Books & journal special issues

Governing Complex City-Regions in the Twenty-First Century: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa

This book provides a comparative study of the complex governance challenges confronting city-regions in each of the BRICS countries. It traces how governance approaches emerge from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors, working in diverse contexts of political settlement and culture.

The Routledge Handbook of Social Change

The Routledge Handbook of Social Change provides an interdisciplinary primer to the intellectual approaches that hold the key to understanding the complexity of social change in the twenty-first century. Drawing on disciplines including anthropology, human geography, political sociology, and development studies, this is a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to researching key issues raised by the challenge of making sense of the twenty-first century futures.

Scale of belonging: Gauteng 30 Years After the Repeal of the Group Areas Act

Over the last three decades South Africa’s urban spaces have been alive with transformations in the scale of spatial arrangements, and this has important implications for the ways in which ordinary people identify with one another, understand their place in both society and space, and are able to take up a position in the city that allows them to live their lives.

This Urban Forum special issue arises from a GCRO project,Scale, Belonging and Exclusion, which brought together a group of researchers who met regularly to share literature and develop their research. This collection offers five studies in which scale manifests as a dynamic related to belonging. They allow us to understand how changes to scale come about, who drives them and what implications they have for the lives of ordinary people. They also allow us to explore normative positions taken by actors in these studies about the ‘right’ scale of spatial arrangements. This special issue was published 30 years after the repeal of the Group Areas Act.

Comparing the relational work of developers (Environment and Planning A special issue)

The major output of the Building Gauteng project is a themed issue of the journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, published in March 2020 and guest edited by Richard Ballard and Sian Butcher. This collection of papers arose following a two day workshop from 25 to 27 July 2016, on the theme ‘Understanding the role of urban developers’. Four of the papers contained in the collection are of developers in Johannesburg and three were on cases in Toronto, Manila and London.

Excerpt from the editorial

The work of developers consists not only of the material production of space the material production of space, but also to social forms of production – relational work as we call it. The interests of developers in going ahead with a project at all exist alongside the interests of state actors, finance and civil society. As a comparison of the seven studies in this theme issue shows, state actors do not only set the broad market conditions to which developers respond, they are also direct instigators of projects, or indeed they can resist those embarking on projects. It would be incorrect to assume, on the basis of this evidence, a diminishing role of the state, although the interests of state actors have contradictory effects on the accumulation interests of developers. Moreover, the cases show the ways in which the private sector is sometimes motivated by more-than-accumulation imperatives.

To the extent that there is adequate agreement on the merits of a project to proceed in preparing and producing it, this work is undertaken not by a discrete actor but rather a variety of actors within the lead firm and beyond it. This point has been well developed in both economic geography and literature on developers. In our comparison of cases in this collection we note the differentiation between developers who vertically integrate functions within their firm and those who build relationships beyond their firms, either with more or less equal status consortium partners or outsourced specialisations and functions. There is no inevitability towards the ever greater division of labour; specialisation in some cases can exist alongside functional integration in others. The assemblage that constitutes and forms around the developer can reflect powerful actors’ calculus on the advantages they might gain. An exploded view of the developer can help to disaggregate the many actors involved, their different roles, the ways in which they are connected and how those actors, roles and connections shift over time. In turn, this can advance our understanding of how the production of space unfolds and the ways in which power relations in urban development politics are negotiated.

Articles

Ballard, Richard and Sian Butcher (2020) 'Comparing the relational work of developers' Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 52(2): 266-276 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19893684

Mosselson, Aidan (2020) Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 52(2):277-296https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19830970

Alison Todes and Jennifer Robinson (2020) Re-directing developers: New models of rental housing development to re-shape the post-apartheid city? Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 52(2): 297-317 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19871069

Leffers, Donald and Gerda R Wekerle (2020) Land developers as institutional and postpolitical actors: Sites of power in land use policy and planning Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 52(2): 318-336https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19856628

Butcher, Sian (2020) 'Appropriating rent from greenfield affordable housing: developer practices in Johannesburg. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 52(2): 337-361 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19895278

Brill, Frances (2020) 'Complexity and coordination in London’s Silvertown Quays: How real estate developers (re)centred themselves in the planning process.' Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 52(2): 362-382https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19860159

Ballard, Richard and Philip Harrison (2020) 'Transnational Urbanism Interrupted: A Chinese developer’s attempts to secure approval to build the ‘New York of Africa’ at Modderfontein, Johannesburg.' Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 52(2): 383-402 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19853277

Mouton, Morgan and Gavin Shatkin (2020) Strategizing the for-profit city: The state, developers, and urban production in Mega Manila Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 52(2): 403-422https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19840365

Vernacular regeneration: Low-income housing, private policing and urban transformation in inner-city Johannesburg

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.

Megaprojects for SA's settlements (Transformation special issue #95)

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.

The Changing Space Economy of City Regions: The Gauteng City-Region

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.

August House is Dead, Long Live August House!

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

The Society of South African Geographers Centenary Special Issue

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).

Movement Johannesburg

Movement Johannesburg is a publication that examines the historical and contemporary movements that have and continue to shape Johannesburg. Edited by Zahira Asmal and GCRO Research Associate Guy Trangoš the anthology reflects the experiences and opinions of a number of Johannesburg-based authors, academics, photographers, architects, artists and researchers. It presents the city as a complex and changing web of diverse

Changing Space, Changing City - Johannesburg after Apartheid

the dynamo of South Africa’s economy, Johannesburg commands a central position in the nation’s imagination, and scholars throughout the world monitor the city as an exemplar of urbanity in the global South.

This richly illustrated study offers detailed empirical analyses of changes in the city’s physical space, as well as a host of chapters on the character of specific neighbourhoods and the social identities being forged within them. Informing all of these is a consideration of underlying economic, social and political processes shaping the wider Gauteng region.

Non-racialism in South Africa (Book)

When Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa in 1994, the world looked on at the 'miracle' of racial reconciliation that unfolded in South Africa. However, the dream of a 'Rainbow Nation' (in Archbishop Desmond Tutu's phrase) seems to be fading, and racial identities seem to be more entrenched than ever. What prospects then for the 'non-racial democracy' envisioned by Mandela and the South African Constitution?