ABSTRACT
Urban planning is a discourse which seldom, if ever, takes place among those most affected by it. For the many families of the Cape Flats who once lived in the run-down, low-rental, multi-purpose but arguably humanised inner-city areas of Cape Town, urban planning was simply something that happened to them - and tore out the heart of their city. Urban planning cannot be separated from political and economic considerations. Indeed ideas only become effective when they connect with a particular constellation of social forces. In his analysis of the Foreshore in 1966, Roelof Uytenbogaardt observed that 'the impossibility of reconciling the requisites of a Monumental Approach with actual demands is demonstrated very clearly by the departures that have been made from the 1947 plan and by the problems at hand which cannot be solved within its framework'. By the 1960s Cape Town was declining in relation to other economic regions of South Africa with a relative fall-off in productive output.
