About

Our Mission

For more than 25 years I have been closely involved in the conceptualisation, design, construction and management of indoor and outdoor entertainment, retail, urban and landscape developments with some of the Cape’s leading private and commercial institutional developers and their consultants.

These include projects such as:

Extraordinary Experiences

  • Monex Developments Tygervalley Centre from its initial development through to Phase 4 extensions;
  • Rabie Properties residential developments such as Dolphin Beach, Strand Golf Course and many others;
  • Metropolitan Life,  Sanlam and Old Mutual Properties commercial and office park developments
  • V&A waterfront development
  • Monex’s Century City, the largest mixed used development in the Cape where I worked closely with Martin Wragge, Monex Design and an extended professional team to design and build Century Cities core structure including the environmental wetlands of Intaka Island, the Century City Canal water recycling and drainage system, Ratanga Junction Theme Park and Canal Walk Shopping Centre.

In all of these developments I was able, in retrospect, to observe the effects of “good” versus “bad” location, structure and configuration design decisions: e.g. the effect of the larger scale developments to dramatically alter the structure of the city and its urban balance, large developments like Tygervalley “killed” the retail “high streets “of Bellville and Durbanville for many years.

With the success of the development came a rapid increase in property values and those with foresight or luck positioned smaller developments clustered round this new major attractor and caused an escalation in car based traffic problems and segregation of pedestrian, public and private transport and the massive increase in roads and freeways, contributed to further urban sprawl.

The resulting agglomeration of building enclaves each with its own segregated “private” footprint results in spatially simplistic tree structure and a complete lack of the urban quality that is so prized in the older European cities we love to visit and walk around in.

Even larger scale “Mega-attractor” developments such as Century City strove to become complete “”cities” in themselves in order to control the entire property cycle so that the prime lands along the N1 would be held open till last when property values will have multiplied many times over and the return on investment would be commensurate with the large investment in money  (Billions) and time (15 -20 years.)