In South Africa’s largest city region, located in the province of Gauteng, a key condition of inequality is that high-income households live in large houses while low-income households live in much smaller accommodation. Innovations in earth observation have enabled the modelling of building volumes in cities and this allows for new ways of assessing housing inequalities in Gauteng. This study calculates building volume per capita (BVPC) for the province as an indication of the volume of residential space in which individuals live. It offers five analyses using this data. First, mapping this metric illustrates that townships, informal settlements and inner city high-rise areas have cramped conditions of less than 10 cubic metres per person, while suburbs have a much higher building volume per capita. Second, the article shows that this metric complements traditional calculations of crowding, such as the number of people per room. Third, it calculates the relationship between BVPC and income and shows that the lower-earning three-fifths of households in the province occupy just 13% of the province’s residential building volume, while the higher-earning two-fifths occupy 87% of the province’s building volume. Fourth, it calculates that 51% of residential hexagons in the province fall below the threshold of adequately sized housing as defined by South African housing standards. Finally, it shows that areas that fall below the threshold have a higher proportion of informal housing.

B etween 1950 and 1991, South Africa’s white minority government classified individuals by race and permitted them to reside only in racially-specific suburbs or homelands. With more than three decades having passed since the collapse of this project, inequality remains high and urban geographies seem frustratingly reminiscent of apartheid. Yet, as Owen Crankshaw argues in Urban Inequality: Theory, Evidence and Method in Johannesburg, it would be incorrect to interpret today’s urban inequality only as a legacy of apartheid. He argues that present urban inequality should also be understood with respect to economic restructuring over the last half century. Crankshaw makes extensive reference to mainly US literature on the relationship between economic restructuring and urban inequality. This literature argues that the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism caused changes in the occupation structure in US cities, allowing the upward and outward mobility of individuals with non-manual skills into suburbs and trapping unskilled residents in low-income inner city areas. Crankshaw is correct that South African urban scholars have not sufficiently utilised the value of this literature, and his book offers rich insights by applying this framework to Johannesburg. The comparative nature of this work produces further insights for scholars of urban inequality more generally, elucidating both Johannesburg’s specificity and engaging in debates on the measurement of segregation and urban inequality. The book is organised into two parts, with the first part examining transformations in the labour market. As in other post-Fordist contexts, Johannesburg’s job market has been substantially reconfigured since the 1970s. The importance of manual work in the overall occupation structure has declined and non-manual work has grown. Furthermore, the increasing

Note: This work is part of GCRO's series of rapid research papers.Rapid research papers are akin to working papers, often -

In 2015, the billionaire Douw Steyn launched a mixed-use megaproject 27 km north of downtown Johannesburg. Plans for Steyn City include 10,000 high-end residential units along with private hospitals, schools, a golf course, an equestrian centre and 2000 acres of parkland behind a 3-m-high perimeter wall. The launch attracted some critique in the media for the exclusive environment that the development sought to create, an ambition that seemed particularly incongruous given its close proximity to the poor settlement of Diepsloot. In response, the developers argued that the project had created more than 11,000 jobs and that wealthy people should invest close to places that need work and livelihood opportunities. This paper is based on interviews with workers who live in Diepsloot and travel each day into Steyn City to work for subcontractors building infrastructure, housing and social facilities. The empirical material shows that although these workers acknowledge the opportunity of employment, they are aware these jobs are uncertain, mostly low-skilled and insufficient to cover the basic costs of everyday life in Diepsloot.

AbstractThis chapter analyses income inequality and socio-economic segregation in South Africa’s most populous city, Johannesburg. The end of apartheid’s segregation in 1991 has been followed by both continuity and change of urban spatial patterns. There is a considerable literature on the transformation of inner-city areas from white to black, and of the steady diffusion of black middle-class residents into once ‘white’ suburbs. There has been less analysis on the nature and pace of socio-economic mixing. Four key findings from this chapter are as follows. First, dissimilarity indices show that bottom occupation categories and the unemployed are highly segregated from top occupation categories, but that the degree of segregation has decreased slightly between the censuses of 2001 and 2011. Second, the data quantifies the way in which Johannesburg’s large population of unemployed people are more segregated from top occupations than any of the other employment categories, although unemployed people are less segregated from bottom occupations. Third, over the same period, residents employed in bottom occupations are less likely to be represented in affluent former white suburbs. This seemingly paradoxical finding is likely to have resulted from fewer affluent households accommodating their domestic workers on their properties. Fourth, although most post-apartheid public housing projects have not disrupted patterns of socio-economic segregation, some important exceptions do show the enormous capacity of public housing to transform the spatial structure of the city.

This chapter revisits the analysis of Johannesburg’s segregated history by Parnell and Pirie published three decades ago, in the year that the 1950 Group Areas Act was repealed (1991). For much of the twentieth century, Johannesburg was formally divided into an inner-city for white occupation, suburbs for white occupation mainly to the north and south east of the city centre and townships for black, Indian and coloured residents mainly to the south of the city. From the 1980s, a number of processes have disrupted these configurations: the inner city and some of the more affordable suburbs have become primarily black; middle class and elite former white suburbs have become more racially mixed; some government housing programmes have introduced low-cost housing to well-located areas and some informal settlements have been established close to middle-class suburbs. Alongside these disruptions, many ongoing spatial processes reinforce inherited patterns: most informal settlements have been established far away from affluent areas and often near to townships, townships have become denser through backyard rental accommodation, and many government housing programmes have extended apartheid-era townships. Crucially, the relative position of areas with more expensive properties has not changed over time—they remain relatively more expensive. Johannesburg’s large population of working class residents, who are overwhelmingly black, are financially excluded from middle-class and elite suburbs, a process which reproduces some of apartheid’s spatial patterns even in the absence of formal segregation.

Since the repeal of the Group Areas Act three decades ago, South Africa's once-divided spaces have merged, and race-based restrictions on political participation have been eliminated. The result is that the territories to which people belong have transformed, and in many cases have increased in scale. This editorial introduces a special issue on the scale of belonging, which consists of a series of case studies in Gauteng Province. It considers the possibilities, complexities and limits of this aspect of spatial transformation. It provides two cross-cutting themes running through the articles. The first is that scales of belonging are produced by state practices, the private sector and ordinary users of space. The second is that actors invest in particular scales preferentially, either for their immediate benefit or for the benefit of society as a whole.