Research Outputs (GCRO)

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Towards applying a green infrastructure approach in the Gauteng City-Region
(Gauteng City-Region Observatory, 2019-12) Culwick, Christina; Khanyile, Samkelisiwe; Bobbins, Kerry; Dunsmore, Stuart; Fitchett, Anne; Monama, Lerato; Naidu, Raishan; Sykes, Gillian; van den Bussche, Jennifer; Vieira, Marco
The Gauteng City-Region (GCR) regularly experiences heatwaves, raising renewed concerns over water security, as well as heavy and persistent rains, leading to severe flooding in some areas. In this context of heightened climate variability, thinking about ways to redesign our urban areas with more sustainable infrastructure solutions is becoming more and more important. Green infrastructure (GI) is emerging as an alternative approach to traditional (‘grey’) infrastructure in urban planning and development. Its emergence can be understood in terms of the growing demand for infrastructure and services, increased concerns over natural resource constraints and climate change, and the negative impacts associated with traditional approaches to designing and building cities. It has been proposed that GI can provide the same services as traditional infrastructure at a similar capital cost, while also providing a range of additional benefits. However, despite greater policy interest in green infrastructure in recent years, traditional infrastructure solutions to urban problems continue to dominate. This is partly due to the lack of a systematic evidence base to support GI implementation. There have been calls from decision-makers for more concrete examples of the benefits of successful urban GI applications, as well as for practical guidelines on their implementation. Towards applying a green infrastructure approach in the Gauteng City-Region is the GCRO’s eleventh Research Report. This report builds on the findings of two previous green infrastructure reports, as well as a CityLab process run with academics and government officials between 2014 and 2016. These outputs and the CityLab discussions highlighted as critical the need to for a deeper evidence base in building support for, and enhancing investment in, the GI approach. Unlike the earlier studies which were more theoretically grounded and policy oriented, this report comprises a number of technical investigations that more practically reflect on how a GI approach could be incorporated into urban planning in the GCR, and in other similar urban contexts.
Quality of Life IV Survey (2015/16): City Benchmarking Report
(Gauteng City Region Observatory, 2018-09) Culwick, Christina
South Africa’s post-apartheid government has been successful in raising the standard of living for millions of people. It has provided them with access to housing and basic services, improved health and education, and developed social services and urban amenities where none existed before. However, there remain many thorny development challenges that government is, at least at present, poorly equipped to address. Consequently, there remains deep dissatisfaction among many residents, which at various times and in certain contexts has led to widespread community protests. This report stems from the premise that data, and analysis thereof, are critical for local and provincial governments in Gauteng to understand where progress has been made and where intervention is required. The City Benchmarking Report presents some key findings from the Quality of Life IV (2015/16) survey at the municipal and provincial levels. The results provide insight into a range of objective indicators such as access to basic services, travel patterns, and economic activity, as well as respondents’ subjective opinions, perceptions and levels of satisfaction. This combination allows us to gain a multi-dimensional understanding of quality of life in the province as well as some of the drivers that improve or worsen it. While there are many aspects of quality of life measured by the survey, this report focuses on specific issues related to municipal service access, satisfaction with services received, satisfaction with the municipality providing those services, and the relationship between access, satisfaction and overall quality of life. Although this report allows government, residents and stakeholders to compare municipalities with one another, its benchmarking analysis should not be read as a competitive scoring of cities, which in turn becomes a basis for municipalities to market themselves as having the ‘highest quality of life’, or to vie with one another over who has the best performance. Some municipalities do better on some variables, but worse on others. The point of this report is to help each municipality understand its own strengths and weaknesses in relation to others and to the broader Gauteng context.
Taking streets seriously
(Gauteng City-Region Observatory, 2018-02) Harber, Jesse; Parker, Alexandra; Joseph, Kate; Maree, Gillian
In many parts of Gauteng, streets are congested with cars, trucks, minibus taxis, pedestrians, and informal traders. In other parts, streets are quiet, underutilised and frequently underserviced. The surface quality of the city-region’s streets varies widely – from the engineering marvel of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project to those (relatively few) remaining gravel or dirt roads. Besides these contrasts, there are many other degrees of quality by which Gauteng’s streets vary. In some parts of Gauteng, streets have become privatised or heavily securitised. The phenomenon of ‘gated’ communities either manifests as enclosed streets within private estates or as closed-off existing public-road networks in older suburban areas. Some streets are patrolled by security guards, lined with high walls and electric fences, and surveyed by CCTV cameras. In busy areas, informal traders sell their wares on the pavement or at traffic lights, adding to the congestion on narrow sidewalks. These activities are subject to varying levels of control and police harassment, where by-laws dictating the use of roads and pavements are haphazardly enforced, with trading goods or café tables randomly confiscated across the city. And, like many other features of the urban environment, the quality of Gauteng’s streets is highly uneven. This Research Report, ‘Taking Streets Seriously’, interrogates how what is considered good urban design and liveability of streets may shift in different contexts. Through a series of case studies it attempts to understand the various logics at play in Gauteng’s streets – not only the logics of their designers, builders or managers, but also of those who inhabit, use, or otherwise interact with them. The studies unearthed a complex interplay of actors on Gauteng streets, with street users, property owners and the state each operating according to their own, diverse agendas, contingent on the particular street in question. The result is streets that are chaotic, contested, and changing over time. It is fair to say that, with only a few exceptions, Gauteng’s streets were and continue to be designed with hostility or a studied disregard towards anyone not behind a steering wheel. Yet despite the dominance of cars, pedestrian activities do proliferate. While indubitably car-centric, they are nonetheless sites of diverse and vibrant 'non-motorised' life. This vibrancy is no thanks to those who constructed and now control our streets. Non-car users have only made their mark by contesting the territory of the street using a variety of tactics. With this Research Report, we hope to prompt a re-imagination of our streets, not least as streets rather than roads, but also as public spaces. Streets comprise by far the majority of public space in contemporary Gauteng, where other forms, such as plazas and parks, are woefully inadequate. Streets taken seriously – not by users, who have little choice, but by their designers, planners, and managers – have enormous potential to enable and encourage public life in Gauteng’s cities. Conversely, streets that are poorly made or neglected outright can constrain both the society and economy of a city. Ultimately, we hope to correct an official urban discourse that overlooks the many uses to which streets are and could be put. In a time of enormous excitement and corresponding investment in our cities, we would like to see some of both these factors directed towards the (re)development of our streets.
Mining landscapes of the Gauteng City-Region
(Gauteng City-Region Observatory, 2018-01) Bobbins, Kerry; Trangos, Guy
The extraction of gold along the Witwatersrand mining belt has fundamentally shaped the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) over more than a century. Mining in the region occurred across a vast area. The Witwatersrand basin is made up of three sub-basins – the West’, ‘Central’ and ‘East’ Rand – and stretches across a further seven distinct gold mining areas. These goldfields attracted prospectors, industrialists and work-seekers from across South Africa and around the world. They were responsible for the formation of Johannesburg and, over time, the development of large parts of the extended metropolis around it. For many years, gold mining produced immense wealth for mining companies, banks and residents – indeed the wealth extracted fired the entire South African economy. But there have been negatives. Gold mining also spawned a war, entrenched deep social divides, instilled exploitative labour practices, and devastated the natural environment. Though the industry is now in decline, the landscapes affected by mining are still identifiable by toxic scars that traverse the city-region. This Research Report, GCRO’s seventh, considers how the legacies of mining have been imprinted on the towns and cities of the Gauteng City-Region. The report uses ‘mining landscapes’ as a conceptual device to structure an analysis of the diverse impacts of mining, and to highlight the need for a comprehensive and collaborative approach to manage its after-effects. The report makes a unique contribution to existing literature on mining and mining waste in the city-region by presenting an integrated perspective on their urban, environmental, social and economic processes, characteristics and consequences, both historical and contemporary. While accounts are often told from the viewpoint of specific disciplines (such as history, geography or sociology), the analyses presented in this report – comprising of written pieces, archival excerpts and photo essays – are unbounded by distinctive disciplinary conforms. This allows for the diversity of the landscape to be explored in new ways. The report makes a call for the GCR’s mining landscapes to be understood as a connected landscape of systems rather than a set of isolated and forgotten features of a bygone mining era. From the abandoned mine areas that scatter the surface of the GCR, to earth tremors caused by hollowed out cavities below the earth, silicosis, acid mine drainage, distressed mining towns and more recent histories of artisanal mining – the legacy of gold mining in Gauteng has a variety of expressions, all emerging from the same interconnected history. The concluding chapter looks to the future and considers the possibilities for innovative and collaborative approaches to unshackle the towns and cities of the Witwatersrand from their gold-mining inheritance. This includes the prospects for spatial transformation, repairing social divisions, cultivating natural assets, and remedying the destructive health and environmental effects of a century of mining activity.
Motherhood in Johannesburg: mapping the experiences and moral geographies of women and their children in the city
(2017-11) Parker, Alexandra; Rubin, Margot
South African cities were designed and legislated to enforce spatial marginalisation of Africans, coloureds and Indians to peripheral urban settlements. The legacy of this intentionally constructed racially segregated space has been reinforced in the post-apartheid period by market forces around property prices, informal settlement of land, and the unintended consequences of state housing policy, amongst other factors. Patterns of race-based spatial marginalisation have also been overlaid by income and gender factors, creating hostile conditions for women, and poor women in particular. Whilst there is a rich mine of literature on spatial exclusions due to race, very little study has focused on the gendered spatial experiences of women, and more particularly mothers, in South African cities. Mothers sustain a number of multifaceted roles through, and beyond, the care of and provision for their children. They engage in multiple spheres of work, home, education, community and politics. Straddling these various realms, mothers are increasingly active ‘users’ of a diversity of city spaces. In some cases, the daily routines of mothers are confined within a single neighbourhood, but most often mothers enact their many roles on a day-to-day basis in many different areas of the city. The nature of motherhood (as both a relationship of care and a role constructed in society) and highly unequal urban conditions often impose heavy burdens – financial, temporal and emotional. However, the choices mothers make in the city by traversing diverse spaces in order to fulfil their multiple roles, and the responsibilities and costs this inflicts, is not well understood. This Occasional Paper speaks to this ‘gap’ by exploring the spatial dynamics of mothers in Johannesburg. It investigates how women who self-identify as mothers navigate their own and their families’ daily lives in the city in facing a variety of challenges and obstacles. Methodologically the research involved studying the everyday practices and experiences of 25 mothers in the city, who agreed to in-depth interviews and mapping exercises. The participants were a diverse group in terms of geographic location, income, race, age, and family situation. The women narrated their daily lives and the routes they took through various places and spaces that made up their everyday experiences of the city. They discussed their decision-making around the choice of home, work, school, shopping and recreation and detailed the social and spatial dynamics of their support networks. Exploring these ‘moral geographies’ of motherhood provides valuable insights into a group of people who engage the city extensively in ways that are under-recognised. In turn, understanding the spatial negotiations that typify mothers’ lives exposes the depth of spatial inequality and poor urban management of our city-region in new ways. This Occasional Paper is the result of a partnership between the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) and the GCRO, and specifically involved a collaboration between researchers Yasmeen Dinath, Margot Rubin and Alexandra Parker.
A framework for a green infrastructure planning approach in the Gauteng City-Region
(2016-09) Bobbins, Kerry; Culwick, Christina
As the population, economy and urban built environment in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) expand, government is increasingly under pressure to provide urban infrastructure to support growth. It is increasingly important that this infrastructure is sustainable, minimising the negative environmental impacts often associated with traditional forms of urban development. Green Infrastructure (GI) is the interconnected set of natural and man-made ecological systems, green spaces and other landscape features that provide services and strategic functions in the same way as traditional infrastructure. In harnessing the benefits of ecosystem services, GI has emerged as a more efficient, cost effective and sustainable alternative – and sometimes accompanying approach – to conventional forms of infrastructure. Despite international evidence demonstrating how GI can be used as an alternative to, or in tandem with, traditional infrastructure, the GI approach has so far gained only limited traction in the GCR. In 2013 the GCRO published the State of Green Infrastructure in the GCR report. The report established the principles that underpin GI, used available data to map the extent of GI networks in the region, assessed to what extent municipalities were aware of and applying a GI approach, and demonstrated a possible way to value GI in local government financial systems. The conclusions of the State of Green Infrastructure report were used to guide the next phase of GCRO’s research in support of the adoption of GI approach – a phase focused on better understanding the opportunities for implementing GI in planning and infrastructure development programmes and on addressing some of the challenges associated with shifts towards this approach. A framework for a green infrastructure planning approach in the Gauteng City-Region, GCRO’s fourth Research Report, builds on the foundations laid in the State of Green Infrastructure report. It assembles expert inputs and reflections from collaborative stakeholder discussions in what was known as the Green Infrastructure CityLab to illustrate important considerations for the development of a GI planning approach in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR). The report is divided into three broad sections. Part A introduces the theoretical underpinnings of a GI approach and builds an argument for the importance of incorporating GI into planning and infrastructure development in the GCR. Part B presents three pieces written by external experts. They consider how GI and ecosystem services can be valued by municipalities, and how so-called ‘grey-green’ infrastructure design solutions can be implemented in the GCR. Part C reflects on the stakeholder engagement process that has been undertaken, primarily through the GI CityLab, to deepen understanding of how GI can be embedded in municipal practice. Based on these research findings, this report concludes with a strategy for GCRO’s next phase of work in its ongoing Green Assets and Infrastructure Project.
Pathways to antiracism
(2017-07) Abrahams, Caryn
There is an apparent resurgence of racism, xenophobia, and discrimination on the basis of ethnicity in South Africa. In this context careful policy-focused analytical work is critical to advance the constitutional values of non-racialism and equality. Pathways to antiracism, GCRO’s fifth Research Report, builds on GCRO’s ongoing research into race dynamics in the Gauteng City-Region, and aims to inform and provoke discussion around pathways towards social change. The study results from a long-standing partnership between the GCRO and the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation (AKF) on the meaning and interpretations of non-racialism in contemporary South Africa. Pathways to antiracism consists of three substantive papers: ‘Antiracism in post-apartheid South Africa by Kira Erwin; ‘Doing antiracism work: Seeing through racial subjectivities’ by Caryn Abrahams; and ‘Global antiracism strategies and practice’, also by Kira Erwin. These papers are interspersed with photo essays, poetry and other short contributions. Antiracism in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper examines the contested nature of the concept of antiracism, and reviews selected strategies and practices by the state and various civil society and faith-based organisations to address racism in South Africa after 1994. Since antiracism is a less frequently used concept in South Africa than non-racialism, the paper starts with an overview of antiracism theories from within and outside the country. Against this theoretical backdrop, the paper then analyses interview data from selected South African organisations that have undertaken strategies and projects to address racism. Many of these initiatives are directed at the micro level of institutions and communities. They provide valuable learnings that suggest meaningful change within project participants and in specific sites, as well as sophisticated practices that acknowledge how race is interwoven with other forms of social difference, including class, culture, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. However, these projects do not collectively add up to a national success story of reversing racism. In its conclusion the paper makes a case for thinking about how we may best move these isolated pockets of practice into a broader national antiracism strategy. One key suggestion is to create a space for collaboration and collectivity between civil society organisations, as well as between government and civil society. This shared knowledge project may potentially leverage the strengths of existing strategies and facilitate the co-design of new strategies, in turn offering exciting possibilities for a national South African dialogue around plural rather than purist notions of antiracism that engages directly with many of the theoretical debates globally and locally. Doing antiracism work: seeing through racial subjectivities. This paper considers the way activists and others approach antiracism work. It begins with an explanation of the various ways people think through race, highlighting three typical subjectivities that shape racialised perspectives. The first, race essentialism, encompasses crass racism where there are assertions of superiority or inferiority. The second, race evasiveness, is when people distance themselves from accusations of racism by couching exclusion in other terms. The third, race cognisance, is when people acknowledge how race and racialised histories have shaped their ways of being and acting. The paper draws out these ways of seeing race, or acting in racialised ways, by looking at two recent examples that captured the public imagination, and demonstrates the complexities of race cognisance by capturing the voices of activists. The paper concludes that in this current conjuncture in South Africa, the challenge for activists is to teach people to be critical of their own race evasiveness, and, more generally, to think through ways to get beyond the struggle between race evasiveness, essentialism and awareness. Global antiracism strategies and practice. In 2001 South Africa signed the United Nation’s Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. One of the commitments in the DDPA was the development of a national action plan (NAP) against racism, xenophobia and related intolerances. Fifteen years after the conference, South Africa has now developed a draft NAP. While very few countries have produced monitoring and evaluation reports on their action plans, where these are available (for example, Canada and Ireland) some lessons can be drawn on what did not work and why. This paper examines NAPs within an international context, and outlines some of the key lessons South African policymakers could learn from the experiences of other countries that have implemented NAPs. It includes a discussion on some of the inherent tensions between NAPs and international compliance, and more specifically how South Africa may want to start thinking about these during the further development and implementation of such a plan. The paper’s conclusion also raises some critical questions on whether NAPs work and what is needed if they are to move beyond an exercise in international compliance.
Uneven spaces: core and periphery in the Gauteng City-Region
(2017-08) Peberdy, Sally; Harrison, Philip; Dinath, Yasmeen
Peripheral areas of the Gauteng City-Region – like small towns on the edge, large peri-urban and commercial farming areas, sprawling dormitory townships, huge swathes of displaced urbanisation in ex-Bantustans, and remote industrial and mining areas – are all poorly understood. Yet there is evidence that many of these areas are undergoing rapid change, with profound implications for many current policy debates including what to do about inequitable economic growth patterns, how to manage ongoing population movements in the post-apartheid period, where best to locate large public housing schemes, and so on. Uneven spaces: Core and periphery in the Gauteng City-Region, GCRO’s sixth research report, comes from a clear recognition that despite the comparative wealth of Gauteng and its role in driving the national economy there are places of relative ‘peripherality’ in the GCR that require attention. The report is also a response to a strong focus in the existing literature on the physical and economic core of the province, the City of Johannesburg in particular. By contrast there is a relative paucity of analysis on less central parts of the city-region. The work is the result of a research partnership between the GCRO and the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP), in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University. GCRO’s Dr Sally Peberdy wrote the first part of the report entitled ‘Uneven development – core and periphery in Gauteng’. Prof Philip Harrison and Yasmeen Dinath from SA&CP compiled the second part, ‘Gauteng – on the edge’. Both parts, albeit through different modes, consider transitions in the social- and space-economies of outlying places. The first part investigates the dynamics of peripheral areas in Gauteng through the lens of theories of uneven development. Showcasing a wealth of data and maps generated from the Census and GCRO’s own Quality of Life surveys, it analyses the multiple ways that spaces may be peripheral. These include unequal access to housing and services; the spread of income, household assets and employment opportunities; variations in perceived quality of life; and so on. The analysis builds from an initial binary delineation of parts of Gauteng as either ‘core’ or ‘periphery. It then progressively nuances our understanding by showing that notions of core and periphery are relational, that processes of change across what may be counted as core or periphery are often indeterminate and contradictory, and that there are often ‘peripheral’ areas in the heart of the GCR, and ‘core’ features in areas conventionally regarded as on the margin. This section concludes with thoughts on the role of government in creating, sustaining and ameliorating multiple forms of peripherality, The second part of the report asks the question ‘what is happening along the geographic edge of the GCR?’, and seeks to answer this both through the lens of scholarship on edge cities, peri-metropolitan areas, and agglomeration, as well as through a number of in-depth case studies in six types of peripheral areas: 1. Areas with extractive economies (Carletonville); 2. Industrialising ex-mining areas (Nigel-Heidelberg); 3. Areas with state-implanted industry (The Vaal, including Vereeniging, Vanderbijlpark and Sasolburg); 4. Decentralised growth points (Babelegi); 5. Agricultural service centres (Bronkhorstspruit); and 6, Recreational hubs (Hartbeespoort). Through its exhaustive narrative accounts of the development of specific places on the edge of the GCR, this section of the report compellingly highlights the importance of history and timing, and asks us to consider how urban development drives economic development and vice versa. Although ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ are artificial constructs, these terms gesture at very real spaces of uneven growth and development. The two parts of this report, different but complementary, considerably deepen our understanding of what is going on in parts of the city-region that are less well researched, and help focus the attention of policy-makers concerned with the causes and effects of – as well as possible solutions to – spatially uneven development outcomes.
Acid mine drainage and its governance in the Gauteng City-Region
(2015-05) Bobbins, Kerry
Acid mine drainage (AMD) in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) has been described in the media as a ticking time bomb after it was officially reported to have begun surfacing from old mining works on the West Rand in 2002 (Masondo et al., 2011; TAU SA, 2011; Slack, 2013). Acid mine drainage occurs when ‘fool’s gold’ (FeS2) or iron pyrite found in mined rock oxidises. This occurs when either underground mine shafts, or crushed conglomerate in Mine Residue Areas (MRAs) on the surface, become exposed to oxygen and water creating run-off that is very high in sulphates – effectively sulphuric acid – and is hazardous to both humans and the environment (McCarthy 2010). Over the last decade, a flurry of news articles have highlighted the threat of acid water decant and its likely effects on human health, the environment, water quality, municipal infrastructure and building foundations in the Johannesburg Central Business District (CBD). These reports have fuelled anxieties around when and where decant will take place and who will be affected by AMD. In response to these concerns, government, through the National Department of Water Affairs (DWA), has introduced a set of immediate and short-term interventions to overcome decant in the West Rand. These have allowed AMD to be framed as an environmental emergency. DWA has also set in motion a process to develop a long-term solution that, through a broader and more inclusive approach, will solve various AMD issues over time including its impact on the Gauteng water supply. In relation to both these two government interventions – the immediate/short and long-term solutions – very few stakeholders or members of the public know enough about AMD and its governance to understand what the real challenges are and how they should respond. Even fewer are able to piece together the series of events that led up to the current and proposed set of actions taken by DWA to tackle AMD. This paper argues that the current trajectory of government-led responses has suspended meaningful public engagement and debate, and the result is a grey cloud of misinterpreted facts and presumed motives that has cast a shadow of misunderstanding, which in turn exacerbates the anxieties of affected communities and interested stakeholder groups
The GCRO barometer 2014
(2015-04-17) Mushongera, Darlington
The GCRO Barometer 2014 depicts developmental progress in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) in a single interactive graphic using 38 indicators across ten key sectors. It serves as a tracking and diagnostic tool to inform policy makers and the public on where development progress is being made, and areas of concern. It also serves as a tool for benchmarking Gauteng against other South African provinces and similar sized city-regions across the world. The GCRO Barometer 2014 is the first release and shows progress in 2012 against three base years: 2002, 2007 and 2011. Overall, the Barometer shows that the developmental outlook for Gauteng is positive with significant progress realised between 2002 and 2012 in nearly all sectors. For instance, the poverty rate has fallen dramatically since 2002 and access to basic services has improved. However, there are challenges in areas such as Social Cohesion, Governance, the Labour Market and Sustainability. Sadly, people’s perceptions of government, as well as their unwillingness to participate in governance matters do not correspond to the achievements made by government during this period. This should be a cause for concern for policy makers in all spheres of government as it reflects dissatisfaction with the nature and quality of services being provided as well as the methods of provision. The Barometer also shows that the impact of government programmes is minimal over shorter time spans – change between 2002 and 2012 is considerable, but change between 2011 and 2012 is insignificant. This is a cause for concern given the 5-year cycle of electoral terms for local government in South Africa. The Barometer’s outcomes underscore the need for government to step up policy and programme monitoring with a view to achieving immediate and positive short-term impacts on communities.

Research Outputs (GCRO)

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