Located at 77 Monty Naicker Road, Durban, is the office of the Urban Management team, dedicated to restoring and maintaining Durban. The location also boasts one of Durban’s best kept secrets.
Concealed on the top of the eThekweni Municipality’s Urban Management building is a rooftop garden, filled with luscious herbs, vegetables and indigenous plants. The rooftop garden was the first of its kind in Durban, designed and made a reality by Wendy Gibson-Taylor. The rooftop is 1200 square feet of urban farmland in the Durban CBD. All material used for the garden is recyclable and encourages sustainable living.
A variety of flora can be found growing in anything ranging from old shoes from the Chinese factories, old tyres, a broken traffic light, to an old bus stop. Water is harvested from the neighbouring building, and the garden possesses a treadmill pump, that can be pumped manually, which generates the sprinklers to water the garden.
The Urban Management office has solar powered mats situated on the rooftop, thus the office uses solar electricity to power the building; including the computers the employees work on! Furthermore, a fish farm situated below the rooftop garden, contains tilapia that contribute to fertilising the vertical garden wall. Another remarkable feature is the beehive on the rooftop garden, found next to rows of tunnels filled with vegetables. Urban Management harvests these vegetables and provides them to rural areas.
The rooftop garden hosts educational tours on how to grow your own sustainable vegetable garden and sustain a family through only recycled material, as exhibited in the garden. It also hosts functions and was well received as a location for a pop-up café during the COP 17 Conference.
The rooftop is open to the public everyday- a must see for passionate gardeners and anyone keen to learn about sustainable gardening!

One street at a time
Urban Management at the side of eThekweni Municipality is bettering Durban one street at a time, and also giving back to the community through their various projects. Additionally, Urban Management along with the eThekweni Municipality is further showing patronage concerning the environment, as they are responsible for the recent tidying, restoration and overall cleansing of the streets of Durban. In 2009 the priority zone Pilot Project was established to “manage, and maintain the environmental, economic, social and cultural aspects of the city as a place for all”.
The goal of the project is to change the perception of the area, and in so doing to attract people to come back and draw closer to the city again. There has been a major change in the streets, as the team believes that by changing the area, a behavioural change will follow, resulting in the whole city participating in keeping Durban attractive. According to Urban Management, their greatest achievement is that they have changed behavioural patterns, appropriate to their belief of â€˜change the space, change the attitude’.

eThekwini Urban Management and rooftop garden
031 332 0442