Wherever the circles of car infrastructures have been drawn onto the map of the city, invisible fortress walls have arisen. Disguised as arteries conveying essential life blood – but still as inaccessible as the stone walls that once guarded the town – the volatile nature of circular traffic belts surrounding a city makes them a site of contradictions. Decisive circular traffic interventions inserted into the periphery of the historical core of a city not only separate the old and the new, but equally the meaningful and the mundane. Moreover, the concept of a circular route on the edge of the old town holds a different interpretation on the European continent than in the British Isles, and especially in the southern African context. The numerous settlements under the influence of the Anglosphere have different interpretations to the development and design of the ring road concept. In the South African urban context, several variations of the ring road exist – and in the capital city, Pretoria, it is both the site of decisive interventions and abrupt isolation. What makes this intervention unique compared to its counterparts in Europe and Britain?
This paper investigates the southern African interpretation of the non-navigable ring road as an imported planning model. In 1948, the town planners and the national government approved the Pretoria Traffic Plan, acting on the recommendation from the report published by the British town planner, Sir William Holford, and subsequently set about the dedicated goal of modernising the capital city. One of the principal recommendations of this report stipulated the regulation of traffic through the city, which proposed the removal of vehicular traffic from the historical city centre in favour of a more complex alternative system to the existing road network of Pretoria. This ring road underwent several variations, but its contradictory effect forever changed the urban tissue – and thus became both the site of linkages and segregation.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/archandurb.2024.58.3-4.12
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License