Landscapes of peripheral and displaced urbanism

This report focuses on the peripheral and historically displaced areas of the northern Gauteng city region. This subregion has become a home to hundreds of thousands of people, some with stronger local economies while others were historically suppliers of labour with limited to no discernible economies. In this sense, this research situates the trends and dynamics shaping Gauteng within its wider frame – the platinum belt in the northwest and historical labour reserves and former industrial decentralisation points in the north and north-east.

Through this research we understand how those areas are changing; their demographic reconfigurations; how they are sustained by their long-term commuting patterns, the investments of migrant worker wages and their emerging local economies. We also understand government’s plans for them, how it is mediating those plans and how they articulate with the long-term spatial and other strategies being generated in Gauteng. The report editors hold a view that a ‘landscape’ study approach – involving both careful empirical analysis of specific places over an extended period, as well as new theorizing of the urban processes shaping them – is better placed to elucidate the global and generalisable and the local and idiosyncratic forces (including government policy) producing this region’s settlement forms. 

The research report is a product of collective efforts, with different authors variously contributing eight chapters.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Gauteng City-Region’s changing urban cores, peripheral and displaced landscapes, by Ngaka Mosiane and Jennifer Murray locates the research report theoretically and substantively. It provides a summary of the different chapters and outlines the wide-ranging research methods applied in the case studies. The final section of the Chapter uses an ‘urban-core index’ to provide an extended GCR context, framing the socio-economic reality of the study areas and the city region at large.  

Chapter 2: The landscape idea: its peripheral, displaced and other forms, by Ngaka Mosiane, Avhatakali Sithagu and Mamokete Modiba, focuses on the conceptualisation of the landscape as a natural phenomenon with mutable qualities. It adopts this conception of the landscape while also recognising that the landscape may have immutable natural qualities. The chapter also draws from parts of southern urbanism scholarship to bridge the gap between the distinct ideas of livelihoods and ‘the landscape’ (a form of which is displaced urbanisation). Bridging this gap is useful for creating a fertile ground for discussing landscapes of ‘displaced urbanisms’.

Chapter 3: Writing peripheral areas and city-regions, by Sally Peberdy, extends the landscape discussion to the periphery, specifically placing the idea and experience of the periphery in a set of global debates. This chapter underscores the multiplicity of actors, including ordinary people, in the production of city-regions. Additionally, peripheral areas are discussed in terms of scale and perspective, with some scholars seeing peripheries as core to the residents living in them while proponents of city regionalism tend to privilege the metropolitan core areas in terms of innovation, competitiveness, and other features of development; relegating the peripheries to sites of welfare, basic service provisions and skills improvement. This bias reinforces metropolitan core areas as the key sites for fostering viable economic development, while diminishing the peripheries’ lived experiences and potential contribution to regional development.  

Chapter 4: Complexities of peripheral spaces, by Sally Peberdy and Jennifer Murray is based on data-driven analysis, drawn from a quantitative survey of 979 household members across the nine study sites. In a similar fashion to the GCRO Quality of Life Survey, it highlights the many dimensions of the current socio-economic, spatial, and political conditions of the landscapes of peripheral and displaced urbanism. The survey covers research themes of demographics, living conditions, employment, amenities, community, and governance. The chapter identifies key challenges that the residents face and explores the similarities and difference in their circumstances (in some cases compared with the peripheries in the Gauteng province). 

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Rustenburg in particular, operationalising the idea of the landscape as practice (lived and worked on), including the top-down exertion of power, both of capital and the state. They respectively draw from historical and contemporary materials on Rustenburg to demonstrate how a landscape is remade.

Chapter 5: Remaking the historical Rustenburg landscape, by Ngaka Mosiane, describes the interdependent relationships in Rustenburg’s changing landscape, livelihoods and social identities – as the landscape changed, so did the social identities and the colonial economy that took on forms ranging from modern, dominant practices to subordinated livelihood ones. The chapter provides thick descriptions of the drivers of change, including land dispossessions and the 1887 and 1895 Plakkers Wet (squatter laws). It shows how the identities of black Africans also changed during each time-period – to Christians, commercial farmers, labourers and economic subjects. 

Chapter 6: Remaking contemporary Rustenburg landscapes, by Ngaka Mosiane and Cathy M. Dzerefos, explores the continuing remaking of the Rustenburg landscape following the earlier processes examined in Chapter 5. It links those forces of change to Rustenburg’s municipal management, financial performance, trade, employment, gross domestic product and other economic elements that are both the content of the landscape and the interventions of power. Their material concretisation in the built environment expresses the wishes, desires and fears of those in power. However, the hegemony of those landscapes is not absolute – ordinary people are able to cope with their marginality, rework their living conditions as they exploit the fissures of dominant socio-economic and political forms, and even overcome their constraints.  

Chapter 7: Mobility for spatial- and self-development in the former KwaNdebele bantustan, by Ngaka Mosiane, focuses mobility as a key aspect of socio-spatial and economic development. It is the lifeblood of the northern GCR, which both perpetuates these areas’ marginality and turns them into localised and transversal spaces of self-realisation.  The chapter also puts the spotlight on the significance of the interrelation between mobility and land-use in areas of displaced urbanisation, as they are being changed into areas of displaced urbanism.

Chapter 8: Land occupation strategies in the informal settlements of Mabopane and KwaMhlanga, by Avhatakali (Taki) Sithagu, examines land occupation strategies in the former bantustans of KwaNdebele and Bophuthatswana. It specifically compares informal settlements within and around Mabopane and KwaMhlanga as toeholds into the GCR’s core areas. The chapter brings into sharp focus how the multi-layered land administration systems interact with land occupation strategies – land access in Mabopane is under legal tenure regime and its access in KwaMhlanga is largely controlled by traditional authorities. Land occupation strategies in Mabopane are overseen by municipal officials and illegally driven by communities while in KwaMhlanga, traditional leaders treat their customary land system as legitimate, with communities having faith in the hybrid land administration system (legal and extra-legal). 

Taken together, the chapters bring into sharp focus the ways in which ordinary people have been reshaping their lives and their received landscapes of displaced urbanisation into landscapes of displaced urbanism. The governance systems, land tenure and administration regimes as well as ordinary people’s complex responses and experiences in these areas are diverse. They are at once a landscape of poverty, of intrigue as well as affluence, status, and good life, putting to bare remarkable and house architectures as well as minimal, varied and deteriorating socio-economic development.

Recommended citation: Mosiane, N. and Murray, J. (eds) (2025). Landscapes of peripheral and displaced urbanisms. Gauteng. GCRO Research Report # 14, Gauteng City-Region Observatory, Johannesburg, March 2025. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.36634/SHGX2848

This Research Report is an output of GCRO's Landscapes of peripheral and displaced urbanisms project in the Spatial Transformation research theme.