The City of Cape Town will host a series of public meetings in April 2012 to guide the process of renaming almost a hundred “NY” street names.

This proposal served before the City’s Naming Committee yesterday, 15 February 2012. The committee is investigating a series of proposed name changes for streets and roads in Cape Town, under chairmanship of the Mayoral Committee Member for Transport, Roads and Stormwater, Councillor Brett Herron.

“No one disputes the need to change the “NY” (‘Native Yard’) street names which are widely perceived to be offensive. This committee is now recommending that a public participation process start in April as part of the Freedom Day celebrations with the aim of concluding by December 2012,” said Councillor Herron. The proposal will be sent to Council.

The previous City administration started the renaming process under an advisory panel then chaired by well-known academic Rhoda Kadalie. The Khadalie panel had also received a number of suggested name changes for “NY” streets, but these were not all dealt with at the time.

“Our suggested approach for the public participation process is to divide Gugulethu into smaller groups, and to give communities ample opportunity to express themselves on the suggestions. If someone is affected by a name change, they must have their voices heard. A total of 99 proposed name changes are relevant here,” said Councillor Herron.

The public participation process will be run alongside and in co-operation with the private “Name Your Hood” initiative. The City believes that it would make sense to join forces with this initiative, as both processes deal with the same question. All new name suggestions will be considered, alongside those not dealt with previously by the Khadalie panel.

The Naming Committee also agreed to convene a workshop in the coming weeks, at which it would interrogate the existing Naming Policy (adopted by Council in December 2010) to determine whether any changes to this policy were necessary.

The Naming Committee was constituted by Council on 26 October 2011 in terms of Section 80 of the Structures Act. It comprises five representatives from the Democratic Alliance and two Councillors from the African National Congress under the chairmanship of Councillor Brett Herron.