Stitching the city-region together: Everyday intra-urban mobilities

Read an extract from an article by Lindsey Howe about intra-urban mobilities and how these define the Gauteng city region.

The full article and the extract are available in the ‘Downloads’ section below. The extract is from a section of the paper titled, ‘New centralities through popular agency’.

This extract draws on data from a large study with the GCRO in 2015 in which data was collected about people’s journeys using a smart phone app.

As you read the extract, consider how intra-urban mobilities:

• respond to the inherited distribution of urban territories,
• contribute to patterns of economic decline and growth, and
• integrate existing territories as well as cause territorial expansion.

Lindsay suggests that “strategies for fostering centralities where people live are urgently required, rather than simply transporting them to existing ones.”

Would you agree with her? What disadvantages might there be to such a response to the challenges of the post-apartheid spatial form by public authorities?

The full reference for the article is: Lindsay Blair Howe (2022) The spatiality of poverty and popular agency in the GCR: constituting an extended urban region, Urban Geography, 43:9, 1287-1308, DOI:10.1080/02723638.2021.1922200