The Changing Space Economy of City-Regions

This book addresses the South African Space Economy and its stark disparities and dualisms through an assessment of the Gauteng City-Region - the largest economic agglomeration in the country and on a continent bedevilled by a myriad of development challenges. The book's focus on understanding the overall character of Gauteng City-Region's Space Economy - through data mining/analysis and mapping - comprehensively supplements the Space Economy literature on the region. It covers the disparities exacerbated by an overlay of apartheid planning ideology and top-down regional development based on selective encouragement of manufacturing investments in growth points or poles and how implementation of past policies intended to cure these disparities have yielded mixed results. This book further offers the Gauteng City-Region as a microcosm of the national economy in the form of evident significant placed-based variations in the intensity and character of economic structure that on the one hand enjoys massive agglomeration economies, while on the other, has high levels of poverty and large numbers of people living below the Minimum Living Level. This book should appeal to urban studies specialists, economists and development studies researchers in the Global South.

Auteur

Dr. Cheruiyot is a Senior Researcher at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory. He holds a PhD in Regional Development Planning from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA as well as post-graduate training in urban and regional planning and human settlements and bachelor's degree in economics. With over 15 years of working in the field of urban and regional development planning both as a civil servant and a researcher, he has research interests in development (particularly economic development, economic geography or space economics, urban development, regional development and economics, poverty and inequality) and the application of a wide range of quantitative research methods (including cluster analysis, location analysis, spatial econometrics and spatial statistics) to model economic development issues and urban spatial change. Dr. Cheruiyot also teaches quantitative methods and econometrics in the School of Construction Economics and Management at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Contenu

Chapter 1. City-Regions and their Changing Space Economies.- Chapter 2. The Economic Drivers of Urban Change in the Gauteng City-Region: Past, Present, and Future.- Chapter 3. Assessing the Gauteng City-Region's Global Presence and Positioning through Current Global-City Measures.- Chapter 4. Importance of Industrial Clusters and Inter-Industry Linkages for Regional Policy in the Gauteng City-Region.- Chapter 5. The Evolution of Manufacturing in the Gauteng City-Region: From De-industrialization to Re-industrialization?.- Chapter 6. Unpacking the Changing Economic Geography of Gauteng's Tertiary Sector.- Chapter 7. Locating the Informal Sector in the Gauteng City-Region and Beyond.- Chapter 8. Testing Economic Growth Convergence and its Policy Implications in the Gauteng City-Region.- Chapter 9. Revitalizing Gauteng City-Region Township Economies through Value Chain Development.- Chapter 10. Dualisms in the Gauteng City-Region: Summary and Implications.