Changing Space, Changing City

Johannesburg is South Africa’s premier city and is the heart of the Gauteng City-Region that accounts for over one-third of the country’s economic output. Over the past decade or so there has been a growing scholarship on space, politics, development and culture in the city. This writing has established a local and global readership, with Johannesburg emerging as an exemplar of urbanism in the global South. While these studies have established a readership, and contributed greatly to an understanding of the many dimensions of change in the city, there arguably remain some important gaps in the literature.

In an attempt to address these GCRO, in partnership with the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, recently completed an edited collection called Changing Space Changing City – Johannesburg after apartheid. The book, published by Wits University Press, is the first in a series of three envisaged volumes on spatial change in the city-region. The second will focus on Pretoria and its hinterland, and the third will examine trends in the industrial and mining arc stretching around Johannesburg from the East Rand, south to Vereeniging-Vanderbijlpark-Sasolburg, and west to mining towns such as Carletonville and Westonaria.

The Johannesburg book, comprising 34 chapters, was edited by Professors Philip Harrison and Alison Todes from the Wits School of Architecture and Planning, and Graeme Gotz and Chris Wray from GCRO. Four of the chapters were authored or co-authored by GCRO staff.

The book focuses on the city’s physical form and the extraordinary spatial changes in the period following the ending of apartheid. These changes are related to trends across the economic, political, social and cultural domains. The volume therefore seeks to bridge distinct scholarly traditions that emphasise either the ‘material’ or ‘cultural’ dimensions of the city. In terms of the material dimension its major contribution is to provide a multi-layered analysis of urban change drawing on new and updated sources of empirical data such as the 2011 Census, the City of Johannesburg’s development planning information system, and GCRO’s substantial data archive.

More detail.