Gauteng Is Larger Than Gauteng: Reading the Highveld City-Region

Gauteng Is Larger Than Gauteng

South African mapmaking has a scenery problem.

We are very good at making beautiful maps of the places we have already agreed are beautiful. Mountain ranges get them. Coastlines get them. Wine country gets them. Landscapes associated with weekends away and long scenic drives get treated as places worth lingering over.

Gauteng usually gets roads.

This is strange when you consider what is actually there: Johannesburg and Pretoria, the Witwatersrand, the Magaliesberg, the Vaal, the mining towns of the Rand and an extraordinary concentration of human settlement spread across the Highveld.

Gauteng is usually represented as something to navigate rather than something to look at.

Perhaps that is because so much of its geography has disappeared beneath the city.

A place does not have to be picturesque to deserve a beautiful map

There is an easy mistake to make in cartography: confusing geographic interest with conventional scenic beauty.

Gauteng does not have the spectacular coastline of the Cape Peninsula. Its landscape does not announce itself with vineyards running into mountains or an ocean defining one edge.

It reveals itself differently.

There are ridges, watersheds, long elevation changes, rivers and mining landscapes. There is an enormous human geography laid over them. Towns that began independently have become pieces of a much larger urban system. Highways, industry, townships, suburbs and logistics landscapes extend across distances that are difficult to comprehend from the ground.

This is precisely the kind of place that benefits from being seen from above.

A road map tells you how to cross Gauteng.

A topographical map can begin to tell you why it has the shape it does.

Gauteng does not end cleanly at Gauteng

There is a useful difference between Gauteng Province and the Gauteng City-Region.

The first has a line around it.

The second is a relationship.

The Gauteng City-Region Observatory describes a wider urban system whose towns, infrastructure and economic relationships extend beyond the provincial border. Its most recent population mapping makes the scale of this system particularly visible. Within an analytical radius of 175 kilometres from central Johannesburg, GCRO counted more than 20 million people using Census 2022 data.

That circle is not an official boundary. It is useful precisely because there is no neat one.

Administrative borders tell us who governs a place. They do not necessarily tell us how the place works.

This becomes obvious around Gauteng. Rustenburg, Potchefstroom, Sasolburg and the eastern Highveld are not suddenly part of Gauteng Province, but neither are they spatially irrelevant to the economic and settlement system centred on it.

The edge is fuzzy because the relationships are real.

Johannesburg is partly an urbanisation of geology

Before Johannesburg there was the Witwatersrand.

The gold-bearing belt running east to west helped create one of the defining spatial structures of the region. Mining drew capital, labour, industry and infrastructure to the Rand and was fundamental to the emergence of Johannesburg and the extended metropolis around it.

A line through the rock became a line of human settlement.

That history still helps explain the peculiar east-west structure of the Rand and the sequence of towns, industrial landscapes and former mining areas extending across it.

This does not make a topographical map of Gauteng a geology map. It is not necessary to plot every goldfield or mine dump to understand that the landscape beneath the city had consequences for the city above it.

Mining is part of the explanation, not the graphic subject.

Gauteng is high ground

The physical geography becomes more surprising once the metropolis stops obscuring it.

A continental watershed runs directly through the Gauteng urban region, passing through Randfontein, the Krugersdorp mining belt, Northcliff, Braamfontein and Kensington, across OR Tambo and north of Benoni. Water falling on opposite sides ultimately enters river systems draining towards different oceans.

Johannesburg is not simply a large inland city sitting on a vaguely flat plateau.

It occupies consequential high ground.

Pretoria has another topographic character again. The Magaliesberg and its surrounding ridge-and-valley landscape give the city a physical structure quite unlike Johannesburg's.

South again, the Vaal establishes another kind of landscape.

Seen from a motorway, much of this disappears beneath development.

Seen topographically, the region begins to recover its landform.

Then we drew another map over the first

Of course, physical geography explains only part of modern Gauteng.

Mining created one geography. Segregation imposed another. Highways and private mobility produced another. Industrial restructuring, township expansion, logistics, gated development and post-apartheid housing continued to redraw the region.

Recent GCRO land-cover analysis shows both substantial urban expansion and the overwhelmingly residential character of Gauteng's outward growth since 1990. Major growth areas have included Midrand, Soshanguve and Hammanskraal, Mamelodi, Pretoria East, Katlehong and Sebokeng.

Meanwhile, population mapping from 1996 to 2022 shows both spreading and thickening of settlement, including major infill of territory between Pretoria and Johannesburg.

So “sprawl” is not quite enough.

Gauteng has expanded and filled in at the same time.

The mining region, industrial Rand, segregated metropolis, motorway city, township metropolis, logistics landscape and suburban corporate city have accumulated rather than neatly replacing one another.

That is why the place can look incoherent from the ground and strangely logical on a map.

The right Gauteng depends on the scale

There is no single correct scale at which to draw this place.

Our Gauteng & Environs map deliberately reaches beyond the province. It extends from Rustenburg and Potchefstroom in the west, through the Gauteng urban system and Sasolburg, to Middelburg and Bethal in the east.

That frame changes the reading immediately.

Johannesburg is no longer an isolated metropolitan blob inside a provincial polygon. The West Rand, Vaal and eastern Highveld enter the same picture.

Then there is another scale.

The Highveld map stretches from Polokwane through Rustenburg and Klerksdorp, south through Welkom to an inset of Bloemfontein, east through Clarens and Harrismith, and north-east through Standerton, Bethal and Middelburg.

At that scale, Gauteng changes character again.

It remains the extraordinary concentration at the centre, but it becomes part of a much larger inland geography of towns, uplands, mining regions, agricultural landscapes and long transport relationships.

Neither map is more correct.

One reveals the region.

The other reveals what the region belongs to.

This is what Gauteng has too often been denied in South African cartography: not another diagram explaining how to get through it, but the opportunity to be seen as a place worth looking at.

A beautiful map should not be a reward reserved for beautiful destinations.

Sometimes the places we think we already understand are precisely the ones that need mapping most.