A key achievement of South Africa's democratic era is the restructuring of local government to amalgamate what were once racially segregated jurisdictions. Larger municipalities increase the coherence of governance and the scope for redistribution. However, the process of reform has created a distinction between two different configurations: single-tier metropolitan municipalities for the largest urban centres, and two-tier district and local municipalities for the rest of the country. Several district municipalities with mid-size urban centres are dubbed 'aspirant metros' because key actors argue that they should be reclassified as metropolitan municipalities in the future. This article examines arguments for and against the metropolitanisation of Sedibeng District Municipality in Gauteng following the Municipal Demarcation Board's announcement in 2011 that it was considering this possibility. The arguments are organised into four themes: development and economy, governance, social cohesion, and party politics. They raise important considerations about the advantages and disadvantages of metropolitanisation in the abstract. However, the analysis shows the complex nature of this debate because of the entanglement of technical and party-political rationalities. The Democratic Alliance, a key opponent of metropolitanisation, governs Midvaal, a local municipality that would be dissolved in the event of Sedibeng's restructuring. It accuses the African National Congress of promoting restructuring because it would further the ANC's political interests in the first instance. Meanwhile, ANC-aligned commentators characterise Midvaal as both corrupt and resistant to social integration.
Since the repeal of the Group Areas Act three decades ago, South Africa's oncedivided spaces have merged, and race-based restrictions on political participation have been eliminated. The result is that the territories to which people belong have transformed, and in many cases have increased in scale. This editorial introduces a special issue on the scale of belonging, which consists of a series of case studies in Gauteng Province. It considers the possibilities, complexities and limits of this aspect of spatial transformation. It provides two cross-cutting themes running through the articles. The first is that scales of belonging are produced by state practices, the private sector and ordinary users of space. The second is that actors invest in particular scales preferentially, either for their immediate benefit or for the benefit of society as a whole.
Keywords Apartheid city • Urban spatial transformation • South Africa • InclusionOn 28 June 1991, the South African parliament repealed the Group Areas Act, along with other 'racially based land measures' (Fig. 1). For much of the twentieth century, white minority governments insisted that individuals living in South Africa were not a single people but belonged to different ethnically and racially defined nations, and allocated each their own national territories. As a result, the state maintained that most people who lived in urban areas did not truly belong to them, and
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