V&A Waterfront CEO, David Green, shared more insight into their plans to invest in excess of R24bn on developing the Granger Bay precinct, the last undeveloped area of the Waterfront, over the next 15 – 20 years.

The V&A Waterfront, owned by Growthpoint and GEPF (managed by PIC), intends to develop Granger Bay into a place for the public to enjoy and interact with the ocean, where a key feature will be the creation of a sheltered bay using new breakwaters.

This public amenity will include areas for marine education, coastal pedestrian walkways, tidal pools, a slipway, fixed quayside, boating, snorkelling and kayaking. The surrounding area will be residential-led, featuring hotels, serviced apartments, private apartments, as well as retail, office, and leisure spaces.

Green was presenting the details of the development to Minister of Tourism Patricia de Lille, and journalists during a meeting in the lead-up to the G20 Tourism Investment Summit.

“This Granger Bay project will look at being regenerative, and what that simply means is that it won’t just look at being carbon neutral, it will actually preserve all the resources, and generate more than what we actually consume. It is quite ambitious.

Green explained that the Waterfront focuses on food, art, craft, design, retail, and sustainability, whereby fostering those ecosystems, and using a collaborative approach, will allow them to grow income and job generation.

“Our vision is to collectively grow the world’s most inspiring waterfront neighbourhood. It is all about these ecosystems, public-private partnerships, and working with tenants. We want people to come and be inspired.

“Right now, we are in the process of an application to take the 600,000 square metres, and add to that another 440,000 square metres.

“That application has been with the City for several years, and in the next few months, we hope that it will go to a municipal planning tribunal, and we’re hoping that we’ll be given the permission, with certain caveats, to progress with that additional 440,000 square metres,” Green said.

“Most of it will focus on Granger Bay, and it isn’t actually a bay, but the idea is to create a bay. We’re looking at a place with more connection to the water, providing lots of opportunities for jobs, and for the promotion of marine sustainability and inclusivity.

The project will seek to provide an additional 1km of walkable space and include inclusionary housing opportunities.

Green said the innovative aspects of the Granger Bay project are that they are taking inaccessible coastal protection to transform it into a swimmable, diveable, accessible area for people to carry out a host of water activities.

“What we’ve done is put designers together with marine engineers, who have historically never talked to each other, and said, look, this heavy coastal interaction (with 7m waves) only happens about 5% of the year, so for the other 95%, what we are going to do is use the coastal protection to create an accessible piece of infrastructure.

“To our knowledge, it is the first time anywhere in the world they have taken coastal protection and turned it into a public amenity for 95% of the time.

“The second thing about it is that we’re looking for the bay to be a model of marine ecology. What we’re doing is creating an accessible bay, and we’ll have a turtle rescue centre. We’ve taken a baseline of what the marine activity is, and then we’ll be encouraging businesses to prototype ideas for marine ecology.

“All of that (Granger Bay) will be accessible to the millions who visit the waterfront. It is not going to be a place for motorised vessels, it is very much a place to swim, dive, and to look at how you improve the marine ecology – so two quite innovative features of Granger Bay.”

Green has said that concerning the inclusionary housing model, they are still evolving it, but that they are also looking at a “once affordable, always affordable” model, where to qualify, the household income would have to be below a certain threshold, and did specify that it “is not social housing”.

In terms of their timeline, they’ve already started on it, but are hoping to get their environmental permissions within the next three to four years. Green said he foresees a continuum of the development, as they still have some build left.

theolin.tembo@inl.co.za

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