GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
Unite for Change Leadership council member and GOOD member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament
18 October 2025
The GOOD Party extends heartfelt condolences to the families who lost loved ones and to the communities living under constant siege of violence. Reports of yet another mass shooting in Philippi on Friday night, claiming seven lives, confirm that many communities on the Cape Flats are living in what can only be described as a war zone. Violent crime and gang warfare continue to claim lives indiscriminately, leaving families traumatised and neighbourhoods terrorised.
The natural instinct is to blame the South African Police Service for failing to keep communities safe, and indeed, the problems in our policing system are undeniable. But policing alone will never end this crisis. We must confront the litany of interrelated social and built-environment conditions that fuel violence and crime. High unemployment and poverty, endemic in these communities, are major factors. But equally destructive is the extreme overcrowding and substandard living conditions that define many Cape Flats neighbourhoods.
It is deeply concerning that the Mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, continues to deny the reality and legacy of spatial apartheid, dismissing it as political propaganda. Spatial apartheid was not a myth; it was a deliberate system of social engineering that inflicted intolerable pain and indignity, forcibly removing people of colour from well-located areas and dumping them into underdeveloped, underserved townships. These spatial injustices created and entrenched the very conditions of inequality and violence we witness today.
A crisis born of social engineering and underdeveloped built environments demands a comprehensive social and spatial redress plan, not denialism and superficial urban policies.
The City’s approach, through its proposed Planning By-Law Amendments that incentivise further densification in already overcrowded areas, is fundamentally misguided. Increasing densities in communities already burdened by poverty, inadequate services, and violence is not progressive planning, it is deepening despair.
Mayor Hill-Lewis’s boast that densification is a ground-breaking solution ignores the human consequences of unmanaged urban stress. Instead of creating solutions, he is outsourcing the City’s responsibility to provide affordable, dignified housing to communities that already bear the heaviest burdens of density, deprivation, and crime.
Mayor Hill-Lewis is building a time bomb and when it explodes, it will not spare anyone.