Crossing The Line dialogue asks: Who is Cape Town really working for? - IOL

From left to right: Ryland Fisher, Henriette Abrahams, Buhle Booi, Nomfundo Walaza, and Dr Alicia English (partially visible on the far right).

In a political climate where voices of division seem to grow louder by the day, one Cape Town-based initiative is determined to create space for ordinary citizens to be heard — not as party representatives, but as people who simply want their city to work better.

Crossing the Line, a podcast and dialogue series founded by veteran journalist and community organiser Ryland Fisher, is building a platform where politics is left at the door and the focus is squarely on the lived experiences of Capetonians.

The latest dialogue, held ahead of local government elections, tackled a deceptively simple question: Does the city work for you?

On Wednesday, September 9, 2026, residents, activists, and community organisers gathered at Bertha House in Mowbray, Cape Town for the first Crossing The Line Dialogue.  

Ryland Fisher welcomes the audience to the first edition of Crossing the Line.

Ryland Fisher, who had previously hosted 25 podcasts, guided the evening. He assured attendees that themed dialogue evenings would continue throughout the year.

Fisher, the host of the Crossing The Line podcast, opened by explaining the name. He said the name is intended to challenge physical and social boundaries created by apartheid and to encourage people to cross the lines that still separate them.

The format was deliberately participatory: the audience spoke first, and the invited panellists listened and responded.

The panel brought together four people whose work connects Cape Town’s public life to community experience: Henriette Abrahams, chairperson of the Bonteheuwel Development Forum; Buhle Booi, head of Political Organising and Campaigns at Ndifuna Ukwazi; Nomfundo Walaza, a clinical psychologist and human-rights activist; and Dr Alicia English, a journalist, publisher and social entrepreneur.

The first challenge came from an audience member who introduced herself as an NGO consultant. The wording of the question, Does the City Work for You? she said, mattered.

When the city claims to serve everyone, who exactly is the “you” in “Does the city work for you?” The answer, she suggested, changes according to where a person lives, works, and belongs in the City of Two Tales. An activist from Manenberg followed, arguing that people should be central to decisions that affect them. Public participation, the activist said, is weakened when administrative systems and political decision-making become indistinguishable, leaving residents outside decisions made in their name.An audience member who identified themselves as an entrepreneur in the travel sector described Cape Town as 'a Tale of Two Cities'. One Cape Town is celebrated as beautiful, progressive and well run, the speaker said, while another is pushed towards deteriorating services and neglect beyond the city centre. 

Another audience member asked whether the city had a reliable, data-driven way to measure how it was working. Population, climate, water, energy, education and economic data would all be needed, they argued, to understand a city as complex and changing. They referred to the book Data as a Compass and asked whether Cape Town had a compass of its own.

A further audience contributor, who said they had previously gathered data for the South African Cities Network, agreed that data existed but warned that older information could not by itself describe the present city.

Another participant responded that residents could also read the city with their own eyes: litter, poor housing, unemployment, children out of school, and run-down schools were visible evidence.

The question that followed was whether any political party had built a culture of accountability.

Dr Alicia English, Mitchells Plain resident, journalist and entrepreneur.

Housing brought the debate closer to household finances. An audience member questioned the use of “affordable” for homes priced beyond the reach of people in lower-paid call-centre and administrative jobs.

The speaker also worried that digital nomads and rising demand in housing are pushing prices higher, and asked whether the responsibility lay with the city, the province or the national government.

Dr English answered by making the question personal. “The answer to that question is really you, wherever you might find yourself,” she said. Drawing on her experience of working with working-class communities, she described families who struggle to keep electricity on between social-grant payments and the next pay day.

She questioned whether property valuations, and the municipal charges linked to them, adequately reflect the history and circumstances of marginalised neighbourhoods. English also challenged the way data is selected.

A city may publish figures about tourism, business growth or sector performance, she said, while residents still ask where the current data is on hunger, children out of school, gender-based violence, addiction and mental-health distress.

Statistics, in her view, must be tested against what people experience in their streets and homes.

Walaza returned to the danger of hiding behind numbers. People can “escape into numbers when we can’t actually answer the things we see every day”, she said. She questioned the city’s reputation for being among the 'best run' and asked what “best” means when residents are priced out of neighbourhoods where they grew up, went to school and want to remain.

Gentrification, she argued, has pushed people towards the periphery while the city continues to market itself as a success story.

Buble Booi speaks to the audience. He is the Head of Political Organising and Campaigns at Ndifuna Ukwazi, an NGO which works to broaden access to well-located and affordable housing. He grew up in Cape Town and began his activism at Equal Education.

With local government elections scheduled for November 4, 2026, Walaza said residents also had to ask how leaders could be held accountable if they did not attend the spaces where residents were speaking.

Accountability, she said, required more than demanding action from government; it also required residents to show up and hold one another to account.

Booi placed the housing question in Cape Town’s longer history. He described a city still shaped by apartheid’s spatial legacy and spoke about the workers who leave the outskirts before sunrise, travel into the city to sell their labour, and may wait until evening to return home.

"We live in a post-apartheid, apartheid city,” he said, using the contradiction to describe a system whose formal past has ended while its geography continues to organise opportunity and exclusion.

"If you do not have money in this city, the city does not work for you.” He called for public land to be used to achieve deeper affordability and for social housing to be treated as a public good rather than a commodity.

Abrahams extended the argument to budgets and the quality of public information. She said that data "must show not only economic activity but also the conditions that keep families poor."

Her questions were insistently concrete: where is the current data on children out of school, hunger, gender-based violence, addiction, mental health and the daily pressures facing township residents?

The wider discussion also returned to poverty-wage work and the prospects of young people who cannot afford homes.

Audience members came out in full force for the evening's discussion.

The discussion eventually turned from diagnosis to responsibility. Fisher asked what residents could do to make the city one in which everyone could live with dignity.

Participants spoke about volunteerism, organising street by street, using municipal reporting channels, building non-partisan community structures and creating ways for younger people to take part. One participant argued that social activism had to be rebuilt alongside volunteer work; another said solidarity had to cross neighbourhood, racial and generational lines.

The closing exchange returned to the power of community. Participants called for responsibility and effective leadership, urged residents to use their own voices and networks, and rejected the idea that people should ask permission to demand services.

The dialogue did not produce a single answer to whether Cape Town works for its residents. It did something more useful for a first edition: it made the question harder to evade. The city was discussed through budgets and data, but also through the queue for a taxi, the price of a home, the condition of a street and the distance between a neighbourhood and the people who make decisions about it.

Crossing The Line, as the speakers suggested, begins when those experiences are treated as part of the city’s public record.