Cape Town: The Good and Bad of Natural Factors

Cape Town's city center is a crescent shaped waterfront that climbs the gentle slopes at the bottom of table mountain, which creates a natural bowl, protected on all sides with extensive waterfront. That's about as ideal a natural location for a city as it gets: the mountain provides protection and natural beauty, springs provide natural fresh water from the mountain, development is protected from high seas (and sea level rise, for the most part) by the slope up to the mountain, and the waterfront seems disproportionately extensive - a huge economic boon. So while natural factors can provide so much, they can also be used for ill, as they long were in Cape Town during South Africa's Apartheid era. From 1946 to 1994, insidious laws separated people by skin color for the purpose of economic and educational opportunity, and natural factors were used to segregate people physically. White people got to live in the city center, black and colored were relegated to the low-lying flats on the far side of the mountain where they were far from jobs and in flood-prone lands. The implications of this kind of segregation - for economic opportunity, education, access to jobs and services - are a truly evil kind of structural violence that was perpetrated on people for nearly 50 years, and has deeply-ingrained repercussions today.