The Antique Utopia:
- Cameron Luke Peters
- 5 hours ago
- 10 min read
A Forgotten Story of South African Garden Cities and the Quest for Affordable Housing.
“Perhaps [building ‘smart cities’ is a way] of ignoring the old stupid cities that we already have…”
Ivan Vladislavic
It’s always tickled me that one of Cape Town’s suburban shopping centres is named after a British utopian socialist urban-planner from the late Victorian era. This is, of course, the Howard Centre in the heart of Pinelands. It was named for Sir Ebenezer Howard OBE (1850-1928), a city thinker who probably did more to influence the shape and substance of the neighbourhood you grew up in than anyone else born in the last 200 years. For comparison, imagine if there was a mall in Randburg called the Marx & Engels Lifestyle Estate and Leisure Park. I suppose it’s no weirder a concept than the ‘Mandela-Rhodes Foundation’, but still.
Words: Cameron Luke Peters
What makes this tribute doubly intriguing is that Pinelands, if you don’t know, is a by-word in the Mother City for absurd conservative taste (amongst both residents and neighbours). I find the place charming and fascinating, but even my friends who grew up amidst its thatch Tudor cottages and esoteric geometries describe it affectionately as a kind of free-range retirement home, boasting a dozen churches, next to no liquor licences and an Ou Meul Bakery. And yet the developers are presently moving in, fresh from the Atlantic Seaboard. ‘Affordable Luxury Blocks’, like Conradie Park and The Signal, are popping up like glass toadstools, and semigrants from all over are preferring its pruned avenues to the high asks of the CBD. In a sense, they’re just repeating a deep cycle in South African (and modern) history: aspiring to live in ‘town’ without giving up the country.
Richard Stuttaford / Sir Ebenezer Howard
Pinelands, you see, was the first ‘Garden City’ in South Africa and the third official one in the world, after Letchworth (1904) and Welwyn (1920) in the deep north of Greater London. (There are streets in Pinelands and Edgemead named ‘Letchworth’ and ‘Welwyn’ in their honour). As such, it is one of the milestones in the history of placemaking. I mean this quite literally. In the middle of its unassuming Central Square (actually a rectangle) is a giant plinth proclaiming:
THIS STONE WAS LAID ON THE 5TH DAY OF MAY 1923 BY LT. GEN. THE RIGHT HON J.C. SMUTS P.C: C.H: U.T.D: K.C. TO COMMEMORATE THE FOUNDING OF PINELANDS THE FIRST GARDEN CITY TO BE ESTABLISHED UNDER THE TRUST FORMED BY THE UNION GOVERNMENT & RICHARD STUTTAFORD OF CAPE TOWN.
How august.
By the way, what is a Garden City? In brief, it’s Sir Howard’s romantic vision of a less miserable England. With a name like ‘Ebenezer’, it’s no surprise his childhood was somewhat Dickensian. Born to a baker in the City of London, London, at the peak of the British Empire, he started work as an office clerk at the age of 15 and undoubtedly bore witness to some of the most startling juxtapositions of wealth and poverty to exist since ancient Babylon. At 21 he emigrated to the USA and lived for a few years in Chicago just after that metropolis had suddenly burned to the ground. According to lore, he was strongly affected by the experience of watching the city resurrect itself, seeing how leafy suburbs were established to help prevent future towering infernos. He is also said to have met and admired Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the twin laureates of American nature-loving who would later come to influence Jan Smuts, Olive Schreiner and innumerable South Africans.
When he returned to London later in the decade, Howard found consistent work as a parliamentary reporter and gradually became obsessed in his spare time with thinking up practical ways to make the city an easier place to live in. On the face of it, this was not a surprising turn. He had found himself working mere metres away from the dead centre of power in the capital of the richest empire the world had ever known, and yet the society which surrounded him was an unignorably awful home for millions of its citizens. Surely something could be done? In thinking so, Howard joined a radical milieu of moderate reformers. You can easily compare him to contemporaries like John Ruskin (1819-1900), the rock-star art critic who preached that even coal miners deserved the time and opportunity to learn how to draw, or to William Morris (1834-96), the fantasy writer and textile artist who proved that even the wallpaper in mass-produced housing could aspire to beauty (and inspire the ‘broekie-lace’ iron-work of so many South African balconies). These men didn’t want to destroy the new world, but to save it from itself.
Belatedly, after decades of mulling over his ideas, Howard published his sole manifesto in 1898 - ‘To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform’ (later revised as ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’). The subtext of the sub-title is plain as day: the choice is between humane housing or guillotines. The decision was made that much easier by the inclusion of some of the prettiest infographics ever published. Just have a look:
The crux of his argument was that ‘Garden Cities’ were a bonafide third-way solution - a ‘third magnet’ for citizens between the pros and cons of the slums and the farms: In point of fact, Garden Cities weren’t ‘cities’ at all but spacious, autonomous satellite towns of sprawling municipalities that served to steady their explosive growth.
The book was an instant, deserved success. In a sense, it did for urban planning what Darwin’s The Origin of Species had done for biology a few decades earlier, effortlessly reconfiguring the everyday vocabulary of millions of ordinary people. The modern concept of urban ‘zoning’ can be traced back to its influence and even Walt Disney was inspired to copy quite a few of Howard’s ideas whilst designing Disneyland, as well as his iconic EPCOT Centre in Disney World, Florida. (EPCOT originally stood for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow). But the book’s most enduring influence was felt and expressed right here, in every South African city.
The man who translated Howard’s ideal across the empire and the equator was the aforementioned Richard Stuttaford. And yes, as you rightly guessed, he was the heir to “the Harrods of South Africa” - the son of Samson Rickard Stuttaford, founder of the most iconic department store in our history. After spending his salad days in England, Richard had returned to Cape Town in 1898 at the age of 28 and soon, quite unsurprisingly, rose up the ranks of his father’s company to become a Director of the firm’s HQ on Adderley Street. However, the old CBD was now a very different beast to the ‘Kaapse Vlek’ he’d been raised in.
Following the endless wake of diamonds and gold upcountry, its population had “more than doubled from 67,000 to 171,000 between 1891 and 1901 alone”. In other words, the city bowl’s size and complexion changed more in the decade building up to the Boer War than in the 240 years preceding it. This was the time when District Six was busy being born and the seediness of the V&A Waterfront was reaching its zenith (or nadir). It’s hard to imagine any other port outside of America around this time more interesting to experience or more unliveable to reside in. After the British finished burning down the platteland, the new rich colonials began their white flight to Oranjezicht, Newlands and Muizenberg while the petit bourgeoisie decamped to Observatory, Green Point and Milnerton et al. But for the new immigrants and working poor of all races, Cape Town became an abusive parent. Plus ça change.
Howard's many, many world-changing diagrams
Richard Stuttaford, for one, could not ignore this truth. As his career flourished, his conscience rattled. Having caught wind of the work of the new ‘Garden Cities Association’, in 1917 he made sure to tour Letchworth on a return-trip to the home counties, and even met with a now-wizened Sir Howard in person. When he got back, he pitched a local vision of the concept to his fellow big-wigs in the Cape Town Chamber of Commerce. They shut him down. Undeterred, he took his proposal to the top. On the 28th of January 1919, he wrote a letter to the acting prime minister of the Union of South Africa, F.S. Malan (Louis Botha and Jan Smuts were busy waging peace in Paris):
Will you give me a quarter of an hour to discuss [Garden Cities] with you, when if you approve my suggestions, you might introduce me to the Minister who is responsible for this part of the public welfare.I may say at once that I do not propose to ask the Government for financial help.With kind regards,
I am, Yours Truly, Richard Stuttaford
Malan granted him the 15 minutes. During the meeting, he took him up on his offer and promised to contribute next to nothing else. A few months later, Stuttaford, as first chairman, signed the deed of the non-profit Garden Cities Trust with six other trustees, dropped £10,000 of his own money into its coffers and accepted the government’s gift of 365 morgen of Uitvlugt, a timber plantation beyond the Black River set aside as the laboratory for the country’s first planned community. By 1921, the English architect Albert J. Thompson was laying out the iconic concentric grid and designing the first thatch properties on the Meadway. By the end of the decade, in spite of budget cuts, influenza epidemics, rinderpest, famine, political chaos and a sizeable worldwide depression, Pinelands was:
[A]n object lesson to the whole country, with 270 houses of the cost value of £350 000, with approximately 6 miles of tree-planted roads and 6 miles of footpaths, provided with water and electricity, light and power, gas, telephones, bus service, post office, hall, tennis courts, bowling green, school [...] in fact, all the amenities necessary for comfortable, convenient, sunny, healthy, beautiful homes…
For old colonials like Stuttaford and Jan Smuts, who had spent all their decades watching the rustic South Africa of their childhoods be ravaged and mangled by war and money, the suburb must have shone like a harbinger of national redemption.
The Garden Cities of Today, spanning the world from North London to South Durban
So what was the catch, you may ask? For most residents of Pinelands, then and now, there wasn’t one. It remains a beautiful, if slightly eerie, arcadia. But it is enclosed. Unlike Cape Town itself, it is not an oasis, a crossroads, or a smorgasbord. It doesn’t need gates to invoke its boundary. To read the Trust’s anniversary publication Fifty Years of Housing (1972) is to marvel at a kind of extended cruise-ship brochure for a fixed residential area. There are clubs, societies and public jaunts and haunts galore but you won’t have to frequent them long before you start running out of new faces. And, of course, whether Howard or Stuttaford meant it to or not, the Garden Cities solution can slide seamlessly into the blueprint of segregation.
Indeed, Thompson (Pinelands’ architect) was immediately re-hired by the city council to design Langa, the first permanent black township in Cape Town, right next door. Uitvlugt itself had first been earmarked as a military camp during the Boer War and then re-used as a quarantine location for thousands of black labourers who were forcibly removed from the city when a wave of Bubonic plague and Swart Gevaar paranoia hit the dockyards in 1901. This desultory slum, renamed Ndabeni (‘the place of debate’), was left to fester for two decades. Finally the tents and shacks were cleared, and spacious boulevards and segmented plots rose in their stead farther out on the flats. However, instead of shady, homely lanes and generational wealth, the black working-class were given concrete barracks, panopticon surveillance policing and sheds with asbestos roofs. The centre of the settlement resembled the mining hostel schemes of Alexandra and Soweto far more than any English village. Langa’s people made it work - they had no other choice - but the location stands today as a memorial to the many ways in which apartheid preceded Apartheid.
And so it went for the rest of the 20th Century. The Garden Cities Trust was laudably committed to social progress for all Capetonians, but under the Group Areas Act this required them to build separate communities for white and coloured families. The development of Meadowridge in Constantia in the 1950s was matched by the layout of Square Hill in Retreat a decade later. Edgemead in Goodwood was set out in tandem with Elfindale in Princess Vlei. The mass social housing developments on the Cape Flats that the Trust was not involved in consciously took their cues from some Garden City principles, but seemed to fatally forget that the ‘Garden’ part of the name was as crucial as the ‘City’. Manenberg, Mitchell’s Plain, Atlantis, Khayelitsha, Ocean View and so many other communities were designed in the years of Grand Apartheid as ‘model unit suburbs’ meant to replace bulldozed neighbourhoods and accommodate thousands of new migrants from the countryside, but they were thorny trees planted in poisoned soil.
Of course, Cape Town might have pioneered these schemes, but the other metros were just as culpable. White-zoned Yellowwood Park (1960) in the Kenneth Stainbank Nature Reserve south of Durban was everything its labyrinthine neighbour Umlazi (1967) was not. Verwoerdburg (later Centurion, 1967) near Midrand was balanced out by Soshanguve (1974) on the other side of Pretoria. Take your pick of examples from Jozi. I hope you can tell that I’m not writing this condemnation from a cynical or reactionary position. The best-laid plans of mice and men can always be soured by dilution. Garden Cities can never work as hand-me-down versions of themselves.
But equally, their most well-executed examples are threatened by their own success. The Mount Edgecombe Estate in Umhlanga and Steyn City near Fourways are nothing if not autonomous luxury visions of 21-Century Garden Cities for the well-heeled. And in a city like today’s Kaapstad, where the Edgemead-born Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis admits that even he can’t afford to live in the CBD, the drive to preserve property values and collective security has spawned dozens of Community Improvement Districts. For many home-owners and businesses, these public-private partnerships have been a godsend salve for the evils of persistent vagrancy and urban decay. But for others (like my friend K.’s parents, who’ve lived in Edgemead all their adult lives), the raised rates they entail might force them to sell their homes in a matter of months. The more beautiful the garden, the more tempting it becomes to build a higher and higher wall.
As for the Garden Cities Trust itself, the board has held on to its soul for longer than almost any other non-governmental institution in the city. Seven other members of the Stuttaford family have served in executive roles over the last century and its current director, Sean Stuttaford (Richard’s great-grandson), only started getting paid a salary for his duties after 96 years of schemes. Inspired by the speedy assembling of Cosmo City in Johannesburg, the Trust has recently pioneered the Greenville Garden City Development near Durbanville, building 3,000 houses so far of a projected 16,000. These add to the many thousands of estates and properties they’ve completed since 1994 in Sunningdale, Pinehurst, Marlborough Park, Norton Square and Mfuleni, along with dozens of new school halls built by their Archway Foundation. Oh for a hundred more such vanguards!
Can Cape Town still reclaim this, or any other practical vision of paradise? To reappropriate a quote by old Slim Jannie: a city is not defeated by its opponents but by itself.
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