MICHAEL MORRIS | Up to 80% of South Africans may live in cities by 2050 - Business Day

Michael Morris

As myths go, one of the most baffling is that Cape Town’s political destiny is decided by busloads of people carelessly uprooted from their rural hinterland but paid enough to relocate to the glittering metropole and so tilt the urban balance of power.

If wearying conspiratorialism of this kind is not widely believed, it’s likely to be more common among town or city-dwellers who are themselves living urban lives for the very reason that just less than 70% of the rest of South Africa lives in a town or a city too.

Once the industrial revolution got under way the movement to urban concentrations was unstoppable. Even apartheid at its most determined could not halt it: one of the first apartheid laws to fall under the onrush of insistent modernity ― in 1986, a whole decade before democratic South Africa’s constitutional framework was ratified ― was the “influx control” law meant to keep black people out of “white” towns and cities.

Forty years later, no-one needs to spend a cent on hiring a bus to convince South Africans that their brightest future lies in urban living. But what is equally true is that urban living does not automatically deliver on the promise.

In a recent paper, “Local Government: Crises Decades in the Making and How to Deal with Them”, colleague Terence Corrigan argues that cities “generally increase productivity, provide a forum for expanding complex and value-adding activities, and offer people the socioeconomic mobility that promises tomorrow will be an improvement on today”.

Hence their attractiveness. Corrigan notes that by 2050 “it is projected that 80% of the country’s population will live in its cities, which will ever more comprehensively dominate its economic landscape”. But widespread dysfunction threatens the proposition; thoroughgoing reform is unevadable.

“South Africa,” Corrigan writes, “is not only becoming an ever more urban society; it is becoming more dependent on the capacity of its urban institutions…. The larger the urban population becomes, the greater the consequences of failure in the systems that support it.

“Infrastructure deterioration, weak planning and ineffective administration undermine the quality of life of established communities and constrain the ability of towns and cities to accommodate new residents and businesses, to support investment and to realise the productivity benefits associated with economic concentration.”

Thus, the “urban transition … creates both an opportunity and a risk”, he says. “Well-governed cities can support greater economic activity and productivity; poorly governed cities can see the advantages of agglomeration dissipated through congestion, infrastructure failure, informality and declining investment.”

On its own, then, urbanisation “should not be assumed to follow automatically from the concentration of population in cities”. And South Africa’s urban transition needs to be assessed not simply by how many people live in cities, but by what its cities enable them to do.

“The objective should be to ensure that growing urban populations are accompanied by expanding productive activity, investment and economic opportunity, rather than by an increasing dependence on consumption and transfers.”

The challenge, Corrigan argues, goes far further than “conventional prescriptions for better administration” and making sure municipalities stick to the rulebook; it is to create cities and towns “capable of supporting productive economic activity and capturing the benefits of urban economies”.

The “ultimate test of reform”, he writes, “should be whether local government can become functioning and developmentally oriented rather than simply compliant”.

Being free to live wherever we choose is an inarguable dividend of the continuing elaboration of a postapartheid existence — but only if towns and cities can and do reward the choice.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-10-12-michael-morris-up-to-80-of-south-africans-may-live-in-cities-by-2050/