Fancy your design skills? Here’s an opportunity to design the city of Cape Town’s new public bench. The PLASTI(CITY) design competition calls on Cape Town’s creative community to rethink public seating for the inner city.
VISI is supporting this cool new initiative by The Mission for Inner City Cape Town and Plastic Pioneers, inviting designers, makers, architects, students and creative citizens to submit an original design for a public bench or seating installation. The brief is simple, but deliberately open-ended: create something robust, considered and appropriate for public space, using Plastic Pioneers’ recycled plastic sheets as the primary material.
The winning designs will move beyond the drawing board. They will be fabricated and installed in public space, featured in VISI Magazine, and showcased as part of Cape Town Furniture Week in February 2027.
For designers, the competition offers an opportunity to explore a material with both practical and aesthetic potential. Manufactured from post-consumer and/or post-industrial plastic waste, the recycled plastic sheet is durable, weather-resistant and low-maintenance – making it particularly suited to the demands of outdoor public environments. It requires no painting, sealing or regular surface treatment, while its colour variations, flecking and layered textures celebrate rather than conceal its recycled origins.
Entries are open to individuals, teams and businesses based within greater Cape Town, with entrants required to be able to fabricate their design or oversee its fabrication. Production costs for winning designs will be covered, with the recycled plastic material supplied at no cost, although proposals need to remain feasible within a reasonable fabrication budget.
So, if you’ve ever looked at a Cape Town street and thought there’s a better way to do this, here’s your opportunity.
The submission deadline is Wednesday 30 September 2026 at midnight. Enter now and help shape the future of public space in Cape Town.
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