Forgotten Bellville is finally getting an overdue ‘glow-up’

“It’s basically a city inside a city,” Alderman James Vos explained to the packed house at the Greater Tygerberg Partnership’s CEO Gala Dinner held at Hazendal Wine Estate on the border of Kuils River and Brackenfell. To be clear, it’s actually Brackenfell because it is on the north side of Bottelary – but that’s hyper local semantics that shouldn’t slow the momentum being built behind the Middestad of Cape Town’s northern ’burbs.

Vos was referring to the 350,000 commuters, more than 100,000 students and 3,500 businesses that bustle through this precinct every day.

Among the ambitious plans to rejuvenate the area is a plan to gentrify the properties along Voortrekker Road that have fallen into the all-too-familiar decay seen across South Africa’s metropolitan areas that are not home to blue-chip multinational businesses.

According to the alderman, these properties will be “transformed into mixed-use spaces that are exciting – where people want to live, work and do business”.

Vos’s boss, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, was also on hand to describe that this momentum is translating into highly tangible, large-scale developments that make Bellville an attractive investment bet: “When I look at what development is going to do at that new precinct… When I look at what Stellenbosch University is going to do at their new precinct … they’re going to have to rename the university because it’s more Bellville than it is Stellenbosch!”

That last bit is real talk because the Stellenbosch Business School is in Bellville and the medical school is based at Tygerberg Hospital – which is either in Parow or Elsie’s River, depending on where you draw your borders.

Making a place

But these plans would not exist without the work being done in Joburg by the Jozi My Jozi initiative. The partnership between the Greater Tygerberg Partnership (GTP) in Bellville and Jozi My Jozi in Johannesburg functions as a highly collaborative relationship rooted in shared learning and mutual inspiration regarding urban regeneration.

Although the exact operational parameters are actively still being shaped – with Jozi My Jozi’s Robbie Brozin (also the founder of Nando’s) in attendance at the event and planning to spend time with the GTP to solidify exactly how they will collaborate – their working relationship is currently defined by several key elements.

The two organisations rely on a shared philosophy of “placemaking” and regularly learn from each other. Both focus on restoring human dignity and making, in Brozin’s words, “invisible people visible” by engaging communities from the ground up while simultaneously driving top-down collaboration between the private sector, government and academia.

Brozin is also proposing a twin cities model through shared cultural and musical threads, aiming to harness the energies of both areas. His plan is to host a “Bellville night in Joburg” to integrate Bellville’s energy into Johannesburg’s revitalisation efforts.

Both initiatives bypass waiting strictly on government intervention, instead mobilising the spicy chicken baron’s fondness for the Constitution’s preamble (which he read in full to the silent auditorium) in a “we the people” approach leveraging private business, dedicated community members and cross-city inspiration to get tangible projects done on the ground.

(This is a great place to disclose that Jozi My Jozi partner Anglo American does support Daily Maverick’s Johannesburg bureau, but that
partnership has no influence on the telling of Bellville’s story.)

Lighting up the night

The foundation of transforming the run-down CBD is a broad illumination project that has already been implemented in two of the public parks. And then there are, of course, the other urban issues, if you have any knowledge of the bit of Bellville around the central station.

Although aesthetic and infrastructure upgrades are vital, unlocking Bellville’s full potential also requires strict urban management and the resolution of street-level challenges.

Hill-Lewis pointed out that alongside rebuilding infrastructure, the City still has “to deal with the issue of, you know, proliferation of illegal informal trading at the bottom of Durban Road”.

To effectively manage these urban challenges, the mayor announced a crucial new enforcement capability granted to the City: “But the Metro Police have just been given the official right, gazetted by the minister, to also help enforce South Africa’s immigration laws and regulations… That will help a lot.”

He explained that these new law enforcement powers act as a vital piece of the broader regeneration puzzle, explaining that when you combine the City’s efforts, the GTP’s placemaking and private business investments, “you start to knit together this beautiful picture, this tapestry of a successful [Bellville]. And, all of a sudden, without even necessarily knowing it … those beautiful plans that were on a document, they start to come to life.”

An outward symbol of the rejuvenation – and one of the main fundraising activities at the dinner, over and above the paid-for seats (Daily Maverick was a guest of GTP) – is the Bellville Skyline Project, which aims to create a distinctive nighttime identity for the city by illuminating major commercial buildings.

Building owners in attendance were asked to make a R250,000 pledge in return for a neon light strip that would be a mark of their commitment to turning the precinct around.

The aim? “So that when people head out of Cape Town on the N1 and they get to Tygerberg Hill and they come over, they can see the magnificence of Bellville ahead of them.”

Hill-Lewis was in a poetic mood, but it is, of course, easy to wax lyrical about burning electricity when your City is up to date with its Eskom account. Vos’s Economic Growth Department is making a provision of R15.5-million to the GTP to continue its placemaking, beautification and urban regeneration work.

The mayor also shared that the City is spending “billions of rands” on major underground infrastructure projects, such as water pipe and electricity upgrades, to ensure the area remains functional and attractive to investors for decades to come.

Eight R250,000 pledges were made at the dinner; now to deal with the bottom of Durban Road… DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.