WHAT Quinton van Zyl has accomplished all happens in his spare time, and yet, it leaves onliners in sheer awe.
“A couple of years ago, I found this computer program that allows you to build cities. It is very well supported by an online community where people will design buildings, vehicles and objects, which you can place in your city. I started taking real-world cities and attempted to replicate them in this program. Over time, I developed some skills and became quite good at this and started a YouTube channel. The channel grew slowly at first, but over time, gained a steady following,” he said.
Van Zyl currently lives in Cape Town. He was born in Durban and lived on The Bluff, Westville and Kloof. He said he has always loved history and geography. He could spend hours looking at maps and doing research on places and subjects that he finds interesting.
“In the past four years, I’ve digitally built about 50 cities. Durban is the city I know best in the world so I decided to give it a go. I love telling stories in the videos that I produce, and I decided to try and tell the history of the city in the form of a short series of videos covering the period from around 1880 to today. If you look online, there really isn’t much content on Durban and its history although there are some excellent websites with private collections of pictures, stories and drawings of the past. It has been so enjoyable going through these sites to try and reconstruct parts of the city from these earlier times,” he said.
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He added, “What has been interesting about this project so far is my audience for this project is very largely made up of current and ex-Durbanites interested in the history of the city. In the past, the channel audience was made up mainly of people who enjoy building virtual cities. I think this project may be useful to people interested in the history of the city and perhaps students, too.”
He reckoned that the response from onliners has been phenomenal and has exceeded his expectations. “One thing about Durbanites is we are so passionate about our city; we realise it’s not perfect, but we know how much potential it has to be so much better. The number of messages of support has been overwhelming.”
The Durban project will take a few months to complete. After that, he’s promised to tackle Cape Town and do something similar. His work can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/@jetjunky6760.
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