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City-Regions and Their Changing Space Economies

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The Changing Space Economy of City-Regions

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Abstract

With unresolved discourses prevailing in mainstream economic thought, including in economic geography, city-regions and their changing space economies is the central theme of this volume. The chapter focuses on key and competing theoretical and conceptual issues of the space economy of global city-regions more broadly, and of South Africa and the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) specifically. The chapter offers the GCR as a microcosm of the South African national economy in the form of evident significant placed-based variations in the intensity and character of economic structure that stimulate growth and despair. This exploration is useful since the GCR shapes the national economy significantly in various ways as well as playing a vital global role in such areas as capital and financial flows, international migration, and research and innovation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also Rodríguez-Pose and Gill (2003), as well as Henderson and Wang (2005), Kanbur and Rapoport (2005), Kanbur and Venables (2005), Lall and Chakravorty (2005), and World Bank (2009) for further explanations.

  2. 2.

    Bantustans were areas designated as ‘homelands’ for different black South African ethnic groups under apartheid legislation (See Fig. 2.1 in Chap. 2).

  3. 3.

    See also Gotz and Todes (2014, p. 117) for various factors exacerbating old or generating new forms of spatial inequalities in South Africa.

  4. 4.

    This stems from regional development logic that predominated in developing countries’ regional development discourses from the mid- to late twentieth century after the ideas of Perroux (1955).

  5. 5.

    Some authors, including Krugman (1991), argue for the firm as the key unit of analysis. However, this volume takes the city, and more particularly, the city-region, as the appropriate unit of analysis (see also Camagni 2001). Olsen (2002, p. 158) criticizes the ambiguity in the work of Krugman and his followers, noting that their models suffer from inter-scale problems because they do not acknowledge spatial units, per se, as the basis of their analysis.

  6. 6.

    See, for example, the economic-related work by Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development (CSID) (http://www.wits.ac.za/csid/16126/csid.html), Trade and Industrial Policy (TIPs) (http://www.tips.org.za/), and Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) ( http://www.cde.org.za/).

  7. 7.

    See, Gotz and Todes (2014) for available data that can be used to understand the space economy. The authors also highlight some of the shortcomings associated with these data sets. Various chapters in this volume used some of these data sets, along with others from different sources.

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Acknowledgements

Mncedisi Siteleki and Samkelisiwe Khanyile are thanked for the preparation of the figures in this chapter. The useful comments of the two reviewers who read an earlier version of this chapter are acknowledged.

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  1. University of the Witwatersrand, Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), a partnership between the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, the Gauteng Provincial Government and organized local government, Private Bag 3 WITS, Johannesburg, 2050, South Africa

    Koech Cheruiyot

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  1. University of the Witwatersrand, Gauteng City-Region Observatory, a partnership between the University of Johannesburg, The University of the Witwatersrand, the Gauteng Provincial Government and organized local government, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Koech Cheruiyot

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Cheruiyot, K. (2018). City-Regions and Their Changing Space Economies. In: Cheruiyot, K. (eds) The Changing Space Economy of City-Regions. GeoJournal Library(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67483-4_1

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