EcoDistricts

The S&J Industrial Estate EcoDistricts Steering Committee (SJEDSC) was established in 2021 by JSE listed diversified REIT Redefine Properties and Abland Property Developers. The SJEDSC has been working with the Solid Green team to drive the process for creating a strong framework to progress towards a model rooted in community sustainability, ecological awareness, and conservation.

Anelisa Keke, chief sustainability officer for Redefine, comments:

Our purpose is to create and manage spaces in a way that changes lives, and we are therefore entrenching ESG into everything we do. This requires an integrated approach to making strategic choices that will sustain value creation for all stakeholders through focusing on what matters most. The EcoDistricts success is a crucial stepping stone and endorsement of the progress we are making to ensure a better future for all South Africans.

Chris Roberg, Director of Abland responsible for S&J Industrial Development, says:

To be part of the team that has taken land that forms part of the undeveloped mining belt in Johannesburg and convert this to an Industrial Estate which has now been recognised as an EcoDistrict initiative is extremely exciting and a great achievement to all involved. This aligns with Abland’s drive toward sustainability which is evidenced by various commercial projects which have international Green Star ratings.

In parallel to working with the S&J Industrial Estate EcoDistrict, Solid Green had been working with the City of Johannesburg, to develop and test the EcoDistrict Methodology for the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) for the Orange Grove Special Development Zone, as part of the city’s innovative approach toward a low carbon city.

As part of the COJ appointment, the Solid Green team created a modelling protocol for a tool that was developed in line with the EcoDistrict requirements, to calculate an area’s energy use profile along with a CO2 emissions inventory. The COJ project team generously gave permission for the S&J project to apply this same tool to their project, to be able to learn from its application to a different project area, in order to further support the use of forward-thinking certification systems such as the EcoDistricts Protocol to guide neighbourhoods in their efforts to reach carbon neutrality.

The successful conclusion of the certification component of the S&J Industrial Estate EcoDistrict process is an exciting start to the long-term journey for this project. The project will now be required to submit biennial progress reports beginning on the second anniversary of certification and continuing every two years thereafter.

How EcoDistricts works

The EcoDistricts approach is regarded as a new model of public-private partnership that emphasizes innovation and deployment of district-scale best practices to create the neighbourhoods of the future – resilient, vibrant, resource efficient and just.

The Protocol puts a comprehensive lens on every urban regeneration decision, drives the delivery of meaningful performance outcomes, and sets the conditions for sustainable, collective impact. Above all, the Protocol is designed as a flexible performance framework rather than a prescriptive standard, recognizing that every community has the ability and need to advance a place-based sustainability agenda. District teams can tailor the Protocol to local circumstances, set performance targets based on local conditions and aspirations, and measure progress against the Protocol’s Imperatives and Priorities.

The protocol is structured around three core elements as illustrated by the three colours used in Figure 2 working from the inside out:
First up are the three IMPERATIVES which form the inner circle of the figure, and which are the guiding principles that will drive design-making and implementation: Equity, Resilience, and Climate Protection.

EcoDistricts Core Elements

Next up are the six PRIORITIES which will enable the district to achieve meaningful outcomes and which link directly to interventions or projects being planned or implemented on the ground, namely Place, Prosperity, Health & Wellbeing, Connectivity, Living Infrastructure and Resource Regeneration.

And finally, the external ring represents the three IMPLEMENTATION PHASES: Formation, Roadmap, and Performance.

Performance focuses on measuring impact and gauging a district’s progress towards its performance targets. This is an ongoing phase during which reports are shared regularly in the community and publicly on the EcoDistricts Registry. A district’s biennial progress report becomes the basis of measuring impact over time and supporting peer-to-peer learning.

Certification includes three core submission requirements after project registration. The required documents are developed in line with the guidance provided by the EcoDistricts Certified Handbook. They are then submitted for third-party verification sign-off, and an endorsement is secured for that step.

As soon as the project secures endorsement for the submission documentation for all three steps, it will be EcoDistricts Certified. In order to maintain certification, districts must submit biennial progress reports beginning on the second anniversary of certification, and every two years thereafter.

Protocol Certification Process

Three important lessons learnt

There is a plethora of lessons that can be taken away from the work done with S&J EcoDistrict that we, as a team, will keep in mind with regards to future projects. Some of the key take aways include the following:

Importance of collaboration:

Once you make an ambitious triple commitment to ensure equitable, resilient and climate protected urban scale development, a lot of factors come into play that require a multi-disciplinary and bi-directional approach. This requires all interested party representatives to be included in the conversations. This can be seen as challenge when there are opposing views; however, the opportunity is to find goals and strategies that satisfy the main imperatives.

Creativity and exposure to better practices:

The challenge that comes with working with a sustainability framework as opposed to sustainability rating tool, is the non-prescribed strategies and benchmarks to be implemented to demonstrate your commitment to a sustainable EcoDistrict. The challenge is reminding the team and ourselves, as consultants, that the scope is wide and imagination can run wild on what this development can really be if it is driven by the commitment to equitable, resilient and climate protection principles.

Process over perfection/benchmarks:

Process is everything with precinct scale development. When you have a development that runs over numerous years, with a variation of individuals involved in the project, it is very easy for initial principles to get lost in everyday obstacles. The EcoDisticts protocol provides a framework that developers can use to ensure their goals and mechanisms are set in the initial phases to guide future decisions and withstand the various ebbs and flows that come with precinct development processes.

Conclusion

In committing to the EcoDistrict certification process, the S&J Industrial Estate has set a new benchmark for precincts in southern Africa. Solid Green is proud to have been part of this process!

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The consequences of our past actions have now started to creep into the present with increased disruption. Floods, the like of which have not been seen in a thousand years, recently hit parts of Europe and China, while Greece, Turkey and Algeria (to name just a few countries) are on fire. Yet still not everyone is ready to accept the full reality of climate change that sits behind these changes.

There are so many challenges that are being experienced by cities today, and people are at the receiving end. Whether that is a lack or loss of jobs, food and water insecurity, inadequate or no service delivery, or infrastructure that is ill-equipped to deal with extreme weather events or increasing temperatures. People need cities to be the places that protect them, that feed them and that provide them with hope.

At Solid Green, we continue to work with the City of Johannesburg and others around the EcoDistricts Protocol, which places Equity, Resilience and Climate Protection at the heart of how neighbourhoods or ‘EcoDistricts’ respond to the challenges they face. The protocol addresses these challenges through a system of collective impact which requires stakeholders to collaboratively define a restorative pathway toward carbon neutrality at a future date.

We need to ensure that those most vulnerable within our communities are provided with the opportunities to meaningfully participate in identifying challenges and opportunities, lead the charge in finding solutions and advocating for change, and thrive through personal and professional growth and prosperity, in order to actively contribute towards cities that will experience stronger and longer-lasting growth. Only when all people can understand, anticipate, and withstand social, economic and environmental shocks and stresses will our cities be prepared for the future that lies ahead.

And only when we focus on moving toward carbon neutrality, being mindful of living within the means of the earth today and perhaps saving a little for the rainy day of tomorrow, will we be acting as the custodians of the planet – as we should be.

If you would like to find out more about the EcoDistrict protocol and how we can use this methodology to set your development or precinct on a pathway to carbon neutrality, please contact us.

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The City of Johannesburg’s journey to encourage urban revitalisation of the inner city and its surroundings is clearly indicated in its Inner-City Revitalisation Programme initiated in 2006. The main goals of the programme are as follows:

• Attract private investment into the City
• Increase the supply of affordable, quality housing in the inner city in terms of the Inclusionary Housing Policy
• Support intermodal activity
• Public amenity development
• Reduce crime activity in the city
• Job creation

To inject new energy into the process, in April 2019 the City released the details of 97 properties around the city that were to be earmarked for mixed use development. These properties were released to the private sector to aid the city to realize over R20 billion in investment value.

The Target Areas

The properties, which are dilapidated and situated on prime property land, are in regions such as Randburg, Rosebank, Orange Grove, Houghton and Wynberg. These properties were targeted due to their great accessibility and proximity to economic hubs within the city. The City put out a call to the private sector to invest by proposing mixed used developments with commercial and retail activity supported by ample affordable housing linked to the Inclusionary Housing Policy.

To date, there have been few responses from the private sector to the City’s call, with implementation being hindered by issues such as resident displacement and social justice priorities not being addressed (resettlement of poor residents to the periphery is contested); minimal community participation; and the viability of cost recovery for developers.

The EcoDistricts Protocol

At Solid Green, we believe that the EcoDistricts Protocol – which is “an urban development framework for achieving people-centered, economically vibrant, resource efficient, neighbourhood- and district-scale sustainability” – can aid the City’s regeneration efforts.

This is because the protocol requires projects to make an Imperatives Commitment at the initial phase of the engagement processes. These imperatives, strongly align with the goals if the City of Johannesburg’s urban revitalisation vision, are:

• Equity – Ensuring all members of the community can participate, lead, and thrive. Focus is placed on identifying vulnerable community members such as people of colour, low income, and people with disabilities, for example.
• Resilience – The capacity of a district to withstand social, economic, and environmental stresses.
• Climate Protection – Projects must have a pathway to carbon neutrality.

The EcoDistricts Priorities and Objective Categories are the guiding elements that can be used to assess areas to define how nodes could use strategic interventions along these lines to move the city toward its goals of a low carbon city.

Implementation phases are as follows:

• 1. Formation – intensive stakeholder engagement, governance framework development and declaration for collaboration between all stakeholders.
• 2. Roadmap – identify priorities, objectives, strategy, and performance indicators to move the city or EcoDistrict to a carbon neutral future.
• 3. Performance phase – requires continuous progress reporting on how strategies are evolving to move toward carbon neutrality.

The EcoDistricts Protocol requires that projects follow the procedure of Formation, Roadmap and the Performance stages to ensure that the imperatives highlighted in their commitment are carried out throughout. The Protocol gives timelines for when each stage must be complete and sent for review.

Commitment to continuous engagement

Collective impact is a strong theme throughout the EcoDistricts Protocol. The protocol calls for power-sharing, collective decision making, shared problems, and shared skills and resources within the City context, which is occupied by diverse stakeholders and interested parties. This core principle is integral to successful development. The protocol suggests communication measures and consideration on how to “bring everyone to the table”.

Final Thoughts

The City of Johannesburg’s move to release properties to be developed by the private sector, alongside outlining its main goals for urban revitalisation, are key starting points to guide the direction of the City. The EcoDistricts Protocol has the potential to educate the developer teams on how to successfully take these goals and properties forward, to successfully realise a regenerated city centre.

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