Open Streets Cape Town

Open Streets Cape Town has a proven track record of working and succeeding in under-resourced neighbourhoods. We have now hosted 23 open streets days, closing streets to traffic and creating public space for communities to come together. In the world's most divided city, creating and managing public space where people can come together is truly transformational.

Our efforts have been supported and funded as events and days. We are so grateful, and have produced incredible results on very slim budgets. 

We have bigger dreams. 

With Elevate funding, we don't want to simply replicate our wins, we want to scale them up by training and supporting new teams of Open Streets Cape Town coordinators to do what we do. We have proven the idea, we have institutionalised the concept in government and now it's time to evolve again. 

This funding will be the step-change catalyst required to scale up into the next iteration of community development. Our goal is to train and support 5 local teams to host their own Open Streets days, 5-day series in their neighbourhoods, enough traction to become sustainable.  

5 new teams. 25 new spaces. The next evolution of social cohesion. 

Open Streets Cape Town aims to support and mobilise a more just, inclusive use and ownership of streets and public space across Cape Town to contribute to bridging the social and spatial divides of our city. 

Our streets are dominated by cars, as in many cities around the world, but this infrastructure was also planned and built to divide communities racially, economically and spatially during Apartheid, a period of legislated and enforced division and exclusion. By transforming these physical divides, we create spaces for healing, reparation and connection.

Our organisation leads a movement of citizens who want the same outcome. Over 23 open streets days and activations, we have grown to a volunteer core of over 500 people who gladly support us. It is in this diverse group that reparation and cohesion begins. We are serious about fun and serious about transforming public space. 

Our city knows what Open Streets can do. Our goal is to evolve to training more teams to do what we do, so that our volunteers can be a permanent part of the organisation and host open streets days in their own neighbourhoods. Our goal is to make positive change lasting and permanent. 

Open Streets Cape Town is an advocacy and spatial transformation organisation. We drive a movement supported by active citizens, community based organisations and local government in the shared belief that streets can be so much more than what they are. 

Cape Town is arguably the worlds most divided city with a Geni coefficient score of 0.63 according to the World Bank in 2015. If you live here, you will understand that this score is both correct and meaningless. Cape Town is spatially and socially divided in a way that cannot be explained in any other way than by experience. 

Open Streets Cape Town aims provides the alternative experience. By leading in creating hope and social cohesion in the following ways: 

• We create definitive demonstration projects that bring together the communities and stakeholders that can create permanent change. 
• We reveal and unlock processes of change, shape policy and build relationships to support community involvement. 
• We create and support public space transformation to not only demonstrate that alternatives are possible, but we create a widening market for transformed streets and public space for communities. 
• We develop skills and support community change agents to work in transforming space in hyperlocal conditions.

What is the secret sauce? 

There are wonderful examples of closing streets to traffic and increasing the amount of public space available for street out-spill cafes and for people to ride bicycles. That's what we may appear to do. 

It's not how we measure ourselves.  

All our work happens before the day. The "innovation" is that social cohesion in public space is the outcome of very strategic working together in communities, with local stakeholders and government to create ownership and belonging well before any event. We embody the open streets ethos in every meeting and planning session. We create a microcosm of safe and inclusive places to discuss crime prevention, to up-skill informal traders, to connect government leaders with local activists, to gather school groups, to train volunteers.. all of these training and planning sessions set the tone and the social contract for street. 

We are a neutral, positive, hopeful, implementation-based catalyst in communities. We bridge many divides that play out on a street or community space. The healing, finding of common ground and common purpose is forged by us before an event. Communities need this style of mediation and cohesion. Streets are a theatre to express this reparation. 

Simply put, as a nation, we cannot survive, let alone thrive if we do not embrace and understand diversity. South Africa has emerged from complete legislated segregation and carries huge expectation to be a global leader and example in bringing together diversity. 

This is not a natural process, or an equilibrium we will come to if we wait long enough. Rising poverty, reduced and contested resources and political conflict is fuelling an opposite response. Not just in South Africa, but in nations around the world. A withdrawal from diversity and gathering towards same seems more the norm. Sadly. 

We really hold true to creating new public space experiences that allow for participants to feel welcome and hopeful. This is where contact theory comes into play. When you are with or near people not like you, but share a positive and memorable moment, it changes perception and breaks down preconceived prejudice. Children often lead the way, which is why we focus on making youth feel most welcome. 

There are very few organisations doing this with intent. There are very few spaces that can hold these moments. 

We intentionally make spaces to intentionally bring people together.