Awakening the sleeping giant – back to our cities in the roaring 20s

As Covid-19 turns endemic, we have witnessed the ebb and flow return to occupying our metropolitan spaces with every subsequent wave, approaching work, entertainment and life anew. We take stock of what has changed in our major cities, the hives of national activity, in the two years to date since we vacated them; how we as society have changed and how audaciously we could rebuild.

March marks exactly two years since we vacated our central business districts, offices, restaurants, cinemas, sports fields and highways en masse, in response to the National State of Disaster curfews and restrictions put in place to protect us from the spread of Covid-19.

As an essential worker and due to the starting time of my show, Breakfast with Refilwe Moloto, I was exempt from the lockdown to navigate the eerie, silent streets of Cape Town before dawn every day. In those early hours I could never have imagined my city to be a literal ghost town: formal desk workers withdrew; semi-formal sofa staff and a growing migration of informal street vendors and vulnerable rough-sleepers began populating the high streets of surrounding neighbourhoods in the hope of catching the generosity of someone buying essentials, or exercising in the mandated few hours government would allow. Remember those days?

A DIFFERENT APPROACH

The more formal or infrastructurally supported your work (if you could keep it), the more you retreated home. For those less fortunate, or essential to the shift economy and health system, you were thrust further and more harshly into the exterior. An already dichotomous city centre saw the crocodile jaws of inequality yawn into a chasm as tent cities within a city were established in recreational fields, under bridges and alongside highways; and untenable financial and personal loss burdened so many of us, even those who managed to retain their formal physical structures.

Activity has since all but normalised. As lockdown restrictions have eased and we trust that we are firmly out of the fourth wave of the pandemic, by no means can we claim this is a return to ‘business as usual’. Even with the hope of a post-pandemic era on the horizon, after the greatest interruption to global activity since the last world war, nothing is, or can ever be the same, least of all our approach to rebuilding.