It's the Monaco of Cape Town, a playground for the super-rich in a city infamously neglectful of its poor. Cut off, more than ever, from the city of which it is supposedly a part, it has become obsessed with itself and its advancement, the sybarite at the dinner table, the narcissist you once thought you knew. It's time to hit pause.

Three decades on, and developments continue apace at Cape Town's V&A Waterfront. Will its development ever end before there's no space left for the ships? Before we all struggle to remember what anything ever looked like in its nascent days?

Revisiting the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town decades after you first stood under the steel girders of what was to become its flagship mall is a strange experience. How could there be so much of everything? How do you find your way any more? Any focus has long perished; in its place, a perplexing maze of brick, steel and glass, punctuated with bobbing boats with their skippers touting for your custom, almost everything designed to enthral and inspire. But collectively its effect is to overwhelm and confuse.

Everything is expensive. The clothes are expensive, the art, the appliances, the...