Cape Town

Plan City Precincts

Plan City Precincts was my first design experience in Urban Development and design. In this design the experience was to find one part of the city which has more potential to redevelop. I actually learned  which kind of development could be the better to be located next to CBD and waterfront.which in this case was mostly residential.Another experience was to use the suitable building type for the project.In Cape Town there is no certain built form for buildings. Therefore as a team we tried to use perimeter blocks. Furthermore we use the old grid network of the CBD and demolished one of the main highways of cape Town to make it more connective. After doing research and study about Cape town as group we found out about location, type of development and built form by knowing the opportunities and problems of area. 

Our team had two teem members with different back grounds, nationality and experiences. Therefore we split the work according to our skills and backgrounds. My teammate Ye Peng from Singapore was an experienced guy with management back ground who mostly did the analysis of the site and I as an architecture think mostly about the design. 

Description of the Design: 

The design is for a new waterfront mixed-use neighborhood in Cape Town CBD, seamlessly connected to the harbor. The neighborhood would be a new gateway for Cape Town and the CBD, connected with a new cruise terminal and plugged into the city’s bus rapid transit based IRT system. It would also provide a new waterfront city centre and community focal point.

The elegant city grid first laid out by the city’s Dutch colonial masters was abandoned in favor of radial infrastructure and larger lots to facilitate industrial development during the city’s industrialization. The mass population exodus from the CBD during the Apartheid period gutted its residential population and liveliness. The strategic location of the site and the progressive expansion of the adjacent V&A Waterfront into the site offer a new window and opportunity to re-connect the city to the harbour. New housing developments of mixed classes proposed offer opportunities for displaced residents to return to live in the CBD.

The key design ideas were to break down the existing brutal road network and highway viaducts, replacing it with the traditional 60x60m Cape Town CBD grid. The grid is used as a basic building block for the new neighbourhood for the layout of buildings, roads, pedestrian paths and
view corridors. New housing developments in the north and south will be served by a new tourism, job and amenity cluster in the centre of the site.