Geographical Product Space and Structural Change in the Gauteng City-Region
Structural change has long been a central concern for academics and policymakers aiming to understand its role in driving economic, spatial, and social development. Central to this discourse are two key questions: what is produced and where it is produced. These questions underpin a region’s economic structure, ownership of resources, and the spatial distribution of economic activity and population.
To understand the dynamics of industrial diversification, the product space framework offers valuable insights into the question of what is produced. As a static analytical tool, it maps the proximity of capabilities required to produce different products, thereby highlighting viable paths for diversification. While transitions into higher-value economic activities are often guided by industrial policy, the framework warns against making ‘big jumps’ into unrelated products—advocating instead for incremental shifts that build on existing capabilities to increase the likelihood of success.
At the same time, the spatial complexity of the global economy has deepened, leading to growing recognition of the need for more geographically grounded understandings of industrialisation. This has prompted a ‘provincialisation’ of economic theory, with increasing challenges to Global North-centric frameworks. Such developments have opened new pathways for examining geographical structural change in regions like the Gauteng City Region (GCR), whose economic landscape remains deeply shaped by apartheid-era spatial inequalities.
Shifting the focus to where production takes place highlights the significance of local institutions, spatial configurations, and place-specific dynamics in shaping regional economic outcomes. The Geographical Political Economy (GPE) perspective—among others—enhances this analysis by foregrounding the role of power relations, historical legacies, and the co-evolution of economic, political, cultural, and biophysical processes.
By integrating economic and geographic perspectives, this project contributes to both theoretical advancement and policy relevance in sub-national economic analysis. Synthesising the questions of what is produced and where production takes place enables a comprehensive assessment of the spatial distribution of industrial activity, value addition, ownership, and institutional support in the GCR. This, in turn, allows for the identification of strategic locations for industrial diversification, supports spatial transformation, and fosters broader economic and social development.
