The future of Cape Town’s Atlantic coast hangs in the balance! You have only until December 12, 2025, to tell the city what you want for Big Bay. This plan, like a hidden map, will decide everything from new homes to beach walks for the next 25 years. Don’t miss your chance to speak up, or else concrete might be poured and your voice will be lost until 2030.
The deadline for submitting comments on the Big Bay Local Spatial Development Framework (LSDF) is 23:59 on Friday, December 12, 2025. This critical cutoff allows residents to influence the future development of Cape Town’s Atlantic coastline for the next 25 years.
Friday, 12 December 2025, is more than a winter landmark on the Atlantic seaboard – it is the hard stop of a civic window that will not reopen. At one minute to midnight the City’s online “have-your-say” portal locks, the inbox at Blaauwberg.DistrictSDF@capetown.gov.za auto-replies “mailbox full,” and the chance to bend the draft Local Spatial Development Framework for Big Bay vanishes for at least 25 years. In the 600-odd hours that remain, residents, retirees, ratepayers, surfers and specifiers are racing to etch their fingerprints onto a 12-km coastal ribbon that stretches from Koeberg’s chain-link fence to the postcard snapshot of Bloubergstrand.
The document itself is no thick red book of bylaws; it is a 1:10 000 ghost that will haunt every future building permit, pipe trench and boardwalk plank. It cannot approve a single storey, yet it whispers the odds on whether your street will one day smell of espresso or diesel. Miss the December deadline and you surrender your voice until 2030, when the statutory review cycle spins again – by which time the concrete may already be cured and the orchids long paved.
Unroll the A0 sheet on any kitchen counter and you’ll see the coast sliced into ten colour-coded mini-charters. The R27 shoulder – already a gauntlet of salt pans and strip malls – is tagged for mid-rise mixed-use boxes aimed at Saldanha’s oil-rig service cluster. West of Eden on the Bay, the dune wedge is earmarked for “coastal urbanism”: four-storey walk-ups where baristas can watch the break from their own windows.
Slide south and the last intact dune system north of Diep River is sketched as a biodiversity corridor so the Blouberg sandveld gerbil can tunnel beneath future roads instead of becoming roadkill. The historic fishing hamlet around the 1908 slipway gets a “sensitive intensification” rule: nothing taller than the stone church spire, nothing heavier than the 1970s sewer mains can carry. East of the R27, a tongue of privately owned bushveld that developers keep dreaming of turning into gated villas is kept at “rural retreat” density, but with a public footpath so schoolkids can one day stroll to a new coastal rail halt.
The kilometre of kelp-scented frontage that still smells like low-tide is promised a continuous promenade lifted one metre above today’s spring-high water – an early concession to the 0.83 m of sea-level rise the CSIR says is plausible by 2100. West Beach’s 1980s cul-de-sacs, meanwhile, are slated to sprout a second “heart node”: a civic square, a Saturday farmers’ market and a MyCiTi stop big enough to swallow articulated buses every 180 seconds at rush hour.
No pastel polygon sparks more late-night voice notes than Erf 1117, the 42-hectare rectangle the state bought in 1978 and then forgot. Fenced, grazed by squatters’ cattle, scraped clean by bulldozers after a 2019 land-invasion scare, it is today a fiscal hole the draft plan tries to plug with “±3 600 homes across income bands.” That single line ignites a Rashomon of dread: gridlock to the sea-view retiree, salvation to the backyarder in Mandela Park, a ratepayer’s nightmare of “exclusive pocket-lining,” and a nuclear regulator’s migraine over evacuation maths.
What the framework actually delivers is a set of conditional moves, not a green light. Any future builder must still survive Municipal Planning By-law Section 158, the Koeberg 0–16 km “Urgent Protection Zone” gauntlet. Roads must be wide enough for 50 000 people to sprint north inside four hours; sirens must be audible in every bedroom; each construction phase must wait until the previous road upgrade is tarred, lit and lined. In plain terms, the plan is a cautious nod that keeps the bulldozers in low gear.
Beneath the housing headlines lurk harder numbers. Traffic modellers say that if a scripted evacuation is ordered at 17:30 on a December Friday, the R27 will seize solid at 19:12 unless two extra north-bound lanes appear between Koeberg and Melkbos – an R1.8 billion invoice stapled to whichever developer breaks ground first. The LSDF therefore slices Erf 1117 into three roll-out cohorts: 900 homes may proceed once the Otto du Plessis interchange is grade-separated; the next 1 200 wait for a new Blouberg-to-N7 link; the final 1 500 are hostage to a future rail spur or busway able to move 8 000 bodies an hour.
Coastal scientists add their own surcharge. If the dunes aren’t armoured, the sea could nibble 28 m landward by 2100. The plan answers with a boardwalk lifted 1.2 m above today’s highest tide and a quiet warning to every private erf that touches the high-water mark: plan to rebuild on the rear half of your plot when the wall fails. Insurers, not planners, are expected to deliver that sermon.
Even the unglamorous 450 mm sewer main under the Sasol garage becomes a chokepoint. Hydraulic modelling shows 3 600 new toilets flushing at 07:00 could drop pressure in West Beach below 120 kPa and make geysers groan. A R310 million, 900 mm replacement is therefore front-loaded – trenched only once, alongside a future coastal tram line, saving R90 million and two extra summers of jack-hammer lullabies.
Comments must land before 23:59 on 12 December. Voice notes, teddy-bear petitions and late-night WhatsApp rants will be ignored. Written objections must cite page and clause, spell out the exact prejudice, and offer an alternative that still achieves the planning purpose. A hand-drawn map on A4 is fine – just add a legible scale bar. Every submission will be anonymised, bound into a 200-page comment-and-response report and stapled into Appendix A of the final LSDF. If you want your councillor to quote you in January, append a 50-word plain-language summary; planners skim.
Once the window slams shut, the Urban Planning and Design Department has 30 working days to polish the draft. A political steering committee – Spatial Planning portfolio members plus two ad-hoc councillors – will host two January public sittings where motions to delete, amend or add clauses must be seconded and priced. Full Council votes on 25 February 2026; a simple majority adopts the framework. No provincial sign-off is required for this category B2 advisory plan, but adoption ignites a five-year review clock – meaning today’s dunes, dreams and drainage pipes can all be reopened in 2030. Until then, the December deadline is the only lever you get.
The Big Bay Local Spatial Development Framework (LSDF) is a planning document that will guide the future development of Cape Town’s Atlantic coastline, specifically the Big Bay area, for the next 25 years. It will influence decisions on everything from new housing to public spaces and environmental protection along a 12-km coastal stretch from Koeberg to Bloubergstrand.
The deadline for submitting comments on the Big Bay Local Spatial Development Framework is 23:59 on Friday, December 12, 2025. It’s crucial to submit by this date as the City’s online portal and email inbox will close, and the opportunity to influence the plan will vanish for at least 25 years.
If you miss the December 12, 2025 deadline, you will effectively lose your chance to provide input on the Big Bay LSDF. The framework will proceed based on the comments received, and your voice will not be considered until the next statutory review cycle, which is scheduled for 2030. By then, development based on the current plan may already be underway, making changes much harder to implement.
The LSDF proposes various changes, including mid-rise mixed-use developments along the R27,
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