Please note - this is a temporary window. id21 is joining forces with Eldis and therefore the id21 website has been suspended. Soon all id21 content will be available on the Eldis website.

Johannesburg: nightmarish future or potential model of inclusive urban governance?

Built on the sweat of black migrant workers, Johannesburg is synonymous with social fragmentation, environmental degradation, violent crime and rampant consumerism alongside grinding poverty. How is the city reinventing itself in post-apartheid South Africa? What can it teach other divided cities similarly struggling to promote political, economic and social justice?

This study looks at service delivery, spatial restructuring, environmental sustainability and institutional reform in South Africa’s largest city. Exploring the conditions and processes that are determining Johannesburg’s transformation from an inequitable, racially divided city into a cosmopolitan metropole, it has lessons for other cities restricted by the need to balance harsh economic realities with demands for democracy and social equity.

Fundamental to an understanding of Johannesburg as a divided city is the characteristic legacy of the apartheid era: the total absence of democracy. Johannesburg – part of the Gauteng urban area with a population of 7.3 million people – has had the chance to shake off its racist past as South Africa embraces liberal democracy. The book describes how early commitments to participatory government and rash public spending to transform the blighted apartheid landscape have come up against fiscal challenges that require striking a balance between equity and efficiency, and the twin pursuits of global competitiveness and poverty reduction.

Export-led growth strategies are failing to bring about recovery in Johannesburg’s manufacturing industry. De-industrialisation and the dramatic decline of manufacturing jobs have deepened inequality among Africans, particularly men. Africans with secondary-school education have gained white-collar jobs in the service sector while unemployment of the unskilled has risen. Increasingly, inequality is no longer primarily based on race but differentiation between a multiracial middle class and a black working class on the one hand, and a mass of unemployed and socially excluded Africans on the other. They in turn are a spatially marginalised underclass, confined to poorly serviced enclaves and the bleak and often dangerous neighbourhoods of the southern suburbs.

The book also examines how:

Efforts to find a global niche for ‘Smart Gauteng’, based on the growth of hi-tech services, are entrenching inequality and failing to provide large-scale employment.
Crime does not affect all of Johannesburg’s residents equally: the main victims are not the affluent white population, whose fears are widely publicised, but the African poor.
It is not just the professional middle class, haunted by a fear of crime, that huddles behind the walls of ‘gated communities’: socially disadvantaged hostel communities in Soweto also opt for exclusion.
Housing policy promotes home ownership and informal settlement upgrading and ignores the massive, largely unregulated, rental sector, which is an important provider of shelter for the poor.
The tendency for government-driven participation on consultative strategies to reach homeowners and landlords over tenants in former black townships is diminishing the prospects for effective state-society co-operation in tackling water, sanitation and energy problems.

The successful struggle of ordinary people to establish a unitary, non-racial city government with a single tax base has increased the potential for cross-subsidisation and redistribution across the city. However, achieving this requires the Greater Johannesburg Municipal Council to:

set elite expectations of what makes a well-run city against the demands of the city’s disadvantaged populations for housing, infrastructure and services
address the social exclusion and political marginalisation of foreign and rural migrants, some women and many youth
do more to genuinely and sustainably involve representatives of civil society in city-wide planning and counter elite monopolies of community organisations.

Source(s):
‘Uniting a divided city: governance and social exclusion in Johannesburg’, Earthscan, by J. Beall et al, July 2002 Full document.

Funded by: DFID (SSRU)

id21 Research Highlight: 19 December 2002

Further Information:
Jo Beall
Development Studies Institute
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7955 7563
Fax: +44 (0) 7955 6844
Contact the contributor: j.beall@lse.ac.uk

Development Studies Institute, LSE, UK

Susie Parnell
Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences
University of Cape Town
Private Bag
Rondebosch 7700
South Africa

Tel: +27 (0)21 650 3509
Fax: +27 (0)21 689 7576
Contact the contributor: parnell@enviro.uct.ac.za

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DfID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. Articles featured on the id21 site may be copied or quoted without restriction provided id21 and originating author(s) and institution(s) are acknowledged. Copyright © 2009 IDS. All rights reserved.

id21 is funded by the UK Department for International Development. id21 is one of a family of knowledge services at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. id21 is a www.oneworld.net partner and an affiliate of www.mediachannel.org. IDS is a charitable company, No. 877338.