summary

The City has released a Draft Development Concept (May 2026) to permanently dispose of approximately 65 to 74 hectares of well-located public land currently leased by the King David Mowbray Golf Course and adjacent sports facilities. The vision is to build a massive mixed-use precinct consisting of around 8,600 residential homes (with a mandate that at least 30% be social/affordable housing) and 75,000 square meters of commercial, retail, and civic space.

Right now, the City is running two public participation processes concurrently until Monday, 6 July 2026:

1. 1. A voluntary public engagement on the Draft Development Concept layout itself.
   2. A statutory comment period regarding the Permanent Asset Disposal under the Municipal Asset Transfer Regulations (MATR).

In standard urban planning, critical technical proofs—such as Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), Heritage Impact Assessments (HIAs), Traffic Impact Assessments (TIAs), and water/sewer utility capacity confirmations—are conducted before land-use changes are set in stone.

In this campaign, the City’s official documents explicitly list all of these critical assessments as “future work” to be conducted after the public has already voted on and approved the permanent disposal of the land. This means residents are being forced to sign off on an irreversible transfer of public property before any objective scientific evidence exists to prove the local environment and utility networks can handle it.

During the initial public engagement round in 2025, the community legally challenged the City because its original authorizing mandate from October 2024 (Resolution C28/10/24) completely failed to cover “Portion B”—which contains the actual golf course footprint.

Instead of halting the current participation window to rectify the oversight transparently, the City Council passed a fresh resolution (C39/05/26) on 27 May 2026—the day before this public round officially launched. Under the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (PAJA), changing the statutory and legal baseline behind closed doors mid-stream or directly at the launch of a public round raises severe questions about procedural fairness and administrative integrity.

The City has optimised the promotional materials for the draft concept but has withheld the baseline municipal data required to evaluate its reality. Essential documents—such as the land’s professional Valuation Report, the MATR Regulation 7 Feasibility Study (which legally defines whether the city needs this land for municipal services), and technical engineering data—have not been published for general access.

Formal applications under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) have been officially served to four separate City directorates. These include urgent applications requiring the City to grant access to the hidden valuation, feasibility, traffic, and wastewater reports by 20 June 2026.

This timeline means that for the first few weeks of the public participation period, citizens are effectively being forced to comment in an informational blackout.

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is an urban planning strategy that clusters high-density housing and commercial activities around major public transport hubs (like train stations or Bus Rapid Transit lines) to ensure residents do not have to rely on private cars, thereby mitigating traffic congestion.

The entire viability of the City’s high-density model for this site relies on a proposed new passenger rail station built to service the 8,600 new households. However, a formal technical analysis of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) reveals that across three consecutive Corporate Plans—including the most recently published plan on 30 March 2026—there is absolutely no mention, no budgetary allocation, and no operational planning for a new station at this location.

Without this non-existent train station, thousands of new commuters will be forced onto the roads, paralyzing the surrounding M5, N2, and local Pinelands and Mowbray networks.

That is currently unproven. The sewage and wastewater generated by the proposed precinct is slated to route directly into the Athlone Wastewater Treatment Works (WWTW). According to the official 2022 Green Drop audit, this facility already suffers from deep operational compliance challenges and severe capacity strain.

By pushing “sewer-capacity confirmation” to a future phase, the City is bypassing engineering logic. It is mathematically irresponsible to approve a land disposal principle before obtaining written, empirical confirmation that the treatment facilities can handle the structural load without risking a localised infrastructure collapse or public health crisis.

The King David Mowbray Golf Course is situated directly within a highly sensitive ecological framework and actively intersects the recognized flood paths of the Black River. Large open green spaces and golf courses function as natural flood retention basins during Cape Town’s severe winter storm cycles.

Paving over this land with commercial space and high-density housing blocks will dramatically reduce permeable soil, increasing the volume and speed of stormwater runoff. Approving the land disposal before completing a comprehensive, independent Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) leaves the surrounding residential areas of Pinelands and Mowbray vulnerable to unprecedented flooding risks.

Absolutely not. The broader community and civic organizations widely recognize the urgent necessity for spatial transformation and well-located affordable housing in Cape Town.

The civic opposition is centred entirely on procedural safety and infrastructure capability. Pushing through spatial transformation via a compromised administrative process that relies on hidden data, unbudgeted train stations, and an overloaded sewage system is a disservice to both current residents and the future families who are being promised well-located homes. True spatial justice requires robust infrastructure that is legally verified before a public asset is surrendered.

Under South African administrative law, government directorates and municipal councils are legally permitted to count a petition—regardless of whether it contains 500 or 50,000 signatures—as a single, symbolic submission. We send each and every public comment as an individual submission.

Dear South Africa is a legally recognized public participation platform, not a petition site. Every single comment submitted through this portal is automatically structured, verified, and sent to the City of Cape Town as an individual statutory submission.

The City is legally compelled by the Constitution and PAJA to read, process, and independently archive every single submission received through our platform. Furthermore, the verified data trail we generate forms an unassailable legal record that can be used in a High Court review should civil society need to challenge the validity of the City’s eventual decision.