Media Industry Clustering in South Africa: Prospects for Economic Development and Spatial Reconfiguration

The media industry in South Africa is very concentrated both in terms of ownership and in terms of close geographical proximity in South Africa’s two leading cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Despite South Africa having no national strategy to encourage or enhance the geographical clustering of the media industry, more than 90 per cent of media companies cluster a short distance from each other in these two cities. This would at fi rst glance appear to be somewhat of an anomaly. Despite the opportunities presented by the 2010 FIFA World Cup, South African cities historically and currently have shown little interest in attracting media companies to their regions or incentivizing existing companies to stay and grow. But this has not inhibited media clustering or media development more generally from taking place. Almost all current growth fi ts into the ‘traditional agglomeration’ notion of private- sector driven, ‘organic’ geographically based clustering developed by Picard (2008). Media organizations are almost all historically concentrated in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In these cities, a great deal of clustering has taken place, particularly in the last few decades. This refl ects in turn South Africa’s concentrated levels of media ownership, which is itself partly a legacy of apartheid- era patterns of accumulation and exclusion. This chapter outlines how in South Africa clustering continues and, in some places, has even been accelerated recently with limited involvement from government. In this way, the growth and spatial confi gurations of the media industry in South Africa are diff erent from, for example, the start- ups in Dubai, Singapore and Trollhattan. There is no doubt that South African media would welcome more state support at any level, but for various reasons explored in this chapter, that is seldom forthcoming.