Builders gonna build, come hell or the — rising sea levels
Twenty years ago I decided, for reasons imaginative and nerdy, to create an accurate map of what Cape Town’s coast would look like if the sea level rose by an admittedly extreme 5m.
My friend Thomas, then an environmental and geographical sciences undergrad, introduced me to an academic who explained the alarming basics of sealevel rise. If the water comes up by one unit, it’s usually coming inland by a lot more.
I duly bought some aerial photographs from the National Geo-spatial Information office in Mowbray (this was before Google Earth) and obsessively began highlighting low-lying contours in magic marker.
What I found is not news to any of Cape Town’s damp treatment specialists. You might want to reconsider your membership of the Milnerton Golf Club, or, as it will one day be known, Table Bay East. Muizenberg and its northern neighbours are soggy toast: the suburb of Retreat was ominously well named. The one place you do not want to live, ever, is at the confluence of the Black and Liesbeek rivers in Observatory, a large expanse of boggy, often flooded veld just a damp hop, skip and a plop away from slowly advancing Table Bay.
Luckily, you can’t live there, at least not now. The site of a rather grim old manor house and a golf course, it is zoned for conservation and is listed as protected by Heritage Western Cape. (I assume a golf course counts as conservation as it preserves, er, prewar values?)
Still, this is SA we’re talking about, a land of endless possibilities. Almost 10 years ago Transnet sold land to private buyers at well below market value. Now, its most recent owner is getting ready to start work on a vast sprawl of buildings, basically the hipster version of those just-add-water-and-toxic waste instant cities in the Soviet Union. It’s got some fancy name but since it’s in Observatory, let’s call this Soviet-lite cluster of highrises and shops Obsk.
Developer Jody Aufrichtig says he wants to “create a development blending different cultures and socioeconomic strata”. You might assume he’s talking about cultures and socioeconomic strata who enjoy spending their time sloshing buckets of water out of their front doors and applying fungal cream to every inch of their bodies, but he and his team insist they plan to use Dutch technology to keep Obsk dry. This seems to involve sinking vast amounts of cement into the area, displacing the water around Obsk and presumably drowning everyone else in Observatory. Perhaps that Dutch technology is really just 17th-century entitlement.
Not all property owners and developers meet climate change by embracing submersion like the brains behind Obsk. Residents of Miami’s poorer, neglected and largely “undesirable” areas are racing against time to safeguard their properties, physically and legally, against inevitable “climate gentrification”. As Miami’s seafront becomes increasingly uninhabitable, the rich who cluster there will have to move further inland. Residents of higher, drier spaces are making sure they won’t be pushed out. It is a civic, strategic awareness that seems to be lacking in Cape Town and SA as a whole.
WE’D RATHER THINK ABOUT HARRY AND MEGHAN, THE SPRINGBOKS OR BRAAI DAY THAN ASK IF THE COUNTRY HAS A PLAN
I understand that our violent, angry, frustrated country wants to see that violence and anger reflected and discussed in our media, but trauma only explains some of it. We’d much rather think about Harry and Meghan, the Springboks or Braai Day than ask if the country has a plan for when those two SA things — sea and sunny skies — turn against us.
There are murmurs. On Tuesday, international relations minister Naledi Pandor expressed the hope that SA would build no new coal-fired power stations after next year. It would have meant more had the energy minister said it. Given the progress of Medupi and Kusile, I’m not sure it’s much of a deadline: power stations we start building in 2020 will come online only in 2040.
I don’t know if the government has a plan. Its endless rhetoric about the fourth industrial revolution, and relative silence on SA’s illiterate children, suggests that it doesn’t. Money men, on the other hand, definitely have a plan. It’s the same plan they’ve had for centuries; the one that has us wondering whether Milnerton will fall into the sea in 10 years or 20.
They know what they’re doing. If you move to Obsk, so do you. Wading, mostly.