We are excited to announce a competition in partnership with Scapetown for our Your City Idea campaign. Your City Idea is aimed at using various offline and online opportunities given to citizens a voice on urban issues, and to crowdsource ideas for the urban future of our cities.
The LandScape Architecture Cape Town book was born from the initial goal to stage the theses of six graduates from the Masters in Landscape Architecture program at the University of Cape Town. They wanted to place their projects in the context of the social and environmental issues specific to Cape Town and present them to a wider audience. This expanded to become a conversation around landscape architecture projects that form the core of the public experience in Cape Town. The book also focuses on the people whose work lends identity to our public spaces, their values and experiences.
The book is a commentary on public space in Cape Town from a landscape architectural perspective. It captures the story of where we have come from; where we are today and where we are going in terms of public space design. It acts as a guide to places, but also to a profession, to a way of thinking about society and design against the back drop of Cape Town’s specific environment, history, social diversity and how the places we build have an impact far beyond the tangible.
Scapetown aims to facilitate dialogue around public space in Cape Town and make landscape architecture more accessible.
Future Cape Town has teamed with Scapetown to give away one of their LandScape Architecture Cape Town books. Just follow the competition instructions below:
The prize:
1 x LandScape Architecture Cape Town book
Follow these three easy steps to stand a chance of winning this inspiring book:
1. Like Future Cape Town on Facebook:
2. Like Scapetown on Facebook:
3. Answer this simple question in the comments below (you can even attach an image):
What would make your favourite public space even better?
The more likes your answer has, the better your chances of winning. So share this on Facebook or Twitter, with the hashtag #YourCityIdea, and get your friends or other people to like your idea.
The competition is open from 24 September to 7 October. We will announce the winner on 8 October!
Click here to SHARE on Facebook
If you love LandScape Architecture Cape Town so much that you would rather want to buy it yourself, email info@scapetown.co.za for the ordering details. There are a limited number of copies.
Allow the natural environment back into the city’s public
spaces. This idea sees the Castle precinct, a dormant feature in CT’s landscape
reactivated by using the Castle moat as a storm water retention pond. The
surrounding land (currently fenced off and used for parking) has indigenous
Renosterveld reintroduced allowing people to walk through it on the way to
work, school or college.
I’d like a super long swurvy bench/cage that hangs over the edge of the promenade for extream chilling, best used in large swell.
The Company Gardens could buzz like Central Park! A few cultural food vendors & light up the trees along the walk; more public sculpture and selective theatre & music performances.
Jesse, those are greats ideas, and I would advise you to stay tuned for news 🙂
I would like to suggest a couple things: Firstly, we need a diversity of aesthetic lighting options, allowing the landscaping in public-spaces to create the ambient lighting. Too often we just opt for street lights and forget the greenery itself at night. Secondly, the hard landscaping solutions are becoming ubiquitous. We use the same brick, pavers and colour patterns and combinations in almost every new space. We need to become more daring and creative, creating hard-landscaping that reflects the “personality” of the precinct. Thirdly, botanical diversity: We are becoming a White Stinkwood/Fever Tree centric city. We are not using the range of species and aesthetic effect that we could. Here is an article I wrote on this very matter: https://www.facebook.com/notes/34degrees-design/landscape-architecture-the-dismal-missing-link-in-creative-diversity/315526618519135
An officeworker’s lunchtime can be a routine retail transaction or a festival – space, sunlight, music, interaction. There should/could be more use and wider dispersal of lunchtime food carts in the City Bowl’s underused squares, and the cordoning-off of parking spaces for this purpose. The city’s restaurants could be challenged to produce a simple signature dish in a lunchtime portion for R35, and everything possible could be done to foster the foodcart culture. Importantly, this brings healthy food options to places that lack the preexisting infrastructure, as well as dramatically lowering the barriers to entry into the retail food/restaurant market. There must be control and a fair bit of ‘nudging’ from above so that vendors are pushed towards healthy choices that do not simply replicate the existing starch/meat options. Food carts are something between a market stall and a restaurant, and they therefore fill a very large gap.
roadside runoff/drainage holes with a water wheel mechanism that catches rubbish, then when it full deposits it into a separate “skip” container whilst another catchment “net” moves in to replace the full one. The “DRAIN” rubbish being collected when streets and bins are being cleaned/cleared of rubish, and less impact down the runoff/drainage destination