Project Title: High-Rise Harvest 

Project Location: Johannesburg 

Project Focus Area: Landscape

Supervisor(s): Dr Karen Botes 

Project Description: 

With levels of food waste soaring and carbon emissions reaching catastrophic highs, it is becoming clear that South Africa will not meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. At a nationwide level, we need a dramatic shift to restore resilience in our urban spaces and minimise our reliance on carbon-intensive food systems - an urban revolution, if you will. However, we lack a role model on this front: our cities will require a real­world precedent to strive towards, effectively addressing the Sustainable Development Goals in an African Context. I envision these shoes being filled by Sandton Central through the High-Rise Harvests Framework. This project seeks to answer the following questions: 

• What interventions should be implemented to support a productive, resilient, and circular urban environment in Sandton Central?
• How can landscape architecture and urban agriculture enhance community engagement in this productive, resilient, and circular urban environment?

With a technical sub-question of: 

• How can circularity and resilience be achieved by cultivating edible plants in Sandton Central?

Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPU Ls) and Urban Agriculture (UA) have been proven to be the way forward in constructing resilient cities. The City of Johannesburg confirms in their Food Resilience Policy that within the next seven years, it will be crucial to initiate smart, innovative UA approaches and to elevate UA to a strategic, sustainable level to impact food systems. The High­Rise Harvests initiative aims to kickstart this in Sandton Central with the vision of a precinct which places equal value on social, environmental, economic, and agricultural productivity. This vision aims to accomplish an urban agricultural network emphasising community collaboration and sustainable resource management whilst utilising green infrastructure to improve regulating and supporting ecosystem services. The High-Rise Harvests Framework entails adding three new green infrastructural, urban agricultural layers to the node: lightweight rooftop farms (The Canopy), green non-motorised transport (NMT) corridors (The Roots), and innovation parks (The Terrain). Terrain Innovation Park will be the first phase of this initiative to foster the initial and long-lasting collaboration between educational institutions, local businesses, and the surrounding community and to instigate the widespread uptake of vertical food production throughout the precinct. The park aims to showcase the potential of various innovative vertical food production systems to champion circularity, versatility, and social engagement while simultaneously producing restaurant-quality vegetables. 

While many factors contribute to urban resilience, this project has chosen to focus on the people. Resilience and sustainability are not purely mechanical and rely heavily on human collaboration, investment, and engagement. The solution to increasing community engagement with urban agricultural initiatives explored by this project has been by combining agriculture with activities familiar to people's everyday lives - such as socialising, eating, and working. Given the current practice of'working remotely' or the culture of dining out in Sandton, Terrain Innovation Park could present a fresh standpoint for these pursuits while igniting interest amongst participants for the produce they consume daily.