Ripple effects and regeneration | Q&A with Jonathan Wilson
A stone’s throw from the action going on at UKREiiF is the Climate Innovation District, brainchild of Leeds-based developer Citu. The CID will eventually have more than 1,000 houses and apartments, including all the amenities necessary for a self-sufficient, low carbon community. Place Yorkshire met with Jonathan Wilson, owner, and director of the sustainability-focused housebuilder, to discuss the district itself, the challenges involved with sustainable housebuilding, and where Citu would like to build next.
It’s an incredible development, which is already home to residents including yourself and fellow Citu director Chris Thompson. When will it be finished and what is there left to do?
When we set out on the project in 2017, it was always envisioned that it would be at least 10-15 years’ worth of work. We’ll have just over 1,000 homes and what is important is we intertwine all the amenities required for a genuinely great sustainable place, so it will have a bakery, a green-grocer, a brewery, and then of course a primary school, so with that ambition we set on the project clear that we would be here on-site for as long as we needed to create the best outcome for the city and it’s community.
We’re about a third of the way through the development right now, so in the next five or six years we’ll be finished. About midway through next year we’ll have completed the first major phase on the north bank of the River Aire.
Also on-site here at the District is our MMC facility where we build our closed panel structural timber frames to Passivhaus standards, where our buildings are manufactured.
As well as the CID, what other schemes are you working on at the moment?
We’re live on four sites across the region, and very much committed to making an incredible and important impact in Yorkshire. We’re live here in Leeds at the Climate Innovation District, and we’ve got a project just down the canal in Kirkstall, Stãll, which will be finished this year. We’ve been on site there for the last two years delivering an exemplar housing scheme on the edge of the city fringe, again on a connected waterway leading to Leeds City Centre.
We’re coming to an end in Kelham Island where we started our journey 14 years ago, when we bought our first site there. We’ve seen the regeneration of the wider Kelham Island as we’ve progressed through two significant phases delivering over 350 homes, and that will also be finished by the end of this year.
So, there’s lots of things finishing this year, then on the horizon we’ve got a really exciting and important regeneration scheme at Attercliffe Waterside that will be delivering 1,000 homes over 10-12 years. The scheme works in parallel with Sheffield’s own ambitions for Attercliffe and just like Little Kelham aims to be a catalyst for wide-scale regeneration in this exciting part of Sheffield. Like all our projects we will start with the delivery of some key amenities to create the right foundation for a great place for people to live.
We’re also proactively acquiring new sites that are in different stages of planning, design, or development. So lots of future planning at the moment at Citu.
Do you have plans for another CID? Where would be your dream location for another one?
When we had the vision for the Climate Innovation District, we anticipated this would be the only one, but that it would help us realise our ambitions and solidify our thinking and ideas, before sending them off to the next project. Attercliffe Waterside is a live project which will build off and benefit from all those ideas and different levels of thinking. I don’t think there will be another Climate Innovation District as it has its own identity community but certainly a lot of the principles will be shared, developed alongside our future thinking. .
The question around where else we would build is something that we talk about all the time. It’s important that we find, brownfield, connected sites that are full of opportunity, we have a bold vision of what can be achieved in often forgotten areas of town and cities.
Is the plan to stay Yorkshire-focused, or would you build outside of Yorkshire?
The short answer to that is our pipeline for the next three to five years sees us delivering important project across Yorkshire, however impact and scale are a byproduct of each other. So, I think in future we would look to projects outside of Yorkshire but they’d have to be the right site, at the right time, with a clear ability to impact the surrounding areas with a positive shift to a more sustainable future.
What are the main challenges and opportunities when you put sustainability at the forefront of development?
We try and find solutions to most challenges that are imposed upon us, and viability is one of those. We work to what we call a medium-density model, whereby removing cars from our landscape presents us with opportunities to change customer perceptions, opportunities for biodiversity, people, and ultimately gives us more land for homes and amenities, which enables us to deliver up to four times what a traditional housebuilder model would be able to deliver on an acre of land.
There’s a lot of challenges that come with doing innovative things and creating meaningful change. We’ve responded to these challenges by creating a culture of one hundred-plus incredible people that have all bought into our ‘why’ – who are up for the challenge of positively creating a ripple effect in the industry.
You spoke at the recent Humanise Summit. How does that ethos interlink with sustainability?
I read the book about 18 months ago and if you boil it down to the simple principles, it’s about providing joyful, interesting places where people can thrive and enjoy being around less boring buildings. That connects to everything that we believe in and have been doing for many years, so there was a really great synergy there around ‘how do we support the movement’, but also help the Humanise campaign develop their idea and movement.
So, we joined up with Humanise as the first developer in the UK to partner on the movement. Our role is very much about how we can make sure that sustainability is at the forefront of how to humanise places and how to make both sustainable and happy places. We’re very clear that the spaces between the buildings – and you can see this here in the District – are as important as the buildings, so one of our roles in the campaign is to share that you can create both interesting buildings that are interesting and joyful, but actually, if you focus on the spaces between them in equal measure for both humans and also bio-diversity and the public, that you can create something pretty special.
And finally, what are you focusing on here at UKREiiF?
We’ve got an amazing opportunity as a developer, in the sense that the UKREiiF set up is a one minute walk down the river to our flagship development, The Climate Innovation District. So, for us, it’s about showcasing and sharing who we are, our amazing people, our amazing projects, and showing the industry what can be done to create a really positive, productive ripple effect in the built environment. We really welcome visitors to come and join a tour and experience the district first hand.
