Place leadership for the governance of complex urban agglomerations

Abstract

City-regions are complex agglomerations – spatially, economically, and politically. Understanding the dynamics and mechanisms that create the foundation for their development is an important undertaking in the face of rising globalisation, urbanisation, migration, and climate change. This research explores the concept of place leadership and its relevance for a complex space like the Gauteng City-Region (GCR). Place leadership is a concept that has been studied extensively in the global North and proposes the rise of leaders across local spaces. The city- region is a dynamic space of contested politics, coalition governments, diffuse power, differing agendas, fragmented, and silo planning and a deeply rooted socio-economic history that has left a lasting impact of inequality. Building a globally competitive city-region has been on the Gauteng Provincial Government’s agenda since the mid-2000s. The city-region argument in Gauteng, South Africa, still lingers, but party politics, differing agendas, the complexities of governance in the city-region, and frequent changes in leadership have prevented the vision from being achieved. The research question of this thesis is: How may the emerging concept of place leadership be applied in the complex, dynamic, and low-trust environment of the GCR? The thesis explores three thematics to analyse place leadership – temporality, crisis, and trans-scalarity. Gauteng, a city-region in South Africa, was examined as a case study. Water governance and the COVID-19 crisis were utilised as lenses to examine place leadership in the GCR. The exploratory mixed-methods study used semi-structured interviews with leaders from political, government administration, academia, and the water sector in Gauteng. A set of questions designed to explore a thematic on leadership and governance was also included in an established broad survey done in the city-region by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, the Quality-of-LifeVI 2020/21. The outcomes of this quantitative element were analysed by performing cross-tabulations across other thematics, including trust, corruption, participatory governance, and demographic data, to draw conclusions. The interviews were assessed and analysed across the themes of temporality, crisis, and trans-scalarity through the lenses of COVID-19 and water.