Benchmarking the way cities and regions around the world are responding to the global recession

September 2009The Gauteng Provincial Government Department of Economic Department (GPGDED) approached the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) to provide them with a fast turn-around report that benchmarks sub-national responses to the economic crisis globally. The brief was to provide a review of what cities and regions are doing in response to the crisis in other parts of the world, and to emphasise the action side of the story – what is being done, rather than analysing the differing nature and impact of the crisis in different places.The report is filled not so much with specific recommendations as a suite of possible interventions that the Gauteng Provincial Government may wish to choose from and implement.For the Gauteng Provincial Department of Economic Developmen

State of the Gauteng City-Region review 2011

This report is associated with an online interactive website which provides the State of the Gauteng City Region review 2011 in full. Link to http://2011.legacy.gcro.unomena.net/This 'State of the GCR' Review aims to contribute to ideas around how to build an integrated, sustainable and globally competitive city-region which provides more equal opportunities and a better quality of life for all its residents. The Review offers image- and map-rich representations of the considerable datasets and information that GCRO has collected and produced on the GCR, providing an overview of the key dynamics and trends affecting the economy, society, governance and environment of a city-region that is predicted to be the twelfth largest in the world by 2015. The State of the GCR is intended as both an information base and a platform for debate for all stakeholders in the region – government, business, academics and residents – around how to build on the region’s advantages and address its challenges, including rapid urbanisation and migration, poverty, and unequal distribution of wealth. GCRO’s 2011 State of the GCR Review was formally launched on Monday 17 October 2011. A second review, State of the GCR Review 2013, was launched in October 2013.Gauteng City-Region Observatory: the city-region review 2011 © GCRO / Authors: David Everatt, Graeme Gotz, Annsilla Nyar, Sizwe Phakathi and Chris Wray with editorial support from Maryna Storie. Conceptual design and execution ITL Communication & Design./The GCRO is a partnership of the University of Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the Gauteng Provincial Government

Mobility in the Gauteng City-Region

July 2014 - Edited by: Chris Wray and Graeme GotzMobility in the Gauteng City-Region has been written in a remarkable moment in the history of transport development in Gauteng. On the one hand the region appears to be in a new ‘golden era’ of transit infrastructure design and investment, as well as long-term planning for ever-growing commuter transport needs. On the other hand, the transport difficulties faced by the Gauteng City-Region’s (GCR) fast-growing population, as well as the many financial, spatial, social, economic and environmental challenges that flow from the region-wide architecture of this population’s daily commuting, appear to be growing ever more acute. It is, therefore, important to delineate the existing flows of traffic across the GCR; to understand the challenges of transport efficiency, access and affordability; and to gauge the impact of key transport interventions like the Gautrain Rapid Rail Link, the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Programme and associated e-tolling, and municipal Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) infrastructure. The report is structured as follows: a summary of recent transport infrastructure projects and key transport challenges are described in Chapter 1 written by Graeme Gotz and Chris Wray. The second and third chapters, by Prof Christo Venter and Willem Badenhorst, provide an in depth analysis of the 2011 Quality of Life survey transport questions, including the generation of a Quality of Transport Index. In Chapter 4, GCRO researcher Guy Trangoš provides a multi-scalar analysis of the public space design around four existing Gautrain stations – valuable research to be considered by authorities should the proposed extensions to the Gautrain go ahead. An often ignored but, from a sustainability perspective, an increasingly important aspect of transport is non-motorised transport (NMT). The report concludes with two NMT chapters by GCRO researcher Christina Culwick, exploring the state of NMT in the GCR and portraying the challenges and potential opportunities for the future of NMT in the city-region. It is not within the scope of a report such as this to review every strategic intervention, nor critically assess every challenge. However, a wide-ranging analysis of the current ‘state of mobility’ in the GCR, and the impact of key infrastructures – or the consequences of their absence – is warranted. Within the frame of the enormous scale of transport planning and infrastructure development underway, as well as the GCR’s many deep and enduring transport challenges, it is hoped that this report will make a contribution to understanding past and current trends, the impact of and (missed) opportunities in key infrastructure investments, and some of the key current priorities that need more attention in this new ‘golden age’ of transport planning.Written by Graeme Gotz et al for GCR

State of green infrastructure in the GCR

July 2013This State of Green Infrastructure report is both an assessment of the set of natural and manmade landscape features in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) and an interrogation into how the services provided by these assets are perceived, understood and valued. Inspiration is drawn from the conceptual and planning framework of ‘green infrastructure’, through which ecological systems, green spaces and other landscape features are regarded as providing services to society in the same way as those offered by traditional ‘hard’ infrastructure.written by Alexis Schäffler et al. for GCR

On Becoming and Belonging in African Cities

Johannesburg is most often compared with Sao Paulo and Los Angeles and sometimes even with Budapest, Calcutta and Jerusalem. Johannesburg reflects and informs conditions in cities around the world. As might be expected from such comparisons, South Africa's political transformation has not led to redistribution and inclusive social change in Johannesburg. In Emerging Johannesburg the contributors describe the city's transition from a post apartheid city to one with all too familiar issues such as urban/suburban divide in the city and its relationship to poverty and socio-political power, local politics and governance, crime and violence, and, especially for a city located in Southern Africa, the devastating impact of AIDS

The State of South African Cities a Decade after Democracy

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 Report’s 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