Owen Crankshaw

Local government, poverty reduction and inequality in Johannesburg

This paper discusses the difficulties facing the post-apartheid metropolitan government of Johannesburg as it reforms itself, seeking to better respond to the needs of all its citizens, while also attracting new investment. These difficulties include high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as the apartheid legacy of “separate development” with its large backlog of poor quality housing and inadequate basic services, much of it concentrated in former “black townships” and peripheral informal settlements. Limited budgets and overloaded bureaucracy have limited the scale, quality and speed of delivery. Meanwhile, the need for organizational change and for good fiscal performance compete for attention and resources with poverty reduction and with the need for a more integrated, cross-sectoral poverty reduction policy. The paper ends with a discussion of how the principal challenges facing Johannesburg are also challenges for contemporary urban governance in many other cities.

The State of South African Cities a Decade after Democracy

Like other national urban policy documents, the State of the Cities Report 2004 affirms a vision of an inclusive non-racial city in which democracy is stable and development flourishes. But the 2004 report is different from preceding urban policy statements in a number of critical respects, not least that it is not a formal statement of government. In part, the relative autonomy of the Reports sponsor, the South African Cities Network (a quango of state and non-state affiliates), explains its divergent analytical point of departure in the assessment of the state of the cities 10 years after democracy. The 2004 report is premised on the notion that changing the racial pattern of inequality hinges on systematic responses to the material forces, demographic, economic, environmental and institutional, that shaped the inherited apartheid city form. The 2004 report is also different from earlier government policy positions in that it argues that urban development is not just a site of national reconstruction and development, but that the urban question lies at the heart of achieving the national vision of a productive, democratic and non-racial society based on a vision of sustainable human settlements.

Race, Space and the Post-Fordist Spatial Order of Johannesburg:

The deindustrialisation of Johannesburg has taken a particular spatial form. Service-sector businesses are increasingly located in the mostly White northern suburbs, whereas the mostly Black southern suburbs bear the brunt of unemployment and increasingly resemble an excluded ghetto. Some authors argue that Johannesburgs post- apartheid spatial order is just as racially unequal as it was during apartheid. This study tests this argument by using the results of the 2001 population census to examine the extent to which edge city development in Johannesburg is characterised by racial residential desegregation. The results show that the northern suburbs are undergoing fairly substantial desegregation. To the extent that this trend continues, the geography of apartheid racial divisions will be eroded and Johannesburgs racially mixed edge city will become an exception among world cities.

Comparing South African and Latin American Experience: Migration and Housing Mobility in Soweto

Given similar levels of economic development and inequality, it seems strange that more effort has not been made by South Africans to learn from the earlier experience of urbanisation in countries such as Brazil, Chile and Colombia. The paper shows that there are problems in drawing comparisons about migration and residential movement in Latin America and South Africa, but that there are growing signs of similarity. Some of these similarities were apparent even before the demise of apartheid, a policy that was never consistent and changed many times. The paper observes that South African migrants are becoming more like Latin Americans in demonstrating a growing attachment to the city. Many Sowetans lives do not fit the model of the circular African migrant; many have lived in Johannesburg for a long time. Semi-permanent residence means that residential movement within the city is increasingly similar to that typical in many Latin American cities. To judge from Latin American experience, the dismantling of formal apartheid is unlikely to reduce levels of social segregation in Johannesburg. Rather, class divisions will be just as effective as apartheid in guaranteeing residential segregation.

Victims, Villains and Fixers: The Urban Environment and Johannesburg's Poor

Urban water supply, sanitation and electricity have been identified as basic needs by the post-apartheid government and the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC). This article explores the relationship of Johannesburgs poor to the urban environment and, in particular, these three key urban services. On the basis of survey data, case studies, textual analysis and in-depth interviews with policy makers and planners, it reviews how poorer citizens were, for a long time, seen as victims under apartheid urban planning. During the rent boycotts that characterised urban struggle politics during the era of late apartheid in Johannesburg, they were often represented as villains. This perception persisted well into the post-apartheid period, where refusing to pay for services was seen as tantamount to a lack of patriotism. Today, Johannesburgs poorer citizens are increasingly being seen as fixers. The GJMC in its policy document, iGoli 2002, is committed to establishing the commercial viability of service delivery. Cost recovery is seen as important for solving the tension that exists between maintaining established service levels (in historically white areas) and extending services to new and historically under-serviced (mainly black) areas. We conclude that there are opportunities to address urban poverty, inequality and environmental management in an integrated way. However, these are predicated on the GJMC and its advisers understanding the ways in which pro-poor and social justice strategies interface with urban services and the urban environment.

Social Polarisation or Professionalisation? Another Look at Theory and Evidence on Deindustrialisation and the Rise of the Service Sector:

The debate over whether or not the deindustrialisation of cities is accompanied by the occupational and income polarisation of their working populations has been characterised by some confusion over the relationship between incomes and occupations in the service sector. Specifically, many scholars have misunderstood the significance of middle-income service-sector occupations for their interpretations of the post-industrial class structure of cities. Through a comparative study of deindustrialisation in Cape Town, evidence is presented to show that the growth of service-sector employment can produce a large middle-income occupational class of clerks, sales and personal services workers. The growth of this class can offset the decline of middle-income jobs caused by the loss of artisans, machine operators and drivers in the declining manufacturing sector. These results therefore suggest that many studies have overestimated the extent of occupational polarisation and underestimated the extent of professionalisation.

The Roots of Homelessness

Abstract The evidence from a survey of one free-standing squatter settlement on the Witwatersrand suggests that squatting in the south of Johanneshurg is not primarily a result of the influx of rural immigrants since the abolition of influx control laws in 1986. Although most of the squatters in the sample were born in rural a reas, the vast majority of rural immigrants had urbanised during the 1970s. The timing of the urbanisation of the rural-born squatters, as well as the reasons that they gave for moving to the Witwatersrand, correspond to the findings of other studies on social change in the rural areas of South Africa. A sizeable proportion of the sample were, however, born in urban areas, mostly within the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging complex. Both rural- and urban-born squatters in this sample have failed to secure fonnal accommodation because of the absolute shortage of housing and because they belong to a class of largely unskilled workers whose income and unemployment rate exclude them fr...

Changes in the racial division of labour during the apartheid era

Scholarly attempts to address the dual impact of economic growth and apartheid labour policies on the racial division of labour in the 1970s and 1980s produced markedly divergent estimates of the extent to which the colour bar was being eroded by employment growth. This study revisits the debate by applying new concepts about the division of labour to South African employment statistics. The reason why scholars came up with such different estimates of the size of the African middle class is that they relied on inappropriate neo‐Marxist theories of class and on official occupational categories. On the other hand, I argue for a more eclectic conceptualisation of occupational groups that incorporates neo‐Weberian class schemes and labour process theory. The result is an occupational classification that tries to be sensitive to the ways in which the racial division of labour was shaped by the legal and institutional mechanisms of racial discrimination, by the level of certification of the population, and by w...