View article

The city of Johannesburg lies at the centre of the largest urban conurbation in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the past, this conurbation was known by the clumsy acronym PWV that stood for the Pretoria–Witwatersrand–Vereeniging complex. Today, it has the political status of a province and has been renamed Gauteng, a popular local name meaning ‘place of gold’. A province that is almost entirely urban, Gauteng is home to 7.3 million people: about onethird of South Africa’s urban population of 21.8 million.¹ Using the most recent metropolitan demarcations, the population of Johannesburg itself was about 2.6 million in 1996,² making it the second largest city in South Africa, after Durban (2.8 million), and marginally bigger than Cape Town (also about 2.6 million).