At the heart of the idea of a city-region in and around Gauteng is the question of how the area should best be governed. As with regions in other parts of the world the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) is an actually existing spatial reality – a very large urban formation that contains a quarter of the South African population and more than a third of national economic activity – but it is also a ‘political project’, a vision and associated long term programme for the rapid, equitable and sustainable development of this space.

This section considers four city-region governance issues: