Urban leisure and tourism-led redevelopment frontiers in central Cape Town since the 1990s

In the Global North, urban redevelopment through leisure and tourism interventions has been a keenly investigated research interface. These types of interventions, whether public, private, or in various combinations, have often led to the dramatic and extensive reworking of central city areas. Less attention has been focused on cities in the Global South – particularly Africa – that provide examples of how these processes of urban change manifest in this context. This investigation tracks the development of leisure and tourism-led interventions as central to the redevelopment of central Cape Town. It is shown how leisure and tourism development nodes developed, which in time consolidated into leisure and tourism urban redevelopment frontiers that have radically reworked Cape Town\u27s central business district along with adjacent neighbourhoods. It is shown that urban redevelopment has come to spill over to ever larger parts of central Cape Town and (if not governed with care) risks rendering vast parts of the central city effectively exclusionary to most of the Cape Town population. On the whole, this investigation serves as a further instance to be heeded by other cities around the globe that aim to deploy leisure and tourism-led interventions as central or part of their central city redevelopment initiatives