Transnational urbanism interrupted: A Chinese developer’s attempts to secure approval to build the ‘New York of Africa’ at Modderfontein,Johannesburg

Abstract

This article examines how developers attempt to move into new settings, and how such attempts sometimes fail. Unlike long-standing developers, who are in various ways ‘embedded’ (Henneberry and Parris, 2013), newcomers have to overcome their lack of familiarity with the context of their intended project. Using the case of a proposed megaproject at Modderfontein in Johannesburg, we examine how a Chinese developer worked to articulate with the Johannesburg planning environment. It produced an extensive network by deploying its staff to Johannesburg, hiring local professional staff, winning the favour of provincial politicians and hiring consultants in the UK in order to help close a deal with planners responsible for approval. Sophisticated efforts to pitch the project to municipal planners using win-win narratives failed to satisfy the planners’ material concerns that the project would break up urban space, would be financially exclusionary and could undermine economies elsewhere in the city. The developer ultimately withdrew as a result of delays in approval combined with a financial crisis it faced in its home context. The article considers the interplay between the transnational networks that emerge around megaprojects; the communicative space of project negotiations that is characterised by different cultures of planning; and the political economic context that allows – or interrupts – transnational development.

Keywords

Developers transnational urbanism Johannesburg China planning approval

Introduction

In 2013 a Hong Kong listed property developer, Shanghai Zendai, announced a plan for Modderfontein, a large section of land in Johannesburg which it had recently acquired (see Figure 1). The chairperson of the firm made local headlines by describing the intended megaproject as a ‘New York of Africa’, ‘the future capital for the whole of Africa’ (Africa Property News, 2015) and a rival to Johannesburg’s existing financial node of Sandton (Crowley, 2015). Yet within just a few years, this endeavour had collapsed, with the company sold to a subsidiary of the Bank of China that deals with non-performing loans, and which finally disposed of Modderfontein at the end of 2016.

Figure 1.

Map of Modderfontein in relation to municipal boundaries and the Corridors of Freedom project.

This episode illustrates how developers attempt, and sometimes fail, to establish a large project in a new context (see Wood, 2009). As Henneberry and Parris (2013: 230) note, developers ‘rely upon their local institutional milieus and access to the tacit market knowledge that they hold’ and that ‘[t]his provides developers with the locational literacy necessary to identify, appraise, fund and ultimately gain permission to undertake development projects’. Developers who work in new contexts run the risk that their accumulated experience does not translate to the new setting. In China, where almost all of Zendai’s projects had been located, developers enjoyed a high level of support from the local state for their work (Wu et al., 2015). Before launching their Johannesburg project, Zendai secured enthusiastic endorsement by the Gauteng premier, the most senior politician in the province within which Johannesburg is located. Whereas this political buy-in would have been important in China, it was less decisive in Johannesburg, as South African municipal officials have autonomy in approving urban development projects. In order to correct this situation, Zendai employed British-based consultants to broker a collaborative engagement between itself and City officials in 2015, a process that forms the primary focus of this article.

Grabher and Ibert (2011: 175) note that a project brings together a temporary organisation, comprising parts of long-term organisations and individual actors, for a particular objective. In this article we consider how, in the case of a developer proposing a megaproject in a new context, the temporary organisation that results is particularly transnational in character, and brings different cultures of planning into engagement with one another. In Modderfontein, Zendai produced networks intended to help it articulate with an environment where it lacked the organic embeddedness derived from a long history of working in the context (Henneberry and Parris, 2013). It hired South African planners who had been working for the previous landowner and it commissioned British and South African consultants to help mediate with local authorities. The consultants laboured to identify ways they might appeal to planning authorities, invoking both international best practice along with principles that they considered important to local actors. Yet these efforts failed to distract planning authorities from concerns they had about the project. The friction encountered by the developer in Johannesburg together with the poor performance of the developer’s projects in China caused the major financial backer to take the company over and sell its South African assets. The article examines the interplay between the transnational networks that emerge around megaprojects; the communicative space of project negotiations that is produced by different cultures of planning; and the political economic context that allows – or interrupts – transnational development.

Zendai’s investment in Modderfontein has been the subject of several studies (Ballard et al., 2017; Brill, 2018; Dittgen, 2017). The empirical material for this article draws primarily from our attendance of master planning workshops and site tours in 2015. We were invited to attend these forums by City of Johannesburg officials and were given approval to do this by senior Zendai representatives. Furthermore we conducted seven interviews with members of the developer’s team and with municipal officials, and analysed documents relating to the project including news articles, reports from business analysts and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and publicly available documents from Shanghai Zendai Property Limited and Heartland/AECI (the previous owners of the land).

Transnational developers

The instincts and intuitions for which developers are renowned are inescapably contextual. In becoming entrepreneurs, developers learn to identify opportunities, raise finance, acquire property, secure regulatory approval, and design, construct and market their products. These activities involve personal relationships and practical know-how that are, to some extent, context-specific (Assche et al., 2014; Moore, 2015; Shatkin, 2008; Wood, 2009). Developers can therefore be extremely ‘parochial’ (Charney, 2007: 1180), with some being comfortable working only in a particular part of a particular city (e.g. Leffers and Wekerle this issue). Geographic specialisation can generate efficiencies and lower uncertainty (Beauregard, 2005), while those who invest in unfamiliar places risk making poor decisions because they lack local knowledge (Edgington, 1995).

A key component of the context that developers have to navigate is gaining approval from regulatory authorities (Healey, 1998). Developers use different forms of rationalisation and legitimation to present their projects in the best light (Moore, 2015). Long-standing developers would have experience with the planning rationalities at work in their respective approval channels, knowing whether authorities are inclined to constrain and direct growth to achieve broader aims or to foster growth for its own sake (Boburg and Reinhard, 2017; Flyvbjerg, 1996; Swyngedouw et al., 2002). They would be aware of contradictions in government that generate mixed messages; local political elites often support large-scale projects but this may place them at odds with regulatory authorities (Kennedy, 2015; Orueta and Fainstein, 2008). Finally they would know where authorities lack capacity to exert their own imperatives (Sajor, 2003; Shatkin, 2008).

In Bourdieusian terms, long-standing developers can navigate these and other nuances precisely because they have spent years working in a particular field and so have acquired the habitus that enables them to function as insiders (Grabher, 2002a; Mosselson, this issue; Searle and Byrne, 2002). By learning to play the game of urban development in situ, developers have become familiar with the explicit and tacit rules of a particular setting, have acquired ways of thinking and of doing that work in their environment and have co-evolved with, and shaped, their environment. Local professional staff already possess a native fluency of the relevant language and social conventions in a way that newcomers would not.

Yet there are developers who are able to operate successfully across multiple geographic scales, pushed to venture out by lacklustre home markets (Charney, 2003) and pulled by opportunities elsewhere. Transnational actors can reduce their uncertainties by investing cautiously, for example in well-known metropoles (Beauregard, 2005). Mobile developers or specialists who work for them might not have the advantage of local knowledge but they have accumulated experience nonetheless which can translate into effective ways of doing business in the new context.

We can complicate distinctions between local developers and transnational developers by recognising that developers are neither just local nor just transnational, they are geographically plural as a result of their networked nature. The agency behind a new urban development does not reside within a single actor even where a development firm is headed up by a charismatic mover and shaker (Adams et al., 2012; Brill this issue; Fainstein, 2001). The exploded view of developers has been examined in concepts such as project ecologies (Grabher, 2002b; Henneberry and Parris, 2013), communities of practice (Faulconbridge, 2010), consortia spaces (McNeill, 2015) and actor-networks (David and Halbert, 2014; Rydin and Tate, 2016). These frameworks allow us to recognise that project networks can be both local and transnational at the same time. Developer firms are constituted by teams of people, sometimes in multiple geographic sites or with diverse geographic origins. The collaborators and outsourced service providers with whom they partner can be located in many parts of the world (McNeill, 2015). Furthermore, investors who travel to a new space enlist local actors in order to integrate their projects with the site of investment (Halbert and Rouanet, 2014: 473).

Various actors in global networks are not simply apart but produce possibilities of interaction through communications technology and physical face-to-face gatherings. Such interactions bring together individuals who were trained in distinct cultures of planning (Friedmann, 2005), necessitating at least some level of translation. That said, originating outside a context may not be a disadvantage per se. Indeed many consultants are hired precisely because they are international (Shatkin, 2008) and able to present global ‘best practice’ models (Larner and Laurie, 2010; Rapoport and Hult, 2017). Meanwhile long-standing actors may not be at an advantage simply by virtue of being local; some bring with them the baggage of difficult past interactions.

The transnational network of actors that surrounds a megaproject results in an extremely dynamic and complex negotiation between the developer and the approving authority. Yet even to the extent that some agreement can be forged by those brought together to negotiate it, the most relevant parts of the network may not be in the room at all. A developer’s ability to act can be determined by elements of a sprawling network well beyond the project at hand, including market downturns, shortfalls in finance and the broader fortunes of the developer’s other projects. The case of Modderfontein illustrates both the composition and workings of the project network that brought a host of specialists together to negotiate the project, and the key relationships outside the negotiating room that ultimately determined its future.

Modderfontein

Johannesburg is South Africa’s most prosperous and populous municipality, and sits within a broader city region of around 15 million people. The city’s urban structure reflects its origins as a city built on gold mining and its apartheid history, with working class townships such as Soweto, Alexandra and Tembisa segregated from middle class northern suburbs. Since democratisation in 1994, the state has acted as a major developer, driving the construction of low cost housing, generally on the urban periphery. While some private sector developers have partnered with the state on this, or made forays into the ‘affordable’ market (Mosselson this issue), most have focused on malls, offices, warehousing, cluster residential, gated communities and instant cities overwhelmingly in the affluent north (Murray, 2011). These players are usually South African, or at least have been long established in the country.

Modderfontein is a largely undeveloped tract of land in an enviable location in the north-east of the city, roughly midway between Sandton, the major business hub, and the country’s major airport, O.R. Tambo International (Figure 1). South Africa’s only rapid rail system, the Gautrain, passes directly through Modderfontein. Until the 1990s the site had not been available for urbanisation because it had comprised the safety zone around what was, at one stage, the largest dynamite factory in the world providing explosives to the mass-scale, deep-level gold and uranium mines on the Witwatersrand. For much of the 20th century it was owned by African Explosives & Chemical Industries Limited (AECI), a subsidiary of major mining conglomerates (Bosman, 2010).

In 1994, the factory terminated production of the volatile nitroglycerine (AEL Mining Services, n.d.) and the surrounding safety zone was no longer needed. The company began a land release programme in 1995, and AECI created a property company in 1999 called Heartland Properties to manage this. In the following decade, around 1000 hectares of land were parcelled and sold-off to developers, resulting in the ad hoc development of a business park, shopping centre and cluster of large gated residential estates. Nevertheless, by 2010 there were still around 2300 hectares of land remaining in the AECI Modderfontein portfolio (Bosman, 2010).

The relationship between Heartland Properties and the regulatory authorities was characterised by some frustration. Without an overarching transportation plan, the piecemeal development caused road congestion, with pressure also on water, sewer and electricity networks. Attempts to find agreement through a framework plan were only partially successful. A senior official acknowledged that the City did not push hard to break the stalemate around Modderfontein as they did not favour Heartland Properties’ piecemeal approach (Interview, City planners, 3 August 2015).

The construction of the Gautrain rapid rail system in the late 2000s was a windfall for Heartland Properties. The Gautrain planners proposed a link between Sandton and O.R. Tambo International Airport, with 11 km of track passing through Modderfontein. Heartland Properties agreed to cede this land on condition that they could build a Gautrain Modderfontein Station, a major boost to the connectivity of the site (Interview, Zendai planner, 13 July 2015). With ongoing difficulties in securing permission for development, the idea of a bulk land sale was attractive. When Shanghai Zendai Properties Limited approached Heartland in 2011, it was gladly received.

Zendai’s 2013 purchase, and 2016 sale, of Modderfontein

Shanghai Zendai was founded in 1994 by the charismatic Dai Zhikang and was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2002. The company had expanded quickly during China’s real estate boom and was eventually ranked among the top 100 real estate firms in China, with Dai listed as the 65th wealthiest individual in the country (Zhang and Alon, 2009). Zendai had benefitted especially from the expansion of real estate in Pudong, Shanghai, but had also expanded into second tier and smaller Chinese cities. Dai showed a strong interest in art collecting which is, in turn, reflected in his major urban projects in China. For example, the Zendai Himalayas centre in Nanjing was inspired by Chinese landscape painting, the projects’ ‘mountain-like towers’ are intended to ‘mimic the surrounding topography’ (Wang, 2014).

From 2011, however, the housing market in China was under pressure and Dai began investigating international markets. He also toured Africa in 2011 where a property broker introduced him to the Modderfontein site. Modderfontein appeared to offer an ideal base for future expansion into Africa, and so confidential negotiations commenced with the site’s owner, AECI, resulting in a land transaction being finalised in November 2013. AECI sold 1600 hectares of land to Zendai for R1.061bn (then around US$107m). Zendai raised the purchase capital from the Bank of China, a leading state-owned financial institution, which also provided a payment guarantee, with a performance guarantee provided by the Standard Bank of South Africa (AECI et al., 2013), which has been 20 per cent Chinese owned since 2007.

Zendai staff had arrived in Johannesburg with a master plan for Modderfontein in hand which had been prepared in Beijing by a Chinese planning institute. The plans, launched publicly in November 2013, did attract several objections. The Alexandra-Tembisa Housing Forum, a community group from adjacent townships, saw no benefit for the working class residents they represented (Interview, City planner, 11 August 2016). It was also criticised by a newly formed political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which bitterly opposed the land sale to a foreign developer (EFF, 2013). Some business commentators suggested, meanwhile, that the project may be too ambitious for Zendai Shanghai (Crowley, 2015; Hogg, 2013).

However these cautionary voices were largely drowned out by dazzling images (Figure 2) and grandiose claims by Dai that he was creating a ‘New York of Africa’, and even ‘that in time it will become the future capital of all of Africa’ (Africa Property News, 2015; see also Rose et al., 2014 and Watson, 2014). In fact, visuals resembled Zendai’s own geomorphic developments in China far more than they did the buildings of New York, and when Dai addressed Chinese audiences, he likened Modderfontein to Lujiazui, Shanghai’s financial district (Dittgen, 2017). Nevertheless the reference to New York at the launch positioned the project as both quintessentially modern and familiar to a South African audience. (Developers building products in China are familiar with using western references to add status to the products they are marketing (see Wu, 2010).)

Figure 2.

Concept graphics.

Interest in the launch was also generated by the fact that large-scale foreign investments of this nature were unusual. The value of the project was placed at R84bn (US$8bn), and the project was branded as a ‘new city’, with accommodation for 100,000 people (SA Commercial Prop News, 2014). One article announced breathlessly that ‘[a] Chinese maverick is investing billions of rands in Modderfontein’ (Steyn, 2013). The land purchase was described as ‘a move which is not only a vote of confidence in the country, but is set to change the face of Johannesburg’. The article stressed the personal credentials of Dai, a ‘Chinese Warren Buffett’, and of Zendai, which was described as being financially sound and operating successfully in 12 cities in China.

Dai had secured the support of the Premier of the Province of Gauteng, Nomvula Mokonyane, who accompanied Dai at the public launch and where she declared ‘this is a definite sign that we are doing something right in Gauteng’ (SA Commercial Prop News, 2013). Provincial support continued with Mokonyane’s successor, David Makhura, who enthused about the enormous cash injection and job creation that would accompany the project in a major annual address to the provincial legislature (Makhura, 2015).

However, planning approvals in South Africa are the preserve of municipal officials, a sphere of government which is autonomous from, rather than subordinate to, provincial government. City planners told us that they were taken by surprise and they learned about the project when the launch was reported in the media, and that they were ‘absolutely horrified’ at the project’s scale, the lack of local consultation, poor integration into the surrounding city, the lack of market-related data informing the plan, and an architectural form that seemed unfeasible in the local context (Interview, City planners, 3 August 2015).

Officials from the City then travelled to China where they met staff from Zendai and negotiated an informal agreement between Zendai and the City. A major focus of the discussions was the need to integrate the proposed development into the broader city. Zendai agreed to rework the master plan, which would then be resubmitted to authorities for overarching planning permission. This led to the planning process of 2015 which is discussed in some detail in the following sections (Interview, City planners, 3 August 2015).

In the background of this attempt to find common ground, however, there were far-reaching changes to the corporate backers of the development. Zendai proved to be less secure financially than was initially explained or anticipated. According to Zendai’s 2014 annual report, the Modderfontein project was ‘proceeding well’ although the bank loans to cover the HK$838m (US$107m) acquisition of Modderfontein would have significantly raised debt-asset ratios (Shanghai Zendai Property Limited, 2014). More ominously, the report indicated that the company was now losing money because of delays in bringing properties onto the market in other parts of China, including in Outer Mongolia where the company had misread market opportunities. By the 2015, Zendai reported a loss of nearly HK$1bn (US$127m) resulting primarily from losses in China (Shanghai Zendai Property Limited, 2015).

These developments worried the company’s major financier, the Bank of China. In the wake of the 1999 Asian financial crisis, China’s Ministry of Finance had set up state-owned asset management companies for each of the largest four state-owned banks to protect bank assets against non-performing loans and to reduce financial risks. In 2015, the China Orient Asset Management Company (COAMC), which supports the Bank of China, purchased all the shares of Zendai (China Orient Asset Management Holding, 2015). Dai Zhikang resigned as CEO, and a new board was constituted comprising mainly officials from the Ministry of Finance. The Wall Street Journal observed that Zendai was among a number of real estate companies that were effectively bailed out by the Chinese state (Fung, 2015). The South China Morning Post reported that Dai turned his attention from property to art collections, warning as he did that the apparent revival of China’s property was a ‘dead cat bounce’ (Ren, 2016).

Under its new owners, Shanghai Zendai continued to deteriorate (Bloomberg, 2017). The Modderfontein planning approval process had begun to frustrate the financial backers and they increasingly realised that demand for real estate in Johannesburg was flat. They also realised that the master plan Zendai had been proposing would be expensive to implement, particularly since municipal officials were not willing to fund infrastructure. Finally, in December 2016, Shanghai Zendai sold Modderfontein, and its subsidiary, Zendai SA (or Heartland Properties) to the South African-based developer, M&T Development (Competition Tribunal of South Africa, 2017). The purchase price of this sale was R1.746bn (then around US$131bn) (Bureau Van Dijk, 2016). This sale helped to alleviate Zendai’s cash flow constraints and the company, now without Dai, turned its focus back to developments in China (Shanghai Zendai Property Limited, 2017). No publicity accompanied the sale of Modderfontein, and given M&T Development’s track record, development on the site may well revert to unspectacular cluster development.

Developer-as-network

During the course of 2015, there was little awareness of Zendai’s financial difficulties among officials and specialists working on the project. By then an army of consultants had launched a process to secure a master plan on behalf of Zendai. Below we explore in detail the work they did to secure development approval. In order to understand this process, it is useful to map out the network of actors that the developer put in place for this work.

The first component of the network was the owners and staff of Shanghai Zendai Property Limited (Figure 3, item 1), with the important complication that the ownership and nature of this company shifted during the course of the project (2). Zendai was initially dominated by the personality of its founder and the staff he sent over to Modderfontein on short to medium term contracts (3) who were enthused with his vision for a ‘New York of Africa’. His staff had a complex task. They were faced with the difficulties of a foreign environment, including the major limitation of language. The COAMC takeover meant that the flamboyant plans that accompanied the launch were gradually replaced by the tough pragmatism of technocrats concerned with protecting the assets of the Bank of China.

Figure 3.

Key actors and their locations.

The second component of the network was former Heartland staff, including a team of planners, who had been absorbed into Zendai following the takeover in 2013 (4). These staff were South Africans who had been employed by the previous owner of the site and were therefore familiar with it. Many were invigorated by the takeover and enthusiastic about planning a whole new city rather than just parcelling up and selling off land under the grudging watch of the City’s planners. Some of these staff played down the Chinese identity of their new employers, saying ‘we see ourselves as not a Chinese company but an international company and our shareholder […] happens to be Chinese’ (Interview, Zendai planner, 13 July 2015). The Chinese and ex-Heartland teams invariably struggled to find mutual accommodation and the dual nature of Zendai SA created persisting tensions in the project (Brill, 2018 provides excellent details on this fraught dynamic).

Although these two groups comprised ‘the developer’ in a formal sense, neither group led the 2015 process to secure permission to develop. Zendai contracted three global consultancies to oversee this process. The lead consultancy was Atkins (5), a London-based firm (now part of the Montreal-headquartered SNC-Lavalin group) with an extensive global footprint, including in China. Atkins was responsible for compiling the master plan and for specialist assessments on the environment, socio-economics and cost consulting among other themes. They managed this by running coordination meetings in London with British collaborators and by commuting extensively to South Africa for meetings and workshops.

The developer also contracted Arup (6) to provide inputs on infrastructure and transport. Arup did in fact tender to run the master plan process (its competencies are similar to Atkins) but the developer opted to allocate master plan work to Atkins and engineering work to Arup. Arup is headquartered in London and Arup’s London office was represented at coordination meetings convened by Atkins. Arup also has an extensive Johannesburg office (7) with a lead professional working on the Modderfontein project having worked in the UK for Arup for a number of years (Interview, Arup engineer, 4 August 2015). Arup had worked with Heartland Properties on transport plans for the site before the change of ownership and therefore had existing relationships with the site and the Heartland personnel now absorbed into Zendai.

Zendai also contracted Colliers International in order to advise on demographics and market potential. The Colliers team included London-based staff, who would travel when necessary to Johannesburg (8), and staff based in South Africa (9). In addition, the broader team included a host of South African architects and other specialists beginning to plan elements of the project (10). Through a process established by Atkins as lead consultants, participants in this community of practice engaged one another and regulatory authorities bilaterally and, at three workshops, multilaterally, picking over the proposal in far more detail than would normally happen for developments in South Africa.

Translating different cultures of planning

This set of relationships does not merely constitute a global project organogram but also articulates quite different cultures of planning (see Friedmann, 2005). Both China and South Africa are several decades into political transitions, from state socialism and apartheid, respectively. These transitions entailed rapid urbanisation and economic liberalisation that caused property market dynamism, although to a far greater degree in China than in South Africa. Urban governance is decentralised in both settings, but in China, support from the political sphere can be much more important than in South Africa. The Shanghai municipal government has provincial status, with high levels of decentralised authority given to district governments (Wu, 1999). Local authorities use planning as an instrument to support rather than constrain growth (Hsien, 2010; Wu et al., 2015) and use their control over land to attract foreign investment (Wu, 1999). The state owns all land and grants rights to develop, an important basis for both public revenue and rent seeking behaviour (Friedmann, 2005). Formal approval processes are often bypassed by informal negotiations with senior local politicians.

In Johannesburg, functions are divided and shared across metropolitan (Johannesburg) and provincial (Gauteng) government, and often ambiguously so. In 2010, a constitutional court ruling resolved some of this ambiguity by ending provincial channels of planning approval, giving municipalities more control over planning. In principle, Johannesburg’s planning follows the British approach of regulating the activities of developers in line with an approved spatial plan. Some studies have argued that Johannesburg has surrendered regulatory power to developers (e.g. Herbert and Murray, 2015). While this may be apt in some instances, authorities do at times attempt to rein in developers.

The timing of Modderfontein’s planning application coincided with a period in which Johannesburg’s planners were conscious of the undesirable nature of many post-apartheid developments and hoped to discourage further enclave development. Since the creation of the metropolitan authority in 2000, Johannesburg’s planners have been working on spatial policies that have tried to respond to apartheid’s spatial legacies and the fragmenting effect of new enclave development (Todes, 2014). In 2013, Johannesburg’s then mayor, Parks Tau, had announced an ambitious spatial programme, grandly called the Corridors of Freedom, to stitch together the segregated city. In 2015, when the proposed Modderfontein plan was being considered by city planners, the implementation of the Corridors programme was at the forefront of their minds (City of Johannesburg, 2016). In terms of this approach, they sought to forge relationships with developers willing to construct real estate within the urban core and were less interested in those seeking permission to build on previously undeveloped land.

For their part, consultants from Atkins, Arup and Colliers introduced to the mix a modality of greater participation in planning. These consultants regularly travel beyond the UK, for example to the Middle East, to facilitate the development of plans on behalf of clients. Unlike the first plan announced by Zendai for Modderfontein in 2013, which the City had not seen, the 2015 process led by these consultants brought the City into their discussions on seemingly major choices on morphology and density. As one consultant put it ‘it’s quite normal, in other regions of the world, to go through this rigorous workshop process where you actually bring the City through the evolution of this project’ (Interview, Arup engineer, 4 August 2015). This, they reasoned, would help the different ‘disciplines’ to find better alignment and would also help them secure buy-in from officials who would be familiar with the contents of the plan from workshops. For their part, City officials felt that ‘Atkins made a huge difference [because they] understood the principles for development in Johannesburg a lot better, and the application of those principles were … a lot better on the piece of land’ (Interview, City planners, 3 August 2015). Atkins was also able and willing to engage with City officials directly as professionals, while City officials had found the Chinese team to be unforthcoming.

Workshopping the master plan

Each of the multilateral workshops lasted for two days and was attended by more than 40 participants from most of the organisations named in Figure 3. The workshops were structured to provide spaces for participation carefully crafted by the three consultancy firms who would arrive from the UK in advance of each workshop to prepare. The consultants made much of their participatory approach, stressing that while they could bring a great deal of international experience, they depended on local knowledge. A substantial amount of the workshop time was devoted to small group sessions with each group taking a different theme, such as economic development, development planning, environment and infrastructure. Consultants insisted that feedback from small groups had to be given by ‘local partners’ ideally from the municipality to ensure that they felt they had participated. Photographs of such sessions then appeared in subsequent presentations by the convenor, who would remind those gathered that the plan had been shaped by their input.

Having claimed the participatory credentials of the workshops, the core of the agenda was in fact a succession of detailed presentations from consultancy specialists on issues such as hydrogeology, infrastructure, economic development, civil engineering, cost, transport, market strategy and architectural guidelines. Although some presentations contained information about Modderfontein itself, and examples of ‘local best practice’ from Johannesburg, many of the presentations drew largely on international examples from the UK, Brazil, China, the Middle East and elsewhere. Presentations showed the potential of good design to produce a variety of gains and avoid the problems created by conventional development approaches. Presenters stated that they did not want to do business as usual and that they wished to engage in ‘future proofing’, which meant, for example, constructing buildings with passive heating and cooling and other strategies that anticipate climate change (Zendai Modderfontein, 2015).

Presenters used various beneficial aspects of the project to argue that the interests of the developer were aligned with the interests of the City at large. The project would ‘regenerate’ Modderfontein, and would provide Johannesburg with ‘flood control, jobs, places to live, investment in infrastructure, urban access to nature, public transportation’ (Zendai Modderfontein, 2015). Meanwhile, green spaces supported biodiversity and would be demanded by future users of Modderfontein.

These win-win narratives became more sophisticated following participation by various individuals from the developer’s team in City of Johannesburg’s own strategic planning forums. Atkins consultants attended the City of Johannesburg’s Spatial Development Framework workshops which happened to be taking place within the same time period. At the subsequent Modderfontein master plan workshop, the Atkins convener declared that, as a result, ‘we are all singing from the same hymn sheet; building strategically around public transit is very important’ (Notes, Final Workshop, 28–29 July 2015). She then detailed at some length how Modderfontein is consistent with the City’s strategy; describing it as a ‘compact city’ which ‘links to the Corridors of Freedom’, and which ‘develops around transit’, and provides a ‘mix of appropriate densities’.

The limits of this strategy were exposed when, in the final workshop, a consultant, who had flown out from London the night before, incorrectly declared in his presentation that Modderfontein was part of the Corridors of Freedom. In response, exasperated senior officials from the City noted that Modderfontein fell well outside their plans geographically (Figure 1), and that where Modderfontein would urbanise currently undeveloped land, the purpose of the Corridors of Freedom initiative was to densify existing urban areas. The red-faced consultant corrected himself and said he meant to say that the proposed development was ‘Corridors of Freedom compliant’. He said that he regretted his wording because he was not just trying to ‘tick a box’.

City officials were aware of the careful efforts by the workshop convenors to steer the discussion in the direction of a consensus, to sell the virtues of the project and to frame the proposal as converging on the City’s own spatial logic. One City official told us during an interview that they felt ‘extremely setup’ by the facilitator’s attempts to achieve a feeling of local participation (Interview, City planners, 3 August 2015). The official believed that only points of agreement were reported during the convenor’s summations, and points of disagreement were erased. Nevertheless, during discussion time and during the small group sessions the officials challenged the developer’s team on various substantive issues and the rhetorical framing being done by the developer’s team.

City officials’ concerns

Throughout the process, City officials returned to three broad concerns. The first was that Modderfontein would exacerbate patterns of urban segregation and disconnection. Officials were concerned with a lack of porosity and connectivity in the Modderfontein plans: ‘I am worried that we are creating an enclave with too few access points and you are going to get a gridlock situation’ (Notes, Final Workshop, 28–29 July 2015). One of the City officials used her report back from small group discussions to make an impassioned statement, invoking the legacy of apartheid itself:

[Modderfontein] is integration space. We don’t want an island, we want connections. I am worried about the ‘new city’ concept. Joburg was a city of separation. […] we are trying to restitch this city. How does this space become part of the Joburg? I understand the need to market it as something special but please be careful. We need eventually to present this to the mayor. So it’s political (Speaker, Option Selection Workshop, 26–27 May 2015).

Members of the developer’s team readily agreed with the principle of integration, but these could be highly circumscribed. One planner stated ‘it’s definitely not our intention to have it as an island because it needs to be integrated with Linbro [Park] [and] Waterfall [City], so it needs to be integrated into the rest of the city, it can’t be an island’. Tellingly, Linbro Park, a small suburb immediately to the west of Modderfontein, and Waterfall City to the north-west, were Modderfontein’s middle class neighbours. This planner showed far less enthusiasm for integrating with neighbouring lower income and far more densely populated townships of Alexandra (Alex) to the west and Tembisa to the north:

Look, Alex is actually quite far removed from us because of the M3 [highway], very difficult to integrate Alex with the city other than the obvious linkages in terms of roads that kind of thing, but quite difficult, […] Tembisa on the other side is a little bit different but it is also quite far from us. […] I think Alex is much better integrated with Sandton. […], which is right on its doorstep […] You know spatially it is very difficult to integrate those two places into our city.

During a workshop, a member of the developer’s professional team attempted to distance Modderfontein from the fragmentary urban sprawl by referencing nearby examples. He said the kind of housing intended for Modderfontein would be less like Waterfall City – which is a series of gated communities – and would be more like Melrose Arch – a new urbanist infill development in Johannesburg. While Melrose Arch has the virtues of being dense, this was an unhelpful exemplar since Melrose Arch is financially exclusive (Dirsuweit and Schattauer, 2004). A city official responded to the member of the professional team saying ‘you need to demonstrate that the plan will lead to an outcome that fulfils the city’s objectives. Melrose Arch is exclusionary and doesn’t fulfil all the city’s other socio economic objectives’ (Notes, Option Selection Workshop, 26–27 May 2015).

A second and related concern of city officials was the kind of housing market planned for Modderfontein and whether this would generate financial segregation (also Brill and Reboredo, 2018). The expert input from Colliers International was that the price range for accommodation should be from R800,000 to R2.5m at 2015 prices (then around US$62,670 to US$195,860). Certainly these were not the most expensive properties in the city, and might be described as middle to upper middle class. Nevertheless a senior official from the City repeatedly expressed concern that the bottom bracket was still out of reach of most in Johannesburg:

The median monthly household income in Johannesburg is ZAR 14 000. We need to plan at least for the median. The rental on a property worth ZAR 800 000 is around ZAR 8000 a month, which is more than half the salary of the median income. You need to get your range down. Your beginning range doesn’t even get to the median point. […] From what I see here this is really not making the kind of contribution for the urban space for the city to […] put its energy into this space (Notes, Final Workshop, 28–29 July 2015).

The consultant’s position was that the developer could cede some land in order for the government to construct ‘social housing’. In other words anything below the planned range would be subsidised by government. While municipal officials agreed with the need to use available subsidies for this, they also cited developments elsewhere in the city that were able to market commercially viable housing for considerably less than R800,000 (US$62,670) per unit.

This line of dispute came to a head in one workshop when a Colliers consultant argued that rather than trying to force a social mix, it is was important to think about the potential of collecting revenue in one place to support social gains elsewhere. Using the example of London he argued:

Where does it make sense to generate money that we can plough into in order to help people get up the ladder? It does not make sense from anyone’s point of view to provide low cost housing in Mayfair. Rather sell it to Russian billionaires and let accommodation for the poor happen elsewhere (Notes, Final Workshop, 28–29 July 2015).

This set off a tense exchange, with the City official saying ‘We have a fundamental problem with that. Where is elsewhere?’ Attempts by the workshop convenor to present the project as convergent with the interests of City officials gave way to a firm divergence in interests. Staff from Zendai stated that they did not feel that Modderfontein could address the developmental imperatives of Johannesburg and that it had to be commercially viable in the first instance. The resolution of these debates was that Zendai was going to partner with specialists in affordable market segments to better understand how they could incorporate it into their plans. Furthermore, municipal officials indicated that they wanted commitments to percentages of affordable housing to be incorporated in the plan.

The third major concern of officials was that Zendai intended to build 1.5 million square metres of commercial space. This was comparable in size to the office space in Johannesburg’s major financial hub of Sandton at the time. Officials pointed out that Johannesburg already had an oversupply of office space. They were concerned that Modderfontein might do to the rest of the city what Sandton had once done to downtown Johannesburg, which is attract businesses to new nodes, leaving a vacuum in established nodes. Officials argued that their spatial logic was to ensure that existing stock was fully utilised before building new stock.

The developer’s team attempted to argue that they would construct commercial space for new economic activity rather than ‘cannibalise’ existing tenants from other parts of the city. They also argued that they were attempting to attract major new anchor tenants not already present in the city, with a hope that Modderfontein could be a base for Chinese firms seeking to establish themselves in Johannesburg. They were exploring ways of building niche economic clusters that would not compete with existing or planned clusters elsewhere in the city. However beyond brainstorming some ideas, some of which did in fact compete with existing clusters, the speakers were vague on what economic gaps such a cluster might fill. The workshop convenor made generic reassurances that office space would be phased over time so as not to dump an oversupply onto Johannesburg (Notes, Final Workshop, 28–29 July 2015).

As City officials raised their various concerns, members of the developer’s team weighed in with less conciliatory comments such as ‘the moment you get too rigid, the developer will just bypass you’ (Notes, Option Selection Workshop, 26–27 May 2015). They stressed the need for financial viability and returns to investors (Notes, Final Workshop, 28–29 July 2015). Such comments occurred at around the time that Zendai’s ownership changed, which seemed to City of Johannesburg officials to reduce their confidence in what they would be able to do. In private, Zendai’s professional staff said to City officials that ‘the more onerous […] expectations [of inclusionary housing] are on them, the less certain they are as local representatives that they’d be able to call it “sell it” to the major majority [Zendai’s financial backers]’ (Interview, City planners, 3 August 2015). City officials meanwhile said that they felt no pressure to have development for the sake of development, and would rather leave it undeveloped for now and hold out for a plan that aligned with the City’s interests.

In the months following the workshops, the Atkins-led team prepared a master plan which they submitted for approval in late 2015. By early 2016, City officials returned the plan, unapproved, with concerns which they believed had not been addressed. The plan was revised and resubmitted and eventually approved by 2017. By this point Zendai no longer owned the land, and the new land owner, M&T Development, with two decades of experience in the region quickly began marketing residential units starting at R699,000 (approximately US$52,000).

Conclusion

Grabher and Ibert (2011: 175) note that projects ‘enact their own small worlds’ by bringing together a temporary organisation, comprising parts of long-term organisations and individual actors, for a particular objective. Sometimes, as this case has shown, these small worlds stretch across the world, coalescing at times into a forum of people together in a room working through project details. These networks bring together quite different interests, cultures of planning and planning rationalities, which manifest as open debate or simply talking past one another. This case has also shown how the fate of a project may well not be in the hands of those in the room; and that distant financial backers in particular have agency to dismantle the network that their developers have assembled.

In attempting to prepare the ground for its project, Zendai produced a remarkable set of relationships. At around the time of the project’s announcement in 2013, its primary relationships were with its financial backers in China, technical staff from China, senior politicians in the province and Johannesburg professionals familiar with the site. It neglected, initially, to bring on board the most important set of relationships, with local regulatory authorities from the City of Johannesburg. In the two years that followed the 2013 launch, the developer attempted a more systematic and concerted effort at articulating with the local environment. They gave responsibility for developing a new master plan to three British based consultancies. Consultants hoped that they could use workshops, a novel practice for Johannesburg, to ‘bring the City through the evolution of this project’ (Interview, Arup engineer, 4 August 2015). During 2015, these specialists presented authorities with arguments that good design and global best practice could deliver many gains for Johannesburg. Consultants also attempted to appropriate City officials’ interests in densification and transit-oriented development, a strategy that was insufficient to placate the authority’s material concerns about the project. Paradoxically, workshops also provided the space for City officials to crystallise and articulate their concerns and for differences to become explicit.

To observers of these workshops it did not seem that a deal was impossible and that, after the phase of hard bargaining, a compromise could be struck. At the final workshop of the master planning process in 2015, Atkins led a discussion on the project’s short-, medium- and long-term construction work, the final phases of which were supposed to be built in the 2060s. Participants may have felt that they were part of a history-making moment, that people not yet born would be taking keys to new apartments in half a century’s time because of the largest ever injection of foreign direct investment into South African cities being discussed in that room. Yet, on the other side of the world, conditions were unfolding that would cause these seemingly solid plans to melt into air (to borrow the wording of Berman, 1988). With hindsight, the monumentality of Zendai’s launch graphics in 2013 seem indicative not of their certainty, but of the many unknowns they had yet to resolve.

Their plans for Modderfontein now join the ranks of the many ‘new cities’ planned in Africa that will never achieve material form (van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018). These events help to challenge ‘accounts that have positioned globalization as a systemic, relentless, and all-encompassing force, propelling individual economic sectors along a historical path of ever-widening scales of coordination and integration’ (Wood, 2009: 121). In particular, it shows the way in which states in developing countries can ‘rethink and remake the contemporary world rather than being simply passively “globalized” by it’ (Ong, 2011: 10). Yet this is no easy triumph; the development of Modderfontein by other actors will contribute to the economically segmented structure of Johannesburg in much the same way that Zendai’s project would have, albeit within a less spectacular frame. The case underscores the contingency shaping which urban entrepreneurs are able to develop property; how developers work, sometimes in vain, to secure their own future on a site; and how quickly investors cash in and move on.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Temba Middelmann for collaborating with us on fieldwork. We thank Frances Brill, Siân Butcher, Christina Culwick, Bronwyn Kotzen, Morgan Moutan, Margot Rubin and the reviewers for their comments on drafts.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: We acknowledge the support received through the South African Research Chairs Initiative of South Africa's National Research Foundation.

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