Mining and industrial arc of the GCR

The Gauteng City-Region (GCR) is the heartland of South Africa’s economy. The main academic work on this century-old activity includes the various spaces of mining production across the Witwatersrand (Harrison and Zack, 2012; Viljoen, 2009; Prinsloo, 1993; Petterson, 1951; Rogerson and Rogerson, 1995; Fine and Rustomjee, 1996). This body of work highlights how mining operations, coupled with energy and other industries, laid the basis for South Africa’s manufacturing up to the 1960s, and later as the basis for the tertiary economic sector remotely associated with mining. While mining residues indicate urban growth (Khanyile, 2023), mining’s environmental legacy threatens many new development possibilities across the Gauteng city region.  

A major theme of the city region’s space economy was the costs of land and production near the city centres. The economic restructuring of the early 1970s involved relocating the manufacturing industry to the city region’s peripheries to lower production costs, ostensibly increasing the economic prospects of those previously lagging areas. That economic restructuring was also characterised by a shift from primary to tertiary activities. This change in the nature of the core-periphery relationships did not mean that manufacturing enjoyed new life – just further afield – but rather that it declined throughout, and the peripheries of city-regions were permanently left behind as tertiarisation concentrates growth in the metropolitan core areas.

The book, an edited collection, will draw from these debates (the GCR’s mining, biophysical, and human landscapes; their changing space economies and peripheral centralities) to create a fertile ground for discussing the spatial histories of this city region. The book will explore the towns and urban fragments that make up the mining and industrial arc from the Central Witwatersrand through to the far East Rand and the West Rand, i.e. the near total cessation of the mining-manufacturing industries in Johannesburg South; the originally coal-based, now declining manufacturing centres such as Germiston, Springs, and Nigel; the mining and energy based towns of Emalahleni and Secunda; the collapsing manufacturing centres of Vereeniging, Vanderbijlpark, and Sasolburg and the distressed mining towns of the West Rand.

Last updated on 19 March 2024