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

The Greater Tygerberg Partnership has convinced the City of Cape Town to stand behind a public-private initiative to illuminate the northern suburban area.

“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.

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 oth