Books and Journal special issues

Vernacular Regeneration: Low-income housing, private policing and urban transformation in inner-city Johannesburg was written by Dr Aidan Mosselson and published by Routledge in September 2018. Based on his PhD in Social Geography at University College London (UCL), Dr Mosselson wrote the bulk of the book when he was a University of Johannesburg funded post-doctoral fellow at GCRO between early 2016 and late 2017.

In 2014, the Minister of Human Settlements signalled an intention to phase out smaller low cost housing projects and to construct all housing within large 'mega projects' or 'catalytic projects'. According to this new direction, Cosmo City in Johannesburg, Cornubia in eThekwini and the N2 Gateway project in Cape Town were to become the models for dozens of new large scale projects across the country.

This volume’s central theme is city-regions and their changing space economies in the global South. These are regions that are witnessing new scales of urbanization, and are integrating into global economic relationships, transportation infrastructures and, increasingly, new information and communications technologies. These regions also witness many complex government arrangements, features that shape these regions immensely.

In the east end of the inner city of Johannesburg, a former textiles factory undergoes a dramatic transformation to become, over the next several years, one of the city’s foremost artists’ studios. When the sale of the building seems imminent, not only must the artists face the daunting prospect of relocation, but a remarkable chapter in the complex narrative of contemporary South African art seems about to close. Sensing the importance of this moment

Richard Ballard was one of four editors of a special issue of the South African Geographical Journal entitled ‘South African Geography at 100’. The idea for this special issue arose from discussions by the Council of the Society for South African Geographers in planning for the centenary of Geography in South Africa. Geography was first taught in 1914 at Victoria College which later became Stellenbosch University (Visser, Donaldson, & Seethal, 2016).