Why the Green Point Track represents exclusion for Cape Town's runners

Professor Armand Bam

Cape Town has many symbols of aspiration. Few are as visible as the Green Point Athletics Track - a world-class facility positioned beneath the mountain, beside the stadium, and at the heart of one of the city’s most active running cultures.

But for many ordinary runners, the track has become something else entirely, a white elephant. A public sporting facility without meaningful public access is not an infrastructure success. It is performative development.

The frustration emerging from the running community is not merely about inconvenience. It is about a deeper question confronting South African cities: who are our public spaces really built for? Because sport infrastructure is never just about sport. It is about belonging, safety, accessibility, dignity, and community life. Cape Town often markets itself as an outdoor city. A healthy city. A globally competitive city. But a city cannot claim to value wellness while simultaneously making basic athletic participation difficult for ordinary residents.

For runners, tracks are not luxuries. They are critical training spaces. They reduce injury risk, create structured environments for youth development, support rehabilitation, and provide safer alternatives to running on dangerous roads. This is particularly important in a country where safety concerns increasingly shape who gets to exercise, where, and when. The irony is hard to ignore.

At a time when South Africa faces rising levels of lifestyle disease, growing mental health pressures, and increasing social fragmentation, accessible public sporting spaces should be expanding, not retreating behind gates, bureaucracy, or unclear usage systems. The issue also reveals something larger about urban planning in post-apartheid South Africa. We continue to build or maintain impressive infrastructure without adequately considering relational accessibility. In other words, access is treated as technical rather than lived. A facility can be physically present yet socially inaccessible.

This is where public institutions often fail communities. They measure existence rather than meaningful use. The running community’s criticism of Green Point Track as a “white elephant” reflects precisely this tension. A world-class facility that ordinary runners struggle to access ceases to function as public infrastructure in the democratic sense. It becomes symbolic architecture, impressive to photograph, disconnected from community life. And when communities feel excluded from public spaces, trust erodes.

The issue, then, is not necessarily who is using the facility, but whether the broader model of access reflects the needs of the public it was intended to serve. If ordinary runners, clubs, schools, and even competitive athletes regularly experience the space as inaccessible due to bookings, closures, or event scheduling, then the deeper question becomes whether the facility is being governed in a way that balances public value with operational use.

The issue is not necessarily about who gets priority access, but whether a public facility is functioning in a manner that meaningfully serves the broader community. If repeated event bookings and closures create an experience where ordinary runners struggle to access the space consistently, then the concern becomes one of governance, accessibility, and public value. Exclusion weakens the pipeline.

More importantly, exclusion weakens the social fabric that sport helps create. Running clubs, informal training groups, school athletes, pensioners walking for health, parents exercising with children - these are not secondary users of public sporting infrastructure. They are the lifeblood of it. There is also a deeply South African dimension to this conversation that cannot be ignored. Access to safe recreational space remains profoundly unequal in this country. Geography still determines opportunity. Affluent communities generally have better access to parks, sporting facilities, sidewalks, and wellness infrastructure than poorer communities. In that context, restricting access to one of the city’s premier public athletic spaces carries symbolic weight far beyond a track.

It raises uncomfortable questions about whose wellness matters most. Public facilities cannot operate as though community engagement is optional. If anything, community participation should sit at the centre of governance models around shared spaces. This means transparent communication around operating hours, clearer public booking systems, designated community-use periods, partnerships with local running clubs, and active engagement with safety concerns that affect ordinary users.

Because safety itself is now part of the accessibility debate. Many runners train before sunrise or after work because that is the reality of balancing employment, transport, and family responsibilities. When safe and structured spaces become inaccessible, people are pushed back onto unsafe roads and isolated routes.

That is not merely a sporting issue. It is a public health issue. The Green Point Track should not become another example of infrastructure admired from a distance but disconnected from everyday citizens. It should become a model for what an inclusive urban sporting space can look like in South Africa. A city that truly values community wellness does not simply build facilities.

It builds access. And access, ultimately, is what transforms concrete into belonging.

*Bam is the Head of Social Impact and PGDip NPO Leadership Development at Stellenbosch Business School

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