Like other national urban policy documents, the State of the Cities Report 2004 affirms a vision of an inclusive non-racial city in which democracy is stable and development flourishes. But the 2004 report is different from preceding urban policy statements in a number of critical respects, not...

Given similar levels of economic development and inequality, it seems strange that more effort has not been made by South Africans to learn from the earlier experience of urbanisation in countries such as Brazil, Chile and Colombia. The paper shows that there are problems in drawing comparisons...

The deindustrialisation of Johannesburg has taken a particular spatial form. Service-sector businesses are increasingly located in the mostly White northern suburbs, whereas the mostly Black southern suburbs bear the brunt of unemployment and increasingly resemble an excluded ghetto. Some...

The debate over whether or not the deindustrialisation of cities is accompanied by the occupational and income polarisation of their working populations has been characterised by some confusion over the relationship between incomes and occupations in the service sector. Specifically, many...

The social polarisation hypothesis argues that deindustrialisation causes the polarisation of the occupational structure, which in turn causes the income polarisation of the employed workforce of global cities. A central argument is that social polarisa­tion occurs because the service sector is...