Suchergebnisse

As part of long-term comparative research into the Gauteng City-Region, this article presents mixed-methods studies in the informal settlement of Denver, located in the industrial belt southeast of Johannesburg's city center. It unpacks the results of focus groups, ethnographic and expert interviews, as well as mapping with an innovative smartphone tracking application, comparing everyday life for several households in this area before the pandemic in 2019 and during the pandemic in 2020. Findings show that the pandemic exacerbated the disproportionate burdens related to gendered roles of household management, childcare, and mobility, both on the macro- as well as the micro-scale. The article thus defines the "gender-poverty-mobility nexus" that shapes space and everyday life in the Gauteng City-Region, precluding places like Denver from overcoming their marginality. Post-pandemic planning policy could be transformative for such spaces if it can build on this knowledge to better identify the needs of these vulnerable social groups and connect them to opportunities. It concludes with suggestions on how these empirically revealed dynamics could be translated into responses on the urban and regional scales, in the name of more equitable, resilient planning futures for Johannesburg and beyond.

States in the Global South have consistently invested in large-scale, vanity infrastructure projects, which are often not used by the majority of their residents. Using a mixed-method and comparative approach with findings from Greater Maputo, Mozambique, and the Gauteng City-Region exposes how internationally-supported and expensive transport projects do not meet the needs of lower-income urban residents, and meanwhile, widespread, everyday modes of commuting such as trains, paratransit, and pathways for walking deteriorate. State-led development thus often generates an infrastructural landscape characterised by "ruin" and "indifference." These choices are anachronistic, steeped in a desire for a modernist-inspired future and in establishing narratives of control. In the cases of Gauteng and Maputo, whether or not the infrastructure is "successfully" implemented, these choices have resulted in a distancing of the state from the majority of urban residents.