Tackling urban cores: development zones to innovation districts?

In 2000, democratic local authorities were established across South Africa, replacing transitional local councils which had been set up in 1994. A whole new system of municipal governance was now put in place with the aim of creating more inclusive, integrated urban areas. South African cities faced many problems, not least of which were the spatial and racial inequalities between predominantly white middle-class suburbs and African townships, which were poor and characterised by quite high levels of crime, poor services and unemployment. The other visible problem in the large conurbations was the flight of capital and middle-class families away from the city centres. Suburban shopping malls and office parks had become an increasingly dominant feature of the South African landscape from the 1970s, when a process of decentralisation and disinvestment in the urban core followed a post-Second World War boom in inner-city investment.