were essential in demonstrating the benefits of occupying public spaces collectively, the movement was focused on everyday use of the roads. “We care about streets all the time, not just when they are sealed off to cars. The movement is about people who... believe that streets can change the city.”
In Cape Town, quite as much as in every other major city in the world, there was a distinct sense that late 20th century transport options and patterns were not sustainable. “When it comes to mobility in cities, it’s not working, and there’s a global consciousness that we have to think differently.”
While Open Streets in Cape Town was the only sustained initiative of its kind in Africa, there were more than 100 across the Americas, and similar movements in Europe and elsewhere.
But, she stressed, it was not simply about compelling people to get on bicycles. “We emphasise that streets should provide choice about how we move around... it’s not just about pedestrianising roadways, or using public transport. But there can only be a choice if public transport is safe, affordable and reliable.
“Open Streets can’t make that happen, but we can provide the opportunities for people to experiment for a day – to get on their bike, or use public transport to get to the venue – so that in time they’ll feel more comfortable doing it regularly.”
It would “take a long time”, but the foundation was strong. “One advantage is that we are working closely with the city and province, and we have a political commitment that can take this really far.”
That trajectory, she argued, was a behavioural one.
Casas, who though she has access to a car last owned one a year ago and uses her bicycle for workaday trips – said: “Once people start seeing streets as a place of opportunity, everything falls into place. It will take time and lots of demonstrations of how it can be.
“It sounds like a cliche, but when you’re on a bicycle you actually see other people, you smile, you hear them, all your senses are stimulated. It’s a much more human way of interacting. And that’s very powerful.”
Weekend Argus