UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND, JOHANNESBURG

The City Institute at Wits

CITIES

“Johannesburg has everything a researcher of cities and urban social interaction could ask for. Its layers of history and extremes of achievement and expectation make it a fabulous place to understand and guide metropolitan people, policy and practice.

The huge potential, rapid change, contested democracy and social and economic challenges of Johannesburg make it one of the key global settings for the multidisciplinary study of cities.”

The City Institute at Wits will expand knowledge about cities with a focus on the challenges and potential of urban development in democratic emerging economies. It will study cities like Johannesburg, with extreme income inequality, rapid growth and social change driven by migration, economic shifts and political instability.

Wits’ location in Gauteng at the economic crossroads of Africa makes it ideal to explore how complicated urban environments can harness their full capacity to become high-performance cities.

Research programmes at the City Institute will build an understanding of changing social forms in cities, and factors contributing to their development and decline.

The Institute will explore how cities can foster development, democracy and peace, with research programmes exploring their physical, social and economic construction.

It will seek insights into contemporary cities through multiple academic disciplines as diverse as anthropology, architecture, engineering, town planning, economics, history, sociology, public health, law, geography, history, music and art.

The City Institute will build on Wits’ relationships with provincial and city governments, and the National Planning Commission, and academic links with developing cities in Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America. Connections between Johannesburg and cities experiencing rapid economic change in Africa will provide a path to rethinking urbanism on the continent.

The Institute will harness the knowledge and capacity of existing Wits research centres in migration, urbanism and the built environment.

The City Institute is located in one of the world’s most fascinating and fast-changing urban centres. Johannesburg is a comparatively new city characterised by extremes in wealth, rapid demographic change and multiple cultures learning to live together in an era of recent and continuing political and economic transformation. It is a high-functioning city with top-level infrastructure and significant wealth alongside poverty, deprivation and urban malfunction.