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Located halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the mixed-use mega development called Waterfall City is a master-planned, holistically designed, urban enclave built entirely from scratch on 2200 ha of vacant land. This expansive city-building project at Waterfall City combines a hypermodernist stress on 'smart' growth, cuttingedge technologies, and state-of-the-art infrastructure with the New Urbanist focus on mixed-use facilities, a human-scale built environment, and pedestrian-friendly precincts. By performing all the conventional functions expected of a municipal administration, the real estate developers at Waterfall City have effectively replaced public authority with private management and control. With its private governance structures and 'go-it-alone' mentality, Waterfall City is an exemplary expression of a privately managed municipality that falls within the broad tradition o f company towns, treaty concessions, free ports, and independent city-states. Apart from its sheer size and scale and administrative autonomy, the outstanding feature o f Waterfall City is its unique blend o f stern religious conformity (grounded in a traditional interpretation o f Islamic principles) combined with a forward-looking commitment to private enterprise and consumerist consumption.

By the start of the twenty-first century, the once dominant historical downtown core of Johannesburg had lost its privileged status as the center of business and commercial activities, the metropolitan landscape having been restructured into an assemblage of sprawling, rival edge cities. Real estate developers have recently unveiled ambitious plans to build two completely new cities from scratch: Waterfall City and Lanseria Airport City ( formerly called Cradle City) are master-planned, holistically designed 'satellite cities' built on vacant land. While incorporating features found in earlier city-building efforts, these two new self-contained, privately-managed cities operate outside the administrative reach of public authority and thus exemplify the global trend toward privatized urbanism. Waterfall City, located on land that has been owned by the same extended family for nearly 100 years, is spearheaded by a single corporate entity. Lanseria Airport City/Cradle City is a planned 'aerotropolis' surrounding the existing Lanseria airport at the northwest corner of the Johannesburg metropole. These two new private cities differ from earlier large-scale urban projects because everything from basic infrastructure (including utilities, sewerage, and the installation and maintenance of roadways), landscaping, security services, the regulation of common spaces, and selling and branding the city are firmly in the hands of private profit-making corporate entities and outside the mandate of public authorities.