The city was designed for twenty thousand people.
In 1964, 3,855 people lived here. A plan was drawn, almost everything was built in three years, and the whole thing was sized for twenty thousand inhabitants. In 2022 the census counted 246,325. Walking Gaborone means walking over that gap: a small plan that had to stretch twelvefold.
01 A calculated city
That figure is worth pausing on, because it explains half the city. Twenty thousand inhabitants is the size of a large town. No metropolis was imagined and no room was left for one: a specific brief was solved with a specific number, and it was solved fast.
The 1964 count recorded 3,855 people on the site. In 1971, 17,718. In 1981, 59,657. In 1991, 133,468. In 2001, 186,007. In 2011, 231,626. In 2022, 246,325. Which is to say: the plan ran out before it was twenty years old, and the city has spent half a century working out on its own what that calculation never allowed for.
02 The water came first
Among the documented reasons for putting the city exactly here, the first is proximity to a source of fresh water. In a hot semi-arid climate, with under five hundred millimetres of rain a year, that is not a logistical footnote: it is the precondition for any plan at all.
The dam that supplies the city was begun in 1963 and completed in 1964, the same year the urban works started. It is an earthcore fill structure, twenty-five metres high and three and a half kilometres long, impounding the Notwane river. Between 1983 and 1985 it was raised by seven metres. Its capacity is around 141 million cubic metres, and its effective catchment about 225 square kilometres.
03 The brandy glass
During construction, the head of the township authority of the day, Geoffrey Cornish, compared the layout to a brandy glass: the administrative offices in the base, and the businesses strung along the "mall", a strip of land running out of that base. The comparison was published in 1966 and has survived because it remains the best description of the plan.
That mall — the Main Mall — is a wide pedestrian street, paved in block, lined with trees, with parasol stalls pulled up against the frontages. It is not a market square or an inherited boulevard: it is a drawn object, and it shows. The city was planned on garden-city principles, with generous pedestrian routes and open space, and the result is a capital where the empty ground weighs as much as the built.
The site supplies the rest. The city sits at about 1,010 metres, between the hills of Kgale and Oodi, beside the Notwane, fifteen kilometres from the South African border, over 169 square kilometres. It is flat, it is low and it is wide: from almost any street you can see the horizon.
04 What happened to the number
Building a whole city in three years takes labour, and labour needs somewhere to live. The plan, sized for twenty thousand, had not allowed for it. The workers put up their own houses on the industrial zone to the south, in a settlement called Naledi. The word means "the star", and is also read as "under the open sky" or "a community that stands out from all others".
The official answer came late and in instalments: in 1971 a low-income housing area called Bontleng was surveyed; in 1973 the housing corporation built a "New Naledi" across the road from the old one; and in 1975 Naledi's land ceased to be zoned industrial and became residential. Old Naledi did not disappear: it was regularised.
That sequence is the city's whole story in miniature. An orderly, rapid plan; a calculation that falls short; and then fifty years of adjusting on the move. Today the metropolitan area holds some 534,842 inhabitants and the city proper 246,325: twelve times the number it was drawn for.
The traveller receives all this as a vague sensation before receiving it as a fact. The avenues are wider than the traffic asks for. Between one building and the next sit lots of orange earth and scrub. The centre can be walked in an afternoon and then the city continues, low and dispersed, for kilometres. None of that is neglect: it is a small plan that was asked for far more than it ever promised.
