The two cities have been historically entangled and drawn together since Amsterdam became the centre of mercantile trade with the east through the establishment Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or simply VOC). The VOC sent van Riebeeck to the Cape in 1652 to set up a halfway station for ships travelling to the Dutch East Indies became the centre of a Dutch colony ruled by the VOC. Layers of Dutch traditions, skills, texts and language (which became Afrikaans – today an African language), norms, and materialities have become entangled with those of the indigenous people, the slaves and the colonial settlers (French Huguenots, Dutch and English) in Cape Town making it a diverse and multicultural place. Cape Town inherited Dutch architecture, city building techniques and ways  of reclaiming land from the sea. Heerengracht and Buitengracht streets are today a legacy of a canalised system of water provision modelled on Amsterdam.

Despite the British taking over the Cape as a colony, increasing the levels of discrimination and repression that had emerged during the Dutch administration; the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910; and the ushering of apartheid rule in the early fifties, the government of the Netherlands continued to view ‘Netherlands as the mother’ and South Africa as the ‘grown up daughter’ never fully agreeing to apply full sanctions to the apartheid regime. However, an intensive anti-apartheid campaign was mounted by many civil society organisations in the Netherlands including Amsterdam contributing to the international economic, cultural and sports boycotts by the 1980s. In 1989 Amsterdam pronounced itself as an ‘anti-apartheid city’. It was inAmsterdam's Dam Square that thousands of anti-apartheid activists celebrated the momentous occasion of Mandela’s release, and four months later, Nelson Mandela appeared in Leidseplein cheered on by 20 000 people, to thank the Netherlands for their support.

Since 1994, the two cities again have become ‘drawn together’ again through economic, tourism, academic and technological connections - there is a direct KLM flight that gets you from Amsterdam to Cape Town on the same day! Today, both cities are noted as being centres of design and the foci of cultural capital: Amsterdam is the digital design capital of Europe, while Cape Town was nominated the 2014 World Design Capital. From their joint platform of an entangled history, would it be theoretically fruitful to look at the configuration of elements and different contextual factors which have led to the emergence of this economic sector in both cities and to explore the relations between them? Could this be a new way of ‘bringing these cities together’? Are there flows and ‘circulations’ of ideas, discourses and urban design imaginaries that move between Amsterdam and Cape Town? It could be a worthwhile project to start a new conversation between Amsterdam and Cape Town to understand the emergence of the creative industries in both cities and what the multi-directional connections and ‘networks of influence and collaboration’ between these cities might be! 

Dianne Scott

Dianne Scott is Professor in Population and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She has visited the Centre for Urban Studies mid December to provide a lecture on 'Urban governance configurations: an analytical framework for advancing sustainable cities in Africa' in the Urban Studies Lecture Series. She has a research interest in the field of environmental governance, environmental politics and sustainable urban development, with a particular focus on South Africa and KwaZulu-Natal.