All rights reservedSarah Charlton1*,Harrison, PhilipRubin, MargotTodes, AlisonGoodfellow, TomMeth, Paula2024-08-232024-08-232016978-85-7785-551-1https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/1918Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the southAfrican cities are often claimed to be sprawling, with peripheral growth being seen in rather polemical terms: either involving the marginalization of the poor to the city edge or the construction of exclusive elite enclaves, disconnected from the rest of the city. This paper argues for considered research which is specifically focused on the peripheries of urban areas in Africa, and makes the case for a particular methodological approach to this exploration. It uses the case of the Gauteng City Region in South Africa to illuminate what these urban peripheries and this method brings into focus. Whilst there are some studies that point to complex spatial change on the urban edges of cities in Africa (see for example Todes 2014; Doan and Oduro 2012), research has often tended to overlook peripheral areas or focus on a donor-driven conception of the ‘peri-urban’ concerned primarily with changes to land use and agriculture (Mbiba and Huchzermeyer 2002). Yet it is increasingly apparent that the edges of many large cities and city-regions in Africa are spaces of complex urban transformations encompassing multiple processes of spatial change. In some, large-scale formal investment in housing and economic activity is evident historically and currently. In others, the growth is mainly happening through informal land development or a complex mixing of formal and informal processes. But there are also places of decline in local economies and population, and so theoretical framings which focus only on growth are misleading. While “new centralities” which offer prospects for employment and livelihood are emerging in some localities, governance is often weaker and more fragmented on the edge than in the core, which can produce inequalities in capacity and strategic direction.EnglishopenAccessconferenceObject1555-1557