February mornings in Cape Town’s city bowl are quiet and dewless, the mountain still radiating yesterday’s heat.
But if you get up early enough you can still get a couple of hours of exercise before the torpor of the day sets in. You might stay in ward 57, riding your mountain bike up through the cobbled streets of the Bo-Kaap on to Signal Hill, before cutting across the blackened slopes of Table Mountain to the Queen’s Block House.
There you can rest beside a 19th-century gun emplacement and smugly survey a sweep of less fortunate boroughs, from Bishop’s Court to Bishop Lavis spread out far below. On your way home, you can pop in at a local deli, where you might bump into Pallo Jordan on a croissant run, or Christina Storm on her third latte.
Then, if you are sensible enough to work in town, you can get home, shower, and make the five-minute trek to your office without risk of being late.
If you believe in Californian virtues like “quality of life”, there is nowhere in South Africa quite like ward 57 to pursue them — if you have the money.
The heart of the ward is the central business district, where the creeping decay of the late 1990s has all but disappeared, vaporised in the white heat of the property boom.
A few pockets of grime remain — particularly just east of Parliament — but the Cape Town Partnership and its city improvement district initiatives set in motion the redevelopment of the downtown area just in time for the property market to begin its long upswing.
Residential conversions in high-rise buildings get much of the attention, but businesses have also been steadily moving back from the suburbs, and retailers poking their heads out of the shopping malls. It may not be a 24-hour city just yet, but Cape Town certainly has an 18-hour day.
The same clean-up programme that has made life easier for business, tourists and more affluent residents has made the central city and its surroundings a lot tougher for homeless people, street kids and the marginally employed.
One would like to think that the increased investment and job creation that comes with city improvement more than offsets that impact, but there is no question that the vulnerable residents have a harder time.
A less obvious front in the class war has also opened up as property values from central town to the fringes of Table Mountain National Park have grown.
In the rapidly gentrifying Bo- Kaap, anxiety persists around what some residents see as the invasion of a Muslim community by affluent young whites and foreigners. It doesn’t help when the new crowd of photographers, designers and film industry types complain that the call to prayer is interrupting their beauty sleep, or send the smell of frying bacon wafting down the Friday streets.
On the other hand, high property prices are enabling working-class families to convert their housing equity into hitherto unimaginable sums of cash. The challenge for the city is how to maintain the diversity of the ward as the temptation of easy cash from developers hovers over just about every piece of private and public land.
And it isn’t just a matter of race. Disa Place old age home in the Gardens is being shut down, and its immensely valuable land sold off. The old and frail are out, the young and glossy are in, which is a loss in a ward with an oversupply of gilded youth.
As you move higher up the slopes of Table Mountain, of course, the youth give way to chic middle age. The price of admission increases with altitude between Vredehoek (model bosses), Tamboerskloof (media types), Oranjezicht (lawyers) and at the apex, Higgovale (Germans). The question — as it is in London, and Vancouver and Sydney — is how to make room for the students, nurses, cleaners we need to keep it all working as well as it does.
It may be the most liveable ward in the country, once you have secured your patch of it, but we do worry. Will the fire sweep down from the mountain and incinerate our art collections? Will an oversupply of new flats in the central business district destroy the rental market? Which one of four schools within walking distance of my house is best? Will the muggers that invaded the lower slopes of our mountain migrate when the tourists leave?
These are probably important things to talk about at the end of a February day, but I am heading out for a drink. It is obscenely hot, the bright young things are out in force, and there is a great little bar just down the road, with a gorgeous view from the terrace.