Technology

Sometimes it feels like no matter where you drive in Gauteng, there’s another shopping mall being built. And they’re not just sprouting in major hubs like Sandton, Midrand and Rosebank; there are smaller towns on the outskirts of the city that all have centres anchored by the same five or six national retailers. This isn't a coincidence. Economic planning in South Africa is premised on the concept that growth happens in the metropolitan core, that Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni is where investment is centred, where jobs are created and where people want to live. According to Ngaka Mosiane, a senior researcher at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), there was an unwritten expectation that the peripheral areas would empty out as people moved toward opportunity. “Those are the sites of innovation, and they attract capital investment and all of that,” says Mosiane. “What has actually happened is a direct opposite of that.”

After 1994, with mining already in decline, the assumption was that people in rural areas and former homelands would migrate toward the metropolitan cores, drawn by jobs and opportunity. The Centre for Development and Enterprise, a business funded research institute, published a policy document in 1998 arguing exactly this point, that incentives should pull people toward cities rather than encouraging investment further out. But over the past two decades, in what Mosiane calls the “far periphery”, people have been building substantial homes in townships, villages and areas under traditional authorities, where land is significantly cheaper, and where, in many cases, rates and taxes are not collected. Retail, banking and insurance have followed, setting up in places that conventional economic planning had written off as having little consumer potential. “A significant number of people choose to live in a shack or back room in the centre, but have a mansion back home in the rural areas,” he says. “Living in the city is no longer the aspiration.”