Uneven urban-industrial development in apartheid South Africa: a geographical political economy perspective

Evidence indicates that class-based segregation is replacing racial segregation in South Africa. However, it is also suggested that hypersegregation, being indirect racial and economic segregation of poor neighbourhoods due to selective outmigration is occurring. The study analyses whether hypersegregation and class-based segregation is occurring in the Cape Town municipal area, what causal factors could possibly contribute to these trends and the descriptive characteristics of these processes. The study employs descriptive statistics to determine whether changes in neighbourhood characteristics fit the characteristics of hypersegregation and class-based segregation theories and spatial analysis to determine whether poverty and wealth is clustering. The study also uses multivariate statistics to find significant correlations between observed poverty levels, segregation characteristics and possible causal factors. The findings indicate that differences in neighbourhood poverty levels is widening, and extreme poverty neighbourhoods and low poverty neighbourhoods are clustering spatially and polarising from each other. Descriptive statistics indicate that neighbourhood characteristics fit the descriptions of hypersegregation and class-based segregation and that neighbourhood changes can be linked to housing ecology and subcultural variables as possible causal factors. However, multivariate districts indicate that although there is a significant correlation with the economic characteristics of class-based segregation, there is no significant relationship between poverty levels and racial segregation. Hypersegregation and class-based segregation is economic in nature, not racial. Finally multivariate statistics also indicate the significance of housing ecology and subcultural variables as possible causal factors in class-based segregated neighbourhoods, whilst housing ecology factors alone is significantly correlated to hypersegregation.

The geographical political economy (GPE) proposed by Andy Pike (2020. Coping with deindustrialization in the global North and South. International Journal of Urban Sciences, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/12265934.2020.1730225) and his colleagues offers room for a better understanding of the interaction between politics and industrialization of a region. In this commentary, we argue that the political dimension of GPE should be further emphasized and geopolitics should be taken more seriously. Incorporation of geopolitics can improve GPE in two ways: First, it will help GPE capture variegated pathways and institutions of regional economies, which in turn can help reduce the Anglo-American bias in GPE and economic geography. Secondly, attention to geopolitics is a way to achieve a multi-scalar understanding of the regional economy because geopolitical actions at international scale influences what happnes at national and local scales. With examples from East Asia, where the effects of geopolitics are highly visible, we claim there are at least three ways that geopolitics influence regional industrialization. First, geopolitics change the global economy, which can subsequently predispose regional industrialization; second, a superpower’s geopolitical strategy influences its international economic policy, which can afterwards predispose other nations’ regional industrialization; lastly, a national state sets a geopolitical strategy which then determines regional policy within the nation’s territory.

The line of scholarship dominating Anglophone geographers’ approaches to studying economic geography since 1980 can be characterized as geographical political economy; an approach prioritizing commodity production over market exchange. Here the spatialities of capitalism co-evolve with its economic processes and economic, political, cultural and biophysical processes are co-implicated with one another. Disequilibrium is normal and space/time an emergent feature. This approach is very different from geographical economics. Mutual engagement is desirable and most easily approached via the geographical sub-field of regional political economy. Regional political economy demonstrates that capitalism’s spatialities increase agents’ uncertainty and the likelihood of unintended consequences, that microfoundations are inadequate, and that capitalism is generative of economic inequality and uneven geographical development. The scope of geographical political economy is illustrated by the geography of commodity production.

Mainstream geographical economics propagates the free trade doctrine, presenting capitalism as entailing, but capable of overcoming, uneven geographical development. Geographers have failed to engage with the international trade theories that rationalize this, or develop alternatives. Beginning with the entanglements through which trade happens, I examine how theories rationalizing the free trade doctrine isolate trade, mobilizing a narrow sociospatial ontology. Marxisant trade theories offer important critiques, but are similarly marred by limited sociospatial ontologies. By contrast, attending to the entanglements of trade, geographical political economy can decenter the free trade doctrine, creating space for taking seriously alternative trading imaginaries and practices.

Key themes for evolution in economic geography are identified that clarify and further refine and reinforce our argument for broader conceptions of institutions, social agency, and power and for the situation of the plural and emerging field of evolutionary approaches more fully within geographical political economy. We address the following issues: conceptual and terminological clarity; evolution and institutions within and beyond the firm; agency, bounded determinacy, and power; and research method and design. Our central contention is that geographical political economy provides a coherent and well-structured conceptual and theoretical framework with which to broaden and deepen our understanding, exploration, and practice of evolutionary thinking in economic geography.

Taking as its starting point the discussion of capitalist variegation and uneven development in Chapter 9, this chapter focuses squarely on questions of research design and methodology in geographical political economy, focusing in particular on the complementary approaches of relational comparison and conjunctural analysis. Relational comparison and conjunctural analysis each seek to explain, intervene, and theorize through the grounded but also structured contexts of place, positionality, and situation. Relational comparisons engage the stretched-out nature of social relations across space, while conjunctural analyses characteristically engage specific social formations, typically during moments of stress or crisis. They each tend to operate in the middle ranges of the explanatory register, being wary of unprincipled induction on the one hand and unmoored abstraction on the other, seeking instead to engage through situated analyses of articulation, intersection, and contestation. They do this in their somewhat different ways by “analyzing situations,” variously taking account of multiple (and more or less proximate) sources of causality, the mediating roles of politics and social struggle, the complex play of history, and the interdependencies of uneven spatial development.

This review assesses the evolution of economic geography over the past two decades, picking up where Scott’s (2000) intellectual history of the field’s “great-half century” ends. It is part retrospective and prospective; as such, it aims beyond a historical review to outline some ideas about important factors that drove the recent developments of economic geography. Specifically, I identify three main themes: i) the “Methodenstreit” over the New Economic Geography and the alleged intellectual imperialism of geographical economics; ii) the search for engaged pluralism amid concerns of a dominance of Anglo-American economic geography; and—perhaps most strikingly—iii) the rapid (re)emergence of subfields after the Great Financial Crisis, such as the geography of money and finance and political economic geography, both with a particular focus on spatial disparities and inequality. Focusing on new developments in the geography of money and finance, I also illustrate how the three themes (economic imperialism, pluralism, and financialisation) have shaped the discipline’s most recent intellectual history. The review concludes by outlining elements of a vision for a pluralist post-crisis economic geography.

Teaching and Learning Guide: Rethinking Economic Geographies of Knowledge

Within economic geography, it has been argued that political economy approaches have diminished in both prevalence and influence to the detriment of both the sub-discipline and to human geography as a whole. This report challenges such a perspective, arguing that political economic geographies remain very much vibrant and engaging in contemporary economic geography and in the way in which economic geographers engage with the nature of the contemporary global economy. It argues that the perceived retreat of political economy approaches corresponds more to a diversification of the ways in which political economic thinking is integrated into more recent economic geography, acknowledging that this does reduce the apparent coherence around a singular articulation or approach to geographical political economy. However, it also seeks to demonstrate through reviewing recent pluralist theoretical work that political economic geography has broadened its theoretical framework and thus made significant contributions to ongoing debates around the geographies of production within the sub-discipline that had not previously been the object of political economic analysis.

“Typically American”

Economic geography has, over the past decade or so, drawn upon ideas from evolutionary economics in trying to understand processes of regional growth and change. Recently, some researchers have sought to delimit and develop an “evolutionary economic geography” (EEG), aiming to create a more systematic theoretical framework for research. This article provides a sympathetic critique and elaboration of this emergent EEG but takes issue with some aspects of its characterization in recent programmatic statements. While acknowledging that EEG is an evolving and pluralist project, we are concerned that the reliance on certain theoretical frameworks that are imported from evolutionary economics and complexity science threatens to isolate it from other approaches in economic geography, limiting the opportunities for cross-fertilization. In response, the article seeks to develop a social and pluralist conception of institutions and social agency in EEG, drawing upon the writings of leading institutional economists, and to link evolutionary concepts to political economy approaches, arguing that the evolution of the economic landscape must be related to processes of capital accumulation and uneven development. As such, we favor the use of evolutionary and institutional concepts within a geographical political economy approach, rather than the construction of some kind of theoretically separate EEG—evolution in economic geography, not an evolutionary economic geography.

Global Development, Converging Divergence and Development Studies: A Rejoinder

As a fortified medieval city, Dubrovnik was the centre of the Republic of Dubrovnik, one of the smallest states in the Mediterranean whose importance far surpassed its size. Just like in many other Croatian historic cities, its industrial heritage has remained in the shadow of the historic city, not properly acknowledged as an important segment of the city’s history. This dichotomy inspired this research, whose focus was the cradle of industrial development—Gruž Bay. The research focused on archival sources, published and unpublished materials and a field study. The systematic integration of collected materials was upgraded with an analytical study, the valorisation, contextualisation and, finally, contemporary presentation. Gruž Bay was once an idyllic landscape with few Renaissance summer villas. The original matrix was overlayed with pre-industrial and industrial complexes: shipyards, a harbour, a railway, industrial and infrastructural complexes. At the turn of the 19th century, they were slowly gaining momentum, which was suddenly interrupted by nearby political turmoil, and ultimately a war. Since then, tourism has prevailed, and the industrial complexes have gradually become redundant. The affirmation of the value of the industrial heritage and its potential for reuse would contribute to the further development of this well-known UNESCO site.

This is a study of United States' policy towards South Africa between 1976 and 1986, the important period in the history of their relationship. It sets out to explain that there had never been a basic shift in successive U.S. policies towards the Republic. The driving force behind the Ford, Carter and Reagan doctrines towards Southern Africa, with focus on South Africa, had been to secure the U.S. national interests---economic and military/strategic. These policies, however, were based on belief of negotiated settlement to achieve majority rule in the region, and were critical of the apartheid system in South Africa. Throughout the period under discussion, South Africa has never remained important in U.S. policy planning, except the period of the mid 1980s, when it attracted the attention of high-level policy-makers, including the President and the Congress. It was during this time that the Republic appeared as a major political issue of U.S. domestic constituencies and on foreign policy agenda. It was partly because of the well publicized crisis in South Africa, and partly because of the Reagan administration's attitude towards the anti-apartheid groups. The combination of these factors had led the defeat of the Reagan administration's policy of constructive engagement and the implementation of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 in which Congress, under public pressure, deviced its policy towards South Africa.

Between the 1860s and the First World War, all the indigenous inhabitants of southern and central Africa were brought under British rule. Historical writing on southern Africa, including what later became British Central Africa, began at the same time. Most English-speaking historians writing in South Africa after the First World War were certain that colonial expansion and white settlement were necessary for the economic uplift and civilizing of Africans, but highly critical of the racial policies being espoused by Afrikaner nationalists. With the British Empire virtually coming to an end in the 1950s and 1960s, and the transition to a multiracial majority-ruled Commonwealth receiving its greatest challenge in apartheid South Africa and federating Central Africa, Thompson’s contemporaries focused on the historical roles of white settlers and Imperial officials in bringing about division when there should have been unity. The writing of history has not flourished on campuses in the independent states, and the bulk of work done has been pursued in the universities of Europe and North America. In such circumstances, debate about the legacy of Empire will be as intense in the future as it has been in the past.