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Governing the GCR Provocations Series

Provoke: to stimulate, incite, stir up, challenge, irk, exasperate, vex

The Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s Provocations is an on-going series of think pieces that give a platform to cutting edge thinking on current issues of the day, written and presented in a non-academic style and format. Each provocation is offered by an academic or practitioner for reading by a wide audience, with the hope of shedding light on key topics relevant to researchers, policy-makers, business people, activists and members of the public. The series aims to challenge conventional understandings, stimulate new thinking, stir up debate and incite readers to respond with interpretations of their own.

The idea of the city-region is growing in international prominence. This is because the form has been hailed as a means for promoting a range of agendas, from boosting economic competitiveness, to sowing integrated development benefits, to building partnerships between state and non-state actors, and even to tackling the challenges of urban growth by offering a means for thinking anew about pressing urban difficulties like mass infrastructure provision and environmental sustainability.

More and more policy and academic work is being done on this issue, with many academics arguing that the burgeoning of city-region governance is a dedicated process of scale building—in terms of both agglomeration scales and deliberate state rescaling (Brenner 1999; Scott and Storper, 2003; Jonas, 2006; Harrison and Hoyler, 2014). Brenner in fact argues that the rise of regional governance can be understood as a process of ‘state reterritorialization’, and the specific form of the city-region as ‘state spatial selectivity’—indicating that this scale has been specific chosen or built by the state (cited in Wu 2017:1135). That said, the city-region is not a straightforward site in which to organise governance. As Storper (2014) points out, governance at this scale necessarily involves many large, contested, and intertwined issues that arise as a result of strong interdependencies and cleavages, combined with fragmented geographies and overlapping implementing agencies. These issues of imbrication mean that difficulties are not amenable to a ‘solution’ so much as a haphazard muddling-through. Similarly, Wu (2017) interprets the state spatial selectivity of the city-region form not as a model to manage social provision or promote democratisation, but rather as an attempt to manage crisis.

The Gauteng City-Region (GCR) is increasingly recognised in official and other discourse. Nonetheless, this increasing recognition has not resulted in consensus of what this means, or should mean, for planning, public investment, or governance. As a prompt for thinking through the resulting complexities, this project entails a series of Provocations, each of which examines a discrete aspect of governance related to the GCR. Taken together, the series intends to trigger debate and dialogue on various ways of thinking about, and priorities for, governance of the city-region.

Updates

As of late 2022 five Provocations and a related Occasional Paper have been published. In late 2023, GCRO commissioned Prof Alan Mabin to write a Provocation on the development of São Paulo, and city-region governance arrangements there, in comparison to the Gauteng City-Region. The Provocation will be published in 2024/25. Further Provocations beyond this are currently being planned.

Outputs

Provocations and Occasional Papers

Mosiane, N., and Götz, G. (2022). Governing the GCR series: Displaced urbanisation or displaced urbanism? Rethinking development in the peripheries of the GCR. GCRO Provocation 8. April 2022. https://doi.org/10.36634/SVRW2580

Mkhize, T. (2021). Rescaling municipal governance amidst political competition in Gauteng: Sedibeng’s proposed re-demarcation. GCRO Occasional Paper 18, Johannesburg: GCRO

Harber, J. and Bryer, M. (2020). Unrealistic expectations, unrealised: bus rapid transit in Johannesburg. GCRO Provocation 7, Johannesburg: GCRO (this output is shared with the A political economy analysis of transit corridors project)

Mabin, A. (2020). The Greater Paris debate: reflections for the Gauteng City-Region. GCRO Provocation 6, Johannesburg: GCRO

Coetzee, S. Cooper, A.K. and Katumba, S (2020). Strengthening governance in the Gauteng City-Region through a spatial data infrastructure: the case of address data. GCRO Provocation 5, Johannesburg: GCRO (this output is shared with the Data Smart GCR project)

Harber, J. and Joseph, K. (2018). Institutionalising the Gauteng City-Region. GCRO Provocation 3, Johannesburg: GCRO

Presentations

Graeme Gotz and Ngaka Mosiane (May 2023). 'Displaced urbanism in the Gauteng City-Region'. Hybrid Workshop on Research on Extended Urbanisation, Wits Rural Facility, 10 May 2023.

Jesse Harber (July 2018). ‘Institutionalising the Gauteng City-Region’. Gauteng Planning Division, 10 July 2018.

Jackie Klopp, Jesse Harber, and Magnus Quarshie (June 2018). 'A Review of Metropolitan Governance, Bus Rapid Transit and Minibus Systems in African Cities', VREF Research Network Workshop, Dar es Salaam, 25 June 2018.

Last updated: 10 October 2022

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