South Africa’s post-apartheid development landscape remains profoundly shaped by its inherited spatial and institutional architecture. Derived from my PhD study, Bell (2025) argues that underdevelopment conditions, stemming from apartheid’s racial capitalist project, created spatial and institutional constraints in Gauteng’s periphery. These conditions limited equitable urban and industrial transformation, and persist today (Ashman, 2022; 2023).
Understanding this persistence requires tracing the pathways through which historical spatial projects, successful as they were according to narrow capitalistic metrics (Pons-Vignon, 2020), entrenched racial and economic segregation, have evolved into enduring geographies of underdevelopment (Smith, 2022; Van Aswegen & Drewes, 2024).
Apartheid’s combination of spatial engineering and industrial policy produced a deeply polarised geography of development (Pickles, 1991). Its industrial decentralisation programme sought to contain Black labour within peripheral industrial nodes while preserving the spatial dominance of the white urban core. Three decades after democracy, many former “border industries” still reflect the material and institutional residues of that strategy—demonstrating how historical policies can shape present outcomes (see Devereux et al., 2007; Kim, 2020).
This blog examines one such site—Ga-Rankuwa, a township industrial node situated on the historical border between Bophuthatswana and the former Transvaal. Based on fieldwork and stakeholder interviews, it unpacks the a core theme that has contributed to the reproduction the conditions of underdevelopment in this peripheral space.
Shifted borders, Sticky Politics, More Problems
Since 1994, the Gauteng province has undergone several iterations of spatial demarcations. Formerly on the border of the Bophuthatsawana Bantustan and Transvaal province (now Gauteng), Ga-Rankuwa was included in the spatial arrangement and became part of the City of Tshwane. As I outlined in a previous RSA blog post (here), these changes to the demarcations introduced governance and institutional friction and tension between municipal councilors and traditional authorities (see also Parnell & Robinson, 2012).
In Ga-Rankuwa, these tensions have caused a fragmentation of the ecosystem involved with ensuring the design and implementation of urban and industrial policies. This fragmentation was characterised by contestation between the City of the Tshwane and the North West Development Corporation (NWDC) over ownership and management of Ga-Rankuwa’s industrially-zoned land.
These arrangement is a legacy of the periphery’s urban and industrial areas ties to the apartheid industrial geography. This was the product of the apartheid state’s operationalisation of its decentralisation agenda in Ga-Rankuwa. While it was funded through the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the management of the industrial zone was purported to be under the Bophuthatswana National Development Corporation (now the NWDC).
Implications for urban-industrial underdevelopment and industrial clustering
In reality, these funding-management arrangements were more grey than black and white. The apartheid state’s approach was less than an invisible hand approach. Rather, it directly influenced the degree and type of industrial development that took place in Ga-Rankuwa. For Bophuthatswana, this created a political-economic reliance on the apartheid state.
This political-economic arrangement continues to have negative implications for the industrial development in Ga-Rankuwa. Due, in part, to needing to service its apartheid-era debts, the NWDC has abandoned a coherent industrial agenda. The reason was that its industrial geography would not benefit from aligning the Ga-Rankuwa industrial zone with the City of Tshwane’s automotive sector goals.
Instead, the NWDC has reoriented itself to become a property manager, renting facilities in its industrial zones without regard for fostering industrial linkages and collaboration among its tenants. The outcomes of the spatial legacy in Ga-Rankuwa for its automotive hub and the wider industrial zone are dire.
Reorienting Pathways: Aligning Urban and Industrial Agendas
The case of Ga-Rankuwa illustrates how apartheid’s spatial-industrial legacies have persisted not simply through physical infrastructure but through institutional inertia and policy fragmentation. The City of Tshwane and the NWDC’s overlapping mandates create an undevelopmental environment.
Industrial zones are managed as property rather than part of a coordinated regional industrial economy. The collapse of initiatives like the local automotive incubator reflects not just market failure, but the failure of institutional alignment in a peripheral space still struggling to overcome its historical design.
Ga-Rankuwa’s experience exposes a structural paradox in post-apartheid development: while spatial borders have shifted, the political economy of space has remained largely intact. Addressing these challenges requires more than new infrastructure or policy slogans. We must acknowledge, seek to disrupt, and redirect the historical trajectories that created unequal urban-industrial geographies.
This demands a strategic realignment of urban and industrial development agendas under a unified governance framework. Such alignment would allow for coherent spatial-industrial planning, the strengthening of local value chains, and the gradual unravelling of apartheid’s spatial-industrial path dependencies.
By doing so, peripheral spaces such as Ga-Rankuwa might begin to experience tangible changes from constrained locations to spaces of new urban-industrial possibilities. The geography of apartheid’s past could then become the geography of a fairer and more even South African development.
Connect with the Author
Jason F. Bell is a Researcher at the Gauteng City Region Observatory and a member of the Inclusive Economies Research Team. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Johannesburg exploring the political economy of uneven urban-industrial development and evolution in Gauteng City Region townships. Jason’s work spanned many areas of economic development, having researched and written on political economy and industrial development issues, regulation, governments and institutions’ role in fostering growth and the evolution, development finance institutions, climate change, and the distribution of power within global value chains.
: Jason F Bell 
: jasonfbell.bsky.social 
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