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.

21st‐century transnational real estate development: What, where, who, how and why?

“…It is, for example, not a coincidence that alongside New York and London, cities such as Shanghai, Singapore, and Dubai have also become popular categories for inter‐referencing, particularly among aspiring politicians and policy‐makers in the Global South. Transnational developers from those places have been actively exporting their respective cities' urban development ‘models' in recent years, following state‐related institutional investors or large business conglomerates (Ballard & Harrison, 2020; Dixon, 2010; Elsheshtawy, 2019; Hanieh, 2018; Koelemaij, 2020; Pow, 2014; Shatkin, 2014).…”

Comparing the relational work of developers

“…New markets have also been ‘discovered’ on the city’s periphery where owners of historically agricultural land supply entry-level detached housing to first-time black homeowners (Butcher, 2019). In the north east of the city, a Shanghai-based firm – attempting to diversify away from the flagging Chinese property market – bought an undeveloped site and planned to build a ‘new city’ for middle-class residents and commerce (Ballard and Harrison, 2019). Meanwhile, city authorities have worked to attract affordable housing developers into transit-oriented corridors in central parts of the city (Todes and Robinson, 2019).…”

“…In these two cases, state actors did not jointly initiate these projects but rather responded to developers’ projects in contradictory ways, with some supporting (column B) and others resisting aspects of the development (column C). Crucially, in Ballard and Harrison (2019), Johannesburg municipal government’s resistance contributed to an international investor’s decision to abandon its project. This state resistance or support could also change over time, under different political administrations and pressures from civil society, as in Toronto (Leffers and Wekerle, 2019).…”

“…Financial actors in these studies (thick underline in column B) pursued their interests proactively or reactively through state or developer-initiated projects. The increasing financialisation of urban development – treating everything from land to infrastructure to condominiums as fungible tradable financial assets (see Searle, 2016) – might drive the production of space in some instances: through new asset classes from which to capture rental streams, such as affordable housing in Johannesburg (Mosselson, 2019; Todes and Robinson, 2019), or in the ultimate power financiers had to ‘pull the plug’ as the Bank of China did in Modderfontein (Ballard and Harrison, 2019). But this is not a given.…”

“…In this collection, some of the cases exhibited instances of outsourcing in which the lead developer firm played a largely coordinating function, subcontracting work on environmental assessments, civil engineering and planning. The role of coordinator may shift during the development process (Brill, 2019) – with consultants rather than developers taking the lead at times (Ballard and Harrison, 2019; Brill, 2019). In particularly complex developments, there is a consortium rather than a single developer firm, where opaque coordination arrangements are themselves a source of power (Brill, 2019).…”