Under the streets of central Cape Town, the forgotten waters of the city’s ancient springs and rivers currently flow out to sea. However, exciting plans are underway to restore this life-giving water and bring new life to the city. Not only is the water from these artesian springs of ecological importance, but it has historic and symbolic meaning which could enrich the future heritage fabric and tourism potential of the city.

Water from the past to flow into future fision

When South Africa was awarded the right to host the FIFA World Cup™ event in 2006, the City’s 2010 Project Team was tasked to provide a world-class, multi-purpose stadium in an urban park context and ensure maximum post-legacy (after-event) benefits for the public.

For this purpose, 105 hectares (ha) of Green Point Common was identified and set aside. But with approximately 64 ha requiring landscaping, the team recognised at an early stage the critical necessity of water for irrigation.

In the past, scarce domestic water was used to irrigate the common – which was always a risk during dryer periods when water restrictions are imposed. This, coupled with an ever-increasing demand for water elsewhere as well as a need to maintain and uphold the City’s investment in the Green Point Common, called for viable alternatives for an irrigation supply.

“It was bought to our attention by our Water and Stormwater colleagues that water from the city’s springs was flowing freely out to sea,” explains Francois van Niekerk, 2010 Technical Project Manager.
“It was obvious to us that this was our solution, but we still needed to conduct a feasibility study to ensure that our facts and figures were 100% correct.”

The study, conducted by water specialist, David Crombie of Arcus Gibb Consultants, examined other alternatives such as desalination plants, borehole water, grey water treatment and even the continued use of potable water. The decisive factors for the study were the costs to implement the solution chosen (initial and running), the yield (kℓ/year and the R/ kℓ), the time to implement the solution and environmental issues. “During this time the need to use a small portion of the water as a feature, and to reinstate and demonstrate some of the original water infrastructure heritage, was brought to our attention by the Oranjezicht Heritage Society.”

When investigating the option of the Oranjezicht spring water, Crombie found a year-round flow of water in excess of 40 ℓ/s, which is a rate of flow more than sufficient to meet the annual 600 kℓ irrigation needs of the Common, the Stadium, the Metropolitan Golf Course and Mouille Point Beachfront, as well as the need identified by the Oranjezicht Heritage Society. “And that’s a conservative estimate,” adds van Niekerk, “which can be supplied fairly quickly and at a third of the cost of potable water.”

Sadly, sewerage seepage from urban development above the springs compromised the potability of the spring water and led to the city making a decision in the early ‘90s to divert the water away from domestic consumption and into the sea.

But Crombie explains, “It’s still perfectly suitable for secondary uses such as irrigation. By diverting existing storm water pipes under the streets, the spring water can be conveyed underground, to emerge as a primary water source within the new Green Point Park. So it’s a great opportunity for the city to make practical use of this historic water.”

Greening the present

Landscape architect and environmental planner, Johan van Papendorp of OvP Asscociates has been tasked with landscaping the Green Point Common and various major elements within the project. He explains, “Having freely available spring water gave us the confidence to increase the points of water features within the park.”

Van Papendorp is excited about this project. “For decades, activities on the Green Point Common have been sports-related and almost (quite) exclusive,” he asserts. “There was nothing ‘public’ about the place. There’ve been plans as far back as 20 years ago to develop the area, to re-introduce the public back into the common, but there was never sufficient will or money to implement them. So amongst others things, this World Cup event has acted as an opportunity for local government to restructure the inner-city and to leverage available funding for maximum public benefit.”

The 2010 Project Team and Van Papendorp’s big-picture concept links together a series of the green spaces throughout the city, “much like the US city of Boston’s ‘green necklace’,” he adds, to culminate in a FIFA Fan Mile stretching along Somerset Road to the Stadium.

The actual Green Point Park, a 12,5 ha area within the Common, will be a public access space for recreation and social interaction within a peaceful, green context. Van Papendorp explains that water from the historic artesian springs will be introduced into the park in ways that create gathering spaces where people can see, hear, touch and be educated about the water.

Channels and spillways will feed into low-lying ponds, which in turn will feed into a Biodiversity garden and a Wetlands garden. “There’s a strong focus on ecological awareness, sustainable practices and environmental interdependence. It’s all about learning to live lightly on the earth and there’s just no way we could’ve justified what we have created, if we’d been restricted to using only domestic water.

“In fact,” Van Papendorp continues, “the Biodiversity show garden we’ve created has stirred quite a lot of interest and has been chosen to host the opening of the International Organisation of Biodiversity on World Biodiversity Day, 22 May, 2010, which will coincide with the official opening of the Park.

It’s Crombie though, who ends with a quiet philosophical comment, when he describes an old photo he came across. “Long ago, the winter rains would turn Green Point Common into a low-lying vlei, and an old photograph, taken around the 1900s, showed people actually yachting on the Common. Now, over a hundred years later, people will be able to come and sail model yachts on these spring water ponds. It’s lovely to know that somewhere, some old history has been restored, even if it’s in the smallest of ways.”

Forgotten waters of the past

“I love the idea that Cape Town’s spring water is being used to irrigate Green Point Common and its surrounds, but that’s just a fraction of the story,” says Caron Von Zeil, of the Oranjezicht Heritage Society and founder of Reclaim Camissa, a public benefit organisation working in conjunction with the City, Cape Town Partnership (CCID) and other key Cape Town groups.

The story that she refers to is the story of the beginning of Cape Town itself.

In the 1650s, when European settlers where looking to establish a halfway station for the lucrative shipping routes between Europe and the East Indies, it was the existence of fresh water, issuing cleanly from the slopes of Table Mountain, that ultimately determined the site of present day Cape Town.

This water source, a series of rivers and springs flowing into the Table Bay basin, was originally known as camissa in the Khoisan tongue, ‘the place of sweet waters.’

Originating in moisture-laden fronts to sweep in from the Atlantic and form dense clouds pouring over the mountain’s edge, the water dripped and seeped slowly through sandstone and fynbos, to finally emerge from the ground, cold and life-giving.

For centuries, this water was the life blood of the old city bowl, defining its culture, history and even its urban layout. It flowed from the mountain noisily through mills and slave washhouses, gurgled along ‘leiwaters’ to irrigate the Company’s Gardens, splashed from public ‘zwaai’ pumps and fountains, and flowed along open canals or ‘graachts’ to finally empty into the sea.

It replenished ship supplies, irrigated fresh produce for crews, powered mills and supplied the domestic needs of the community.

But gradually the increasing water demands brought about conflict over usage, bitter disputes over access rights and grievances with waste disposal.

In time, water had to be piped in from elsewhere, the zwaai pumps were dismantled, the open graachts were closed over to disappear under paved streets, and in 1960 the last of the city’s ‘molen’ or mills was demolished.
It seemed that the very life blood of central Cape Town went underground, to disappear quietly from its daily life. And today, only echoes of this water can be heard in street names such as Mill Street, Heerengracht and Buitengracht.

Reclaiming the place of sweet waters

Von Zeil is clearly passionate about water, and in particular the waters of central Cape Town, “But sadly the streams and rivers of central Cape Town have become lost in today’s urban fabric, and with it so much of the city’s history and culture has been lost,” she says.

An example she refers to is that in Oranjezicht, lies a small field of 13 artesian springs, where water continues to bubble out of the ground, “as one of the most important sources of history in our country.”, ”Unfortunately, the field lies behind rusted locks, in a decaying park, closed to the public.”

From a historical aspect, the use of these springs was formalised in 1682 and a chamber to protect the Main Spring, the Stadtsfontein, was built in 1813. “These chambers are still standing, but only just,” Von Zeil remarks. “They’re in dire need of repair. Explaining the concept of civic hydrology, von Zeil refers to international examples such as Rome, Chengdu in China and Bellevue, USA. “At it’s most basic, civic hydrology means transforming a city’s storm water infrastructure through a sustainable water management system, so that citizens are engaged with their water, in ways that a conventional storm water infrastructure is unable to do.”

What this means in real terms is a ‘resurfacing’ of some the original watercourses within the urban fabric of Cape Town, in ways that are functional, renewable, sustainable and symbolic.

Walking the green pedestrian spine

Concepts currently under discussion within the key stakeholder groups include amongst other things, dockside markets at the ocean’s edge; water taxis to navigable canal connections; a series of linked walkways moving through the old city via a ‘green pedestrian spine’; re-instating the leiwater system to create walking routes that link the heart of lost heritage and cultural spaces; reservoirs and water sustainability parks which are functional, recreational and educational; a public water museum at the original spring in Oranjezicht; reinstatement of the old Platteklip mountain filtration plant and a washer-women cultural/water museum at the old ‘wasplatz’ or wash-houses found at the start of the Hoerikwagga Trail, leading up into the mountain.

Von Zeil points out why this project is remarkable, “Cape Town is utterly unique from an environmental aspect because it possesses a natural 6,5 km dual-water system (13 artesian springs and a mountain run-off river) which flows down through four distinct landscapes (natural, suburban, urban and industrial) each with their own layered remnants of history. But symbolically this micro-watercourse runs from Table Mountain, a potential World Heritage site and a declared natural wonder, to Robben Island, which is already a declared World Heritage site. And the story that lies between those two points is enormous. There really is nowhere else like it in the world.”

“Just imagine,” she adds, “if Cape Town’s spring and storm water was effectively managed above the ground, in a sustainable manner that met immediate and future needs, embraced the history of the city, restored a sense of culture, promoted heritage tourism and created job opportunities.”

Just imagine indeed, if Cape Town became again, the place of sweet waters.

Published with kind permission of Louise Tudor Jones.