South Africa’s small towns: A review on recent research

Introduction

For much of the 20th century, South Africa had a predominantly rural population. However, currently nearly two-thirds of South Africans live in urban areas. The rapid growth of the cities following industrial and mining developments from the early 20th century led by the 1970s to a situation in which it was noted that rural South Africa had entered a phase of depopulation and small town decline (Nel et al., 2011: 396; Todes et al., 2010). Recent analyses by Nel et al. (2011) as well as by Todes et al. (2010) have shown, among other trends, that small/rural municipalities had net outmigration rates, while metropolitan areas, cities and large towns were net migrant attractors. These demographic changes are closely linked to transformations in agriculture, through increased exposure to global agricultural markets, mechanisation, changes in labour legislation and scales of production, as well as a shrinking mining sector, which is often linked to resource depletion, lower commodity prices and changing regulatory frameworks (Atkinson, 2007a; Nel and Binns, 2007; Nel and Rogerson, 2007). It is also demonstrated that while towns received displaced farm workers and rural dwellers ‘small town/rural municipalities also experience considerable inflows of migrants, at the same time they tend to shed relatively large numbers of migrants who may be moving on to larger cities and towns’ (Todes et al., 2010: 335). Their analysis further shows that the second highest proportion of migrants to metropolitan cities originates from non-metropolitan local municipalities, with as many as two-thirds of migrants to metropolitan cities originating from other metropolitan areas (Todes et al., 2010: 335). A large proportion of inter-urban migration into non-metropolitan local municipalities is, significantly, from other non-metropolitan local municipalities (Todes et al., 2010: 335). Notwithstanding, rural populations on the whole have grown, although at a far lower rate than large metropolitan areas.

Nel et al.’s (2011: 407) analysis of demographic and economic change demonstrates that many of these changes echo international experiences which indicate that there are cases of absolute population loss in certain small towns and associated evidence of rural depopulation. Key drivers in this regard can include the loss or contraction of former economic mainstay such as mining, farming, forestry and fishing and/or the rationalisation of market activity through improved transport systems by-passing smaller settlements and the extended market area of larger centres. On the whole, however, many small towns have witnessed absolute population growth, which often tends to lead to the concentration of displaced people into larger, more centralised places which further have an economic base that has diversified away from agriculture into a post-productivist state with an increased reliance of service sector economic opportunities and a wider economic base in general (Hoogendoorn and Visser, 2011). It was also established that similar to experiences in the United States, there was a distinctive racial profile for who was predominantly located in these small towns. The white population has stagnated numerically, while black and coloured (i.e. people of ‘mixed race’) populations have grown significantly. In addition, these towns have seemingly moved beyond a dependence on their resident population while also providing services to an external market driven by post-productivist activities such as tourism (Nel et al., 2011: 407). In this regard, Harrison and Todes (2015: 153) note that, with the exception of some metropolitan regions, in all other categories of urban places ‘the story is one of growing alignment between economic opportunity and population concentrating and thus of improved household access to jobs and other socio-economic benefits’. Individuals and households in South Africa are ‘voting with their feet’ by moving into places which are better able to provide livelihoods (Harrison and Todes, 2015: 153). Or at least suggest the prospect that they might be able to provide such. Weakening institutional, service and economic capacity in smaller centres exacerbates these processes. It is against the backdrop of such shifts in small town demography and economic purpose that a range of research trends in understanding South African small towns has developed.

This paper is divided into two main sections of review and analysis. The first section furnishes an abridged overview of the different types of research themes that have been engaged with of late regarding small town geographies in South Africa. It is argued that a narrow set of issues, which main concerning economic expansion and change, has, rightly or wrongly formed the key vantage point from which to view small towns in South Africa are understood and analysed, which may in itself be a challenging situation. The second section, which comprises the main contribution of the paper, outlines a range of critical research issues and questions regarding the current and future status and understanding of small towns and their hinterlands that require further academic attention and interrogation.

Key themes of small town research in South Africa

In reviewing recently completed research, a few general observations must first be made. ¹ On the whole, the body of small town focused literature published on South Africa to date is relatively limited in both scope and scale. As Steyn and Ballard (2013: 2) observe, ‘with a few exceptions, such as Donaldson and Marais (2012), rural areas have not received the same attention as cities’ in the country’s academic research to date. Where this has taken place, in terms of spatial scope, around a third of current small town research focuses on the national level, in terms of the analysis of current trends and processes. For the most part, however, investigations are region-specific or place-specific (e.g. Donaldson et al., 2012; Ferreira, 2007). The geographic focus is generally rather narrow, often located in the empirical realities of the Free State province and parts of the Karoo region which straddles parts of the Eastern, Northern and Western Cape Provinces. A smaller secondary spatial focus is on the Western Cape. A further observation is that a relatively small number of researchers are investigating small town South Africa, with the glaring absence of contributions from parts of South Africa where a large number of small towns are located (e.g. Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Northwest provinces) and, significantly, given South Africa’s complex and brutal legacy of apartheid social and spatial engineering very few studies have focussed on towns in the form Black Homelands (i.e. areas designated as black racial reserves under apartheid). This, despite the fact that a significant proportion of the country’s rural and small town population are to be found in theses centres.

A range of themes can be discerned from the relevant body of literature which has been published to date by South African scholars of small town geographies. The majority of investigations are concerned with an overview and analysis of locally driven strategies for economic development designed to respond to the economic changes which theses centres have experienced. In the light of the economic restructuring of rural South Africa, particularly with regards to the changes in role of agriculture and mining have played as key employment actors – and the resultant demographic change which has followed as a result of mine closures and agricultural down-scaling – this type of research is to be expected. At the macro level of analysis, efforts to classify small towns and their general economic potential into defined categories have seen a range of investigations in this regard (Toerien, 2012; Toerien and Marais, 2012; Toerien and Seaman, 2011; 2012a, 2012b, 2014; Van der Merwe et al., 2005; Zietsman et al., 2006). Some of these studies have employed quantitative and GIS (Geographical Information Systems) derived data to statistically analyse process of economic and demographic change and to identify patterns of convergence and divergence within the national or regional space economies. Parallel efforts have sought to develop classificatory systems for small towns into defined classes and to identify business opportunities based on the degree to which current business structures fully exploit available market opportunities. With the restructuring of the South African economy in general – and the rural economy in particular, to that of a more defined post-productivist landscape (Hoogendoorn and Nel, 2012; Kotze, 2003), there has been a keen interest in analysing this aspect of small towns and their hinterlands. Increased attention has been given to new identifying and analysing the role and place of new economic actors and processes that are transforming and reworking the economic purpose of rural areas and small towns (Hoogendoorn and Visser, 2011; Hoogendoorn et al., 2009a). The national government’s policy support for sustainable local economic development (LED) has provided a strategic vantage point from which to analyse small towns (Houghton et al., 2014; Nel 2005; Pelser et al., 2012; Reynold and Antrobus, 2012; Rogerson, 2012), by putting ‘developmental local governance into practice’ (Binns and Nel, 2003; Rogerson, 2014). Government policy and its relevance to small towns, particularly that which deals with community planning, economic restructuring and governance have emerged within these studies as key avenues of enquiry. That said, institutional shortfalls, weak local governance and concerns regarding capacity constraints within small towns have emerged as impediments to change and to successful structural transformation. Infrastructure development in small towns has received some attention (Ingle, 2012) as have overviews of the key challenges that prevent development (Ingle, 2014; Van Rooyen, 2012). The changing accommodation landscape of small towns has been highlighted, particularly with respect to the role selected towns now are playing as tourism destinations. While this at one level reflects the growth of service sector activities and the important role which tourism is now playing in the post-apartheid South African economy, as research shown VFR (visiting friends and relatives) has also emerged a significant activity and economic generator, often in towns now on the traditional tourism routes (Rogerson, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). A theme of investigation that has gained increased relevance is the impact of the changing fortunes of the mining sector on small towns. Apart from Nel and Binns (2007) work on South Africa coal and gold mining sector, other linked investigations include those focused on the nexus of public finance, labour migration and its impact on settlements, owing to mine closure in the arid regions of South Africa (Marais and Cloete, 2009, 2013; Marais et al., 2005). Given the historic dependence of the country’s economy on mining, which served as a catalyst for the country’s industrial revolution from the 1870s and the rich mineral resources of the country, it is inevitably that, following the ‘boom and bust’ cycle of mining, there are now inevitably dozens of settlements which owed their origins to mining but which are now shadows of their former selves economically. This is particularly noteworthy in the case of the former coal-mining towns of KwaZulu-Natal province and the former gold-mining towns of the Free State and the North West provinces. Mine down-scaling, economic rationalisation of economic activities and services, loss of skilled workers and the often desperate attempts to diversify economies and seek out new opportunities forms the basis of many of the above-mentioned studies.

Most of the investigations into small towns in the country are, however, framed as single case studies, at the individual town scale (see for example, Qayi, 2012; Rule and Fryer, 2012; Spocter, 2012; Xuza, 2005) and are closely aligned to the above-mentioned strategy of LED). This lense leads to a focus on local authority economic strategies and efforts to crate jobs through the introduction of Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) and Public Works programmes which are seen as vehicles through which to attain such ambitions. In many studies, this work suggests that a focus on tourism SMME development is a route through which LED objectives could be achieved. A range of investigations have aimed to gauge the potential of tourism as a driver of small town development in this regard (Booyens and Visser, 2010; Halseth and Meiklejohn, 2009; Irvine et al., 2015). This approach has been endorsed by studies which indicate that SMME development and broader LED objectives might be achieved through efforts to promote tourism in general (Van Staden and Marais, 2005), as well as particular types of tourism – for example, book tourism (Donaldson and Vermeulen, 2012), heritage (Van der Merwe, 2014), agritourism (Rogerson and Rogerson, 2014) second homes (Hoogendoorn and Visser, 2004, 2010a, 2010b, 2011; Hoogendoorn et al., 2005, 2009b; Visser and Hoogendoorn, 2015), and the associated risk (Marais et al., 2012) and cost (Gibb and Nel, 2007) of tourism development for local development. A tourism-driven approach is seen as one of the few opportunities to tap into underutilised or unused local assets and to draw in external expenditure given the exhaustion of traditional economic mainstays in many areas. At another level, in terms of changes to the physical and symbolic form of small towns, a range of studies have investigated additional dimensions of small town geographies through research into particular issues; for example, desegregation (Lemon and Clifford, 2005) and gating (Donaldson, 2012; Spocter, 2013). The gentrification of small towns owing to tourism development has also received some attention (Atkinson, 2009; Donaldson, 2009) and exemplifies the dual reality of wealthy, often retired city dwellers and second home owners moving to towns where a parallel economic reality exists for the economic marginalised local residents for whom few economic opportunities exist and who derive little or any benefit from post-industrial changes in their towns.

Given the lack of local development, this has often been seen as reflecting the inability of local and provincial government structures and institutions to provide appropriate leadership, in terms of infrastructure provision, service delivery and social interventions. Atkinson (2007a), Pillay and Durrheim (2012), as well as Van Niekerk and Marais (2008) are among the few that have interrogated this nexus. They argue that there appears to be a lack of appreciation of these issues and that the impact of national and sub-national public policies on small towns cannot be expected to be the same across space and settlement types. Instead, the emphasis from the side of national government has tended to fall on policy frameworks and formulas which can be applied in blanket fashion across settlement types. South African developmental policies, as the above-mentioned investigations suggest, have made no provision for coherent socio-economic developmental support strategies specifically aimed at small towns and the numerous struggling local governance structures, which are in many cases fighting for their long-term sustainability. Overlaying this context, as suggested above, is the reality of weak levels of local government capacity, shortages of skilled staff, the reality that many of the smaller local authorities are bankrupt and the towns themselves are too economically deprived to generate adequate, locally sourced revenue to meet local council and development needs, forcing local authorities into a dependent relationship with the central state to address revenue short-falls.

Shortcomings in governance have no more clearly been expressed than in a range of service delivery protests that have been witnessed across small town South Africa, as well as leading to new forms of organising civil society in opposition to the exiting political and institutional status quo. A small number of investigations, mainly located in the Free State, have focused on these issues and the associated contestation which has occurred (Atkinson, 2007b; Marais and Botes, 2007; Marais et al., 2008). Although the metropolitan regions have seen the development of an extensive scholarship in this regard (for a summative example, see Bond, 2014), these issues have not been explored to any great degree in the small town context, where local government provision and capacity is arguably significantly worse than in major metropolitan areas.

Finally, issues of citizenship have seen some attention. The recent focus issue of Diversity (15(2)) with Ballard and Steyn as editors, argued that the fact that small town South Africa has seen little research attention generally (Ballard and Steyn, 2003: 2) and served to open the investigatory and analytical window to an encouragement of fine-grained analysis of issues concerning Whiteness and Indian minority experiences vis-à-vis a black majority citizenry and political institutions, which often, they feel, ignores their presence. Perhaps the most unexpected small town investigation in recent years is from Reid (2013), representing the only single-authored book, entitled How to be a Real Gay, in the recent small town literature, focused on issues such as everyday practices of gayness in hair salons, churches, taverns and meeting halls – the ambivalent space that homosexuality occupies in the newly democratic South Africa: on the one hand, protection of gay rights is a litmus test for the constitutional democracy, yet, on the other, homosexuality is seen to threaten traditional values, customs and beliefs.

Issues going forward

Conclusion

In conclusion, perhaps the investigatory elephant in the room is that some small towns in South Africa are simply redundant and the harsh reality is that some small towns might simply not survive economically in the long term (Nel, 2012). This is a reality that cannot be ignored and holds a myriad cultural, economic, political and social challenges, as many towns purely become places of welfare pay-outs, which is essentially negative to the development of an already sluggish economy in South Africa (Nel, 2005). This position is not assisted, nor remedied, by a recent national government pronouncement. As Turok (2015: 12) notes

The emphasis devoted in February’s budget (2015) to cities as a way to boost growth signals a sea change in the government’s stance towards metropolitan areas – from ambivalence to explicit support … The Treasury has led the conversion in recognition that cities are crucial to the prospects for reviving South Africa’s sluggish economy.

As this discussion has shown, it is apparent that while small towns are a relatively under-researched phenomenon in South African scholarship, they clearly do play a vital place in the national urban hierarch as numerous studies have illustrated (Nel, 2005). While small towns will, inevitably, experience the effects of rural and small towns population change and economic restructuring, they remain key elements in the livelihoods of their residents and will continue to play a vital role as places of services and welfare support and provision. A clear need exists to extend existing scholarship beyond the current economic and development focus and to play greater attention to a diverse range of themes which, as has been argued, have been under-researched to date. Amongst others, these include concerns over issues of governance, institutional capacity, land and resource access, environmental considerations, food supply and skills development. At a broader level, there is a need for national level research to better understand what is happening across the country in terms of the national settlement hierarchy and functional linkages and processes occurring within it. As highlighted above one of the most obvious foci needs to be addressing the imbalance in research undertaken to date which has generally paid inadequate attention to the very real development challenges and tenuous future faced by the former Homeland towns, which are a significant, but which too date, from a research point of view, are a seemingly marginalised aspects of the small town research. While national policy clearly is a adopting a big-city bias it would be to the detriment of the country if all urban places did not receive measures of support appropriate to their needs and their respective roles in the national settlement hierarchy. The topic of small towns while having been a focus of a degree of research in South Africa, clearly is deserving of greater attention.