Densification by commodification: Comparing the production of housing in the Gauteng City-Region and Alpine Rhine Valley

Abstract

Comparing the politics and governance of densification in South Africa and Austria provides new insight into capitalist housing production. In this paper, we present the results of extensive empirical research into housing densification as an urban development strategy in Gauteng, the region surrounding Johannesburg in South Africa, and in the Austrian part of Alpine Rhine Valley, which is the economic center of the province of Vorarlberg. Though these case study areas may initially seem disparate, interrogating the intertwined processes of densification and commodification allows us to identify shared challenges, contrast responses, and develop broader implications for urban theory. In the Gauteng City-Region, the territorial legacy of apartheid persists through housing development on the urban peripheries. Despite concerted policy efforts encouraging spatial change, the “business” of densification largely continues along the same lines, perpetuating urban sprawl at low densities. In the Alpine Rhine Valley, densification is embedded into territorially fragmented public–private governance arrangements. The ideal of the single-family home persists, even as “sustainable” private-sector projects extract value through denser housing production. While these cases are different, we found that housing densification is a key strategy of urban development and governance in both urban regions, reinforcing existing power hierarchies, maintaining socio-spatial stratification, and preserving existing forms of social reproduction. Comparing these two cases reveals how densification is deeply intertwined with commodification in the production of contemporary urban landscapes. We conclude that, embedded in economic growth models, the production of dense housing is essentially part of an overall process of the ever-increasing commodification of urban space.

Introduction

The production of housing is one of the most tangible means through which we perceive the embedding of capital flows into our cities and regions. Not only has the construction sector often been utilized as a key indicator in describing economic growth (Olarewaju and Ibrahim, 2020; Turok and McGranahan, 2013), dense housing production has frequently been the target of local, regional, and national governance policies for achieving improved socio-environmental justice (Charlton et al., 2022). However, our research indicates that the “business of densification” (Debrunner, 2024) in particular as related to the production of housing, rarely lives up to this expectation if examined as a long-term, intertwined process of commodification and densification. To substantiate this claim, this article compares how housing has been commodified and densified to varying degrees across distinct phases of urban development in segments of the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) of South Africa and the Alpenrheintal, or Alpine Rhine Valley (ARV), of Austria.

In examining these cases, we define the business of densification as how actors involved in the production and regulation of the built environment “tend to support … densification processes and policies that guarantee economic growth at the expense of preserving social values” (Debrunner, 2024: 141). These two extended urban regions (Schmid and Topalović, 2023) may seem like an unusual pairing. However, we found such striking parallels when examining the commodification of housing across these sites that we began to examine them in juxtaposition with one another. Despite their differing geographical locations, histories, and pathways of urbanization (on this notion, see Schmid et al., 2018), by examining these sites in comparison through ethnographic research (Lazar, 2012), we could identify characteristics of housing densification processes we would not have identified by reading them in isolation. The findings we derived from this echo the literature describing how the value of housing as a good of exchange is dominating its use value in many places globally (Debrunner, 2024: 144; Madden and Marcuse, 2016).

In what follows, we show how this occurs by comparing five modalities of the business of housing densification in the two regions. First, we introduce our conceptual framework, delineating how housing commodification and densification interact. Then, our methodological approach is presented. We then delve into our comparative findings. Discussion of the five “modalities” identified through both historical and contemporary analysis of urban development shows how the nexus between densification and commodification manifests through universal phenomena like pressure on urban housing markets, governance policies attempting to achieve growth and/or sustainability targets, and public–private partnerships that (re)consolidate the power of urban developers. But beyond such generalized conclusions, we also found that each case exhibits its own iterations of processes that lead to socio-territorial fragmentation and segregation in urban space. Finally, despite marked differences in the material outcomes of urbanization processes in the GCR and ARV, dialogs on densification facilitate “value capture” (Robinson and Attuyer, 2020), by state as well as private actors in the development sphere.

We conclude that, embedded in economic growth models, the production of dense housing is essentially part of an overall process of the commodification of space. In both our contexts, it upholds “traditional” as well as racialized and xenophobic power hierarchies. Finally, we assert that describing articulations of this phenomenon is crucial to policy development, if we are to overcome historical injustices and create more equitable cities and regions. While we may have been able to recognize these phenomena individually, they came into sharper focus by comparing across these cases spanning the Global North and South, allowing us to identify which questions to ask, and interrogate who is impacted by urban policy and governance initiatives.

Dynamics of densification and commodification in housing

Commodification generally implies a process through “which goods or services formerly outside a market enter a market” (La Grange and Pretorius, 2005: 2472 cited in Kadi, 2024). Since land value is increasingly generated through housing (Christophers, 2022: 331), this means that, often, the function of housing

as real estate takes precedence over its usefulness as a place to live. When this happens, housing’s role as an investment outweighs all other claims upon it, whether they are based upon right, need, tradition, legal precedent, cultural habit, or the ethical and affective significance of the home. (Madden and Marcuse, 2016: 14)

It would be overly reductionist, however, to state that commodification and collectivization are the only possible states of a good such as housing. Rather, commodification must be understood as “a continuum with land and housing having exclusively a use value on one end and exclusively an exchange value on the other” (La Grange and Pretorius, 2005: 2481). Instruments such as rental laws, non-profit or public ownership of land and housing, planning and land-use regulations or tax laws all influence the degree of commodification to which housing is subjected (Debrunner, 2024; Kadi, 2024; Musil et al., 2022). As Kadi (2024) has determined, studies of this phenomenon should instead engage with unpacking the varying layers that shape how housing becomes commodified.

For decades, density has consistently remained a central element and a desirable goal of planning; it was a tool with which to achieve policy and design objectives, and increasingly tied to the language of sustainability (Grafe et al., 2025; Herburger, 2023; McFarlane, 2020; Rubin et al., 2020). However, as recent scholarship has shown, densification can lead to negative social impacts, such as rising housing costs and displacement under conditions of intensive commodification (Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2019; Stirling et al., 2024). Densification within the context of commodification prioritizes the maximum retail value of building land over, for example, a higher number of people living in affordable and appropriate conditions on this same piece of land. As much as housing can be densified through additions and adaptations, existing buildings can also be de-commodified or re-commodified (Gray and Kallin, 2023; Musil et al., 2022). This indicates that commodification and densification are dynamic, interrelated, and can impact both new and existing housing stock.

Drawing from our previous work, and closely related to the subject of this special issue, we therefore define the nexus of densification and commodification as a process of interaction between states, markets, and people through which the value of the built environment increases per unit area (Herburger, 2024; Howe, 2020). How much dense housing is commodified and consequently becomes a business depends on a broader political-economic framework as well as the actors involved at the public–private nexus of the housing sector (Ballard and Butcher, 2020; Musil et al., 2022). This definition is closely associated with recent shifts in critical scholarship in geography and urban studies that move away from measuring the varying dimensions of density to studying political-economic frameworks and actor relations in the production of density (Habermehl and McFarlane, 2023: 666).

The local state plays an especially antagonistic role in the business of densification. In the context of the global housing affordability and displacement crises, which developed alongside an increased emphasis on “urban compactness” (Haarstad et al., 2023), the local state is increasingly tasked with conceiving solutions to de-commodify housing (Debrunner, 2024; Verheij et al., 2024). Local states attempt to promote and regulate density in order to extract value for private actors as well as for public goods (Habermehl and McFarlane, 2023: 670-671), for example by giving private developers permission to build higher densities in exchange for including social housing units (Ryan and Enderle, 2012). They can also pursue active land-management and development policies (Debrunner, 2024), or levy charges for higher building densities on private developers (Karampour, 2021).

Yet the local state also has to mediate between and negotiate with the actors who develop and build housing, along with the people for whom development is intended. This has led to a plethora of actor-relations and power asymmetries emerging within the public–private nexus between the state, developers, and local populations (Ballard and Butcher, 2020; Debrunner and Kaufmann, 2023). Depending on the global embeddedness and history of (de-)commodified housing, the local state in different urban regions is faced with complex private actor constellations. Actors like investors, construction firms, or property developers may have different sizes, investment strategies, or ownership structures, be subject to different non-profit regulations, or have varied degrees of access to resources such as land and capital markets (Musil et al., 2022: 1933-1934; Robinson, 2022). Furthermore, citizens are becoming increasingly vocal about and critical of commodified forms of densification, and becoming important social agents in densification processes as a result (Robinson and Attuyer, 2020).

Historically, increasing or decreasing the density of the built environment to achieve specific objectives (McFarlane, 2020) has been a defining characteristic of urban development. Our cases of the GCR and ARV allowed us to apprehend this relationship between housing commodification and densification policy. Originating with the industrial boom of the 19th century, liberal planning and housing policies increased private profit at the expense of the working class in Central Europe. This often corresponded to the privatization of formerly public land into dense “affordable” housing projects in the post-war era. Density was also used as a justification for the racially driven expulsion of populations to the urban peripheries in 19th-century South Africa, to benefit processes of extraction and exploitation (Drakakis-Smith, 1992). Low-density, single-family-housing across racially divided social groups was promoted as both a better living environment and a worthy societal aspiration beginning in the early 20th century, which increased more and more with the expulsion of African-designated populations to the urban peripheries, beginning with the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 and rapidly increasing from the 1950s during the apartheid era. While we were broadly aware of how global phenomena driving such processes resonated within our two cases, it was only when we began discussing them in comparison that further shared overlaps emerged, mutually enriching our understandings of each place.

Methodological approach and empirical work

To grasp such complex actor constellations and varying degrees of commodification and densification, we were inspired by comparative urban research between sites in the Global North and South (Lancione and McFarlane, 2016; Lemanski, 2022) that seeks to “support different ways of working across diverse urban experiences” (McFarlane and Robinson, 2012: 765). In taking each case individually and following “inductive reasoning to find similarities and differences” (Söderström, 2021), we developed hypotheses about spatial phenomena that take seriously the value of working “between contexts and cities that have traditionally neither been found in conversation with one another, nor considered valid sources for the construction of new knowledges outside of the traditional canon of theory” (Rubin et al., 2023b: 353).

Our research did not originate in comparison; each of us utilized similar methods to gather data in our respective regions for what were initially unrelated projects. This primarily involved ethnographic research: observation, multiple forms of interviews, document analysis, and volunteered geographic information (VGI; Herburger, 2022, 2023; Howe, 2021a, 2022a). Because of our institutional setting, we became embedded in supporting each other’s regionally focused case study areas. What brought us to examine them in conversation with one another was our shared use of the frameworks of extended and planetary urbanization (Schmid et al., 2018; Schmid and Topalović, 2023), as well as a common engagement with ethnographic research methods.

Analysis of Johannesburg built on a cumulative body of mixed-methods research, including in-depth fieldwork across the GCR for several months per year during 2014–2017, 2019–2020, and 2023–2024. Individual research was conducted in the form of one of the co-author’s dissertation, as well as through a series of several further collaborative projects. ¹ The process typically included initial liaising with the community, by contacting people in leadership positions identified through work with local NGOs, and setting up focus groups (30–40 participants per area). From these groups, further participants (10–20 per group) were then selected to conduct studies with a smartphone application collecting VGI, followed by semi-structured expert and mobile interviews. Some took part in multiple studies over the years, lending a longitudinal perspective to the data; the total number of participants in the method is over 600. Further interviews were conducted with experts in government, planning, and academia: approximately 150 over the total course of engagement with the region stretching more than a decade. Qualitative content analysis (Gläser and Laudel, 2013) and triangulation (Flick, 2009) were utilized to synthesize the data with literature review and extensive geospatial analysis of the built environment, and spatial change over time.

The empirical material on the ARV was collected during two research projects, one of which was one of the co-authors’ dissertation. In sum, 30 interviews were held with experts from politics, municipal administrations, as well as key actors from the planning and construction sector, each lasting 45–90 minutes. Furthermore, a variety of documents were included in the research process. These included: parliamentary protocols, planning and housing laws and concepts, official publications of provincial spatial planning departments, historical publications, and strategy documents of local political parties. A deductive-inductive approach to qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz and Rädiker, 2022) was used, to first structure the empirical material with more abstract, theoretically driven categories, and then follow an inductive process of coding remaining closer to the material.

Following Roy and Ong’s (2011) calls of “worlding the South” and “learning from elsewhere,” we began from the starting point that any urban place is a worthy place from which to theorize and the explicit value of comparison (Robinson, 2022; Schmid et al., 2018). Exchanging geographically specific bodies of literature on our respective sites (Ballard and Butcher, 2020; Rubin et al., 2020) and discussing our data together provided new insight into phenomena we believe we would not have noticed in isolation. Although geographically distant from one another, we were fascinated to discover that the timeline of extensive industrialization occurred during similar periods: beginning in the late 1800s, with gold mining in Johannesburg and textile production in the ARV. Despite their geographical and political differences, Johannesburg and the Alpenrheintal share parallel histories of industrialization, housing commodification, and densification—revealing common ideals of homeownership and enduring patterns of value extraction shaped by distinct spatial, social, and governance contexts.

Comparative findings

In the following sections, we introduce five key “modalities,” or ways in which the dynamics of commodification and densification interact in the GCR and ARV.

Trajectories of value extraction

Historically, dense housing has always been a key component of economic growth. So if densification has been a feature of urban development for centuries, why is the discussion of densification and commodification only so recent? We found that, while being conceptualized as the producer of exchange value, densification in the past played a more fundamental role in use value, to extract profit from land and labor. In Johannesburg, dense worker housing was built for the gold mines, whereas in the ARV, it was for the textile industry. In both cases, dense housing located relatively high numbers of people close to the sites of extraction and production. In another similarity, the workers dwelling in this housing were historically repressed populations from lower-income, stigmatized social groups: poor and African in the GCR; poor and immigrant in the ARV.

In the parts of the GCR surrounding the city of Johannesburg, urban development is grounded in the legacy of apartheid and geographically remote housing development. What began as dense worker housing for African populations in the inner city to support goldmining contract work from the 1880s onward not only served as a precursor to apartheid, but also established the state consorting with the interests of private and global capital in the production of the city (Bond, 2000). Primarily Black male labor was housed near tightly controlled mining and industrial sites (known as “single-sex hostels”), while women and children were expected to remain “at home” in what were referred to as “rural Native reserves.” Urban areas were designated for people of “European descent” (Drakakis-Smith, 1992). What began as a gradual process of township incorporation extending the urban fabric around Johannesburg and Pretoria then began to unfold at a much more rapid pace during the post-war apartheid era (Mabin, 2013). The apartheid state ultimately began housing people in urban and regionally adjacent areas, encroaching into what was tribally administered and/or communal land, and resulting in the complex patchwork of municipal and customary land that still exists on the regional peripheries today (Mosiane and Götz, 2022;  Mosiane and Murray, 2025).

Similarly, in the ARV housing densification began to emerge with workforce immigration from Italian Trentino around 1880, to sustain industrialization in the region (Pichler, 2015: 62). Workers’ homes were typically built in close proximity to factories and outside the traditional villages, owned directly by textile companies or private individuals. As a result of National Socialist housing policies from 1938 to 1945 and due to World War II, the nonprofit housing organizations were mandated with constructing denser settlements for (forced) immigrants. This distinction remained after World War II: while large-scale housing complexes for immigrant guest workers from Turkey and former Yugoslavia were built directly next to textile factories, the single-family-home-boom occurring in the post-war economic expansion was based on provincial housing subsidies, along with a relatively broad and fragmented distribution of land ownership, and privatization of the commons (Pichler, 2015: 302).

The divided and segregated spatial development policies throughout the GCR’s history resulted in a highly fragmented material and social space. In the ARV too, the percentage of people from Yugoslavia and Turkey living in dense, non-profit housing is still two-to-three times higher than the overall proportion of the population (Statistik Austria, 2023; author’s calculations).

Even though the political contexts were and remain highly different, these forms of densification (“densification for business”) resulted in long-term socio-spatial segregation, the stigmatization of neighborhoods and value extraction from vulnerable social groups.

(De-)Densification through mass housing urbanization

States choose for the urban fabric to become denser by crafting corresponding polices – and can also achieve the opposite effect of de-densification if this suits their urban development objectives. Derived from previously racialized doctrines to build dense and cheap housing for workers, a complex system of mass housing emerged from the late 1950s in the GCR and the early 1960s in the ARV. While related to the idea of value extraction from the land and labor pools, the dense mass production of housing is a particularly dominant articulation thereof.

This phenomenon was especially pronounced in apartheid-era South Africa, officially commencing in 1948, in which the blending of state and private-sector interests in less dense spatial planning was to segregate populations and discourage political protest. In order to house populations expelled from urban areas designated as “white” under the apartheid system, mass housing was developed on the urban peripheries (Platzky and Walker, 1985). People forcibly removed from thriving multi-ethnic central areas were relocated into housing that was planned by the state, in concert with private developers who received subsidies for implementing what were commonly known as “site and service schemes.” Expelled populations were then expected to pay the state rent for this housing – which essentially amounted to mass housing densification projects on the urban peripheries, categorized by ethnic group by the apartheid government – and utility services were delivered by the state. The most extreme form this took was the formation of the “Bantustans,” sorting people by their ethnic origin on the remote urban peripheries, where there was cheap land for housing but extreme spatial isolation. Across the city-region, there was thus a veritable “boom” of what could be considered affordable housing from the late 1960s onward (Mabin, 2013). This coincided with de-densification of historically Black urban centralities like Alexandra (Howe, 2020: 184–191) and a slowdown of public housing development in cities (Freund and Mabin, 2023).

In the ARV, a post-war population explosion between 1961 and 1980 engendered the region’s first true housing boom with dense developments of more than eight stories. Some 45% of all buildings with more than 21 housing units were built during this period (Statistik Austria, 2023, author’s calculations). The constructors and owners highlight the emerging duopoly of the Austrian housing market. Non-profit housing companies were primarily commissioned to build dense housing for immigrant guest workers on the industrial peripheries of the towns and villages. The partial liberalization of Austria’s housing subsidy system enabled private individuals and construction professionals to access funds, leading to the rise of for-profit housing companies and middle-class-owned condominiums rented on the private market (Maier, 1976: 166).

Today, a distinction and concurrency between for-profit and non-profit housing organizations remains in both regions. In the GCR, affordable rental housing remains the purview of the state. The Johannesburg Social Housing Company (JOSHCO) and the Johannesburg Housing Company (JHC) are two of the largest current operators in Johannesburg. ² In the ARV, there are currently four non-profit housing companies, with the largest of them, VOGEWOSI, being owned by the province and the municipalities. However, the low potency of the non-profit sector in the region increases the for-profit sector’s relevance for housing provision, along with the profit-making capacities of private actors (see the next section). In the GCR, actor constellations through channels both legal and untransparent consolidate private developer’s power over and through urban space. The state, broadly speaking, has shown limited interest in alternative housing development models to date (Pieterse, 2019: 23). The City of Johannesburg, however, does tend to lead the way in both, indicating changes in the property market, as well as advancing new modes of experimentation in the realm of housing and urban governance, and there have been several progressive projects of note executed over the past 10 years (Charlton et al., 2023: 181–198).

Nevertheless, in the GCR, despite concerted efforts to limit urban edges, this new urban development occurs to a large extent in the City of Johannesburg, and comprises single-family homes (for low-income populations south of the CBD) as well as condominium and row-house development (for higher-income populations in the Northern Suburbs). This is also interwoven with the legacy of state-led urbanization, resulting in part from Nelson Mandela’s 1994 promise to provide every South African citizen with a home and the extensive Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) initiative primarily focused around mass housing production (Charlton, 2018). Despite this mass housing urbanization, younger generations cannot afford home ownership at all due to falling economic prospects. Access to rental housing remains limited, compared to the overall population size. Interactions between the state, developers, and people will be significantly further strained by the inevitability of increasing resource scarcity and population growth in the future.

Above-average housing costs have also been on the political agenda in the ARV for decades (Pichler, 2015: 302) and have gained further traction over the past 15 years. In the ARV, too, homeownership has become increasingly impossible to achieve for young adults, since housing costs have grown at a much faster rate than salaries. This problem is commonly attributed to the economic potency and dynamic population development, as well as proximity to high-income countries like Liechtenstein and Switzerland. However, the ARV has the lowest share of non-profit rental housing in all of Austria (Österreichischer Verband gemeinnütziger Bauvereinigungen, 2022). This has resulted in an increasingly private rental market, which is the most expensive and precarious type of housing in Austria.

In conclusion, in both regions, the private-sector “densification boom” of the past several decades saw the urban fabrics of the ARV and the GCR becoming increasingly densified as well as commodified. The challenges of housing affordability placed the local state in both regions under pressure to pursue commodified housing densification, by increasing building densities and attracting private investment to secure a minimum level of housing construction, but at the same time, they must provide housing and services for less-well-off segments of the population. As Schmid and Topalović (2023) have argued, this can result in peripheralization (see also Howe, 2022b).

(Re-)commodification of the existing housing stock

In South Africa, after the 1985 lifting of restrictions on movement for racial groups known as “influx control,” commodification of the housing market became an explicit objective of the state. It was intended not only to promote investment in the country, but also to create a “Black middle class,” differentiated from the Black working class of apartheid-era social engineering (Bond, 2000; personal communication, City Manager, August 2016). Housing production (both the state support of and private production of) remains a key driver of growth and development strategies today (Freund and Mabin, 2023; Mabin and Parnell, 2012). Also, significant changes to the housing provision system on the national level of governance in Austria in the 1980s and 1990s point to a deliberate commodification of housing. The liberalization of tenancy laws (Kadi, 2020; Mentschl, 2013), the delegation of housing subsidies to provinces which in turn increasingly promoted private homeownership, and low post-2008 interest rates (Amann, 2023) elevated private developers to the dominant producers of housing densification since the 1990s.

The (re-)commodification of former industrial sites or older residential buildings in what are urban centralities today, in both regions, is a major factor for densification becoming a business. An example of such change over the past decade in particular is an increased presence of privately financed rental units in the urban centralities of the GCR, where land is increasing in value (Harrison, 2023; Turok et al., 2024). Researchers in the inner city of Johannesburg, for example, describe “modern slumlords” buying up massive stocks of high-rise buildings, lightly renovating them, and renting them for exorbitant fees despite providing almost no reliable services (personal communication, Urban Planner in Johannesburg, February 2024; Amato, 2018).

In the ARV, industrial restructuring and abandment of (mostly textile) factory and railway land after 1980 generated new possibilities for housing and multi-use developments in central areas. These areas were a “treasure for urban development” (personal communication, retired Urban Planner, 2024), creating attractive opportunities for emerging project development companies on these brownfield sites (in many cases, including considerable state investment for public programs). These developments usually encompass mixed uses, and between 150 and 300 housing units, where the developer retains ownership over all of the building stock. At the moment, only five developers in the province have enough expertise, networks, and capital to conduct such projects – in some instances they are also in joint ventures with each other, or with public or non-profit housing developers. Two of the biggest developers even share a common history: one split off from the other in 1994. This tendency of former property development employees to start their own businesses continues today.

Dense, well-located affordable housing and service delivery remain some of the most contested issues between the state, developers, and people. And while many institutions of welfarist and non-profit housing provision are still in place in cases like Austria, the past several decades showed increasing liberalization of housing rights that, along with stricter anti-sprawl and densification policies, similarly promoted the commodification of dense housing. Consequently, states in both cases promote the power of developers, who act in concert with and/or negotiate with the state at different tiers of government. Value extraction through housing commodification remains part and parcel to economic growth models: prioritizing exchange over use value and deliberately engineering pressure on urban housing markets to deliver maximum profits.

Territorial fragmentation

Housing and planning governance in both regions is characterized by high degrees of horizontal and vertical fragmentation, with each territorial entity adding an additional layer to the “matrix” of densification and (de-/re-)commodification. With the end of apartheid in South Africa came the continued expectation of housing and service provision by the state, because of the constitutional promise that every citizen should have a right to “adequate housing.” ³ The primary vehicle for both spatial and economic development – purported together – thus became housing production, financed through the nationwide Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), and later through further political policies such as Breaking New Ground in 2004 (Klug and Vawda, 2009) and inclusionary housing frameworks like SPLUMA in 2013 (Turok et al., 2024: 216-217). As this implies, housing was typically mandated by national policy; however, local governments were expected to plan and deliver the material products. As we have discussed elsewhere, this “housing mandate” led to complex negotiations and contestations between the decentralized layers of governance in the GCR (Howe, 2021b). Meanwhile, the urban edge continued to press outwards, until the urban region of daily commuting and interacting began to encompass an area more than 175 kilometers in diameter. Both space and policy are highly fragmented.

From this perspective, a clear line can be drawn between the apartheid legacy of peripheral housing production, an expectation by people that the state should provide housing and services in the post-apartheid era, and the continued importance of what are essentially densification processes in the collective imagination of the South African people. Housing and urban infrastructure were established as one of the primary objectives of urban (and therefore economic) development by the state, keeping African families in particular separated in space to support mining and industrial endeavors since the inception of the territory’s urbanization processes. Developers have extracted high levels of value from new settlements, and governance arrangements over this “territorially fragmented” (Harrison, 2003) space were historically complicit in reproducing the continued unequal geographies of the GCR. This history of housing development and policy landscape thus demonstrates why we must examine the material spaces of densification relationally: seeing what kind of development is being done where, for whom, and conceiving of urban regions holistically.

The business of densification in the ARV occurs within a highly territorially fragmented planning landscape: housing policies are shaped by the province, which is responsible for housing subsidies and spatial planning laws. Also, the Austrian state exerts influence in the (de-)commodification of housing through tenancy laws, non-profit housing laws, and programs targeting improved energy efficiency. Furthermore, within the region, there are 29 municipalities, each with jurisdiction over planning; hence, they can implement different densification policies with divergent objectives. Even though the ARV is a comparatively small extended urban region, there are “local top dogs” in project development to the north and south of the region, giving rise to fragmented “business territorializations” similar to ones identified in the GCR. The origin and heritage of the company owners and shareholders lay the foundations for local networks with investors, politics, and businesses.

Beyond the redevelopment of abandoned industrial complexes, there is another type of privately led densification. It is usually conducted by relatively small but locally well-connected construction companies. They specialize in developing small-scale, replicable densification projects on the small building plots characteristic of the ARV. Typically, apartments are sold as condominiums during or directly after building completion. These companies have a high degree of insider knowledge into local markets, family structures, municipal actors, and municipal building regulations. Their buildings are optimized for these regulations, to achieve short planning times. Much project work is actually done outside of, and even before, formal building application procedures, grounded in people’s knowledge of local administration and politics (Herburger, 2024). ⁴ One Head of Office of a municipality called this type of densification “densification as it happens” (personal communication, 2022), since small municipalities under 3000 inhabitants in particular lack the necessary knowledge, time, and instruments to effectively govern urban densification.

Consolidation of power by local elites

The continued dissection of the landscape into smaller pieces for higher profitability and the liberalization of housing rights in favor of “local elites” are therefore, as demonstrated above, decades old. Housing commodification was a deliberately enacted strategy that remains potent in determining the material and social densities of urban environments today; the key actors involved in this process have also been in place for a generation. In the case of the GCR, the process and actors were established during apartheid, and boomed in the 1990s; in the ARV, they can be traced back to the 1970s, and brownfield redevelopments in the late 1980s. The networks between public and private actors used for extracting value from housing densification projects are tightly knit, and in some cases in the GCR can directly be traced to corruption. In the ARV, there are no “official” cases of corruption, but relations between municipalities and developers perpetually walk a fine line between “good working relationships” and cronyism (Herburger, 2024).

Yet it is incorrect to consider the state completely in cahoots with the private sector, or that the private sector is all-powerful. Butcher (2023) offers a deeper genealogy of relationships that we observed in both the GCR and the ARV. First, there are gaps and frictions between the multi-layered tiers of the state. We found that the local level is fragmented between municipalities following divergent spatial strategies at both sites. Second, there are cross-cutting formal and informal relationships that (often) shift over time. In the ARV, we noted how project development companies were founded by former employees of established companies, who leveraged their networks with municipalities and investors to launch their businesses. In the GCR, companies often comprised multiple divisions for distinct target markets in different parts of the city-region (Howe, 2022b), which we also observed in several cases in the ARV. Third, in both the GCR and ARV, there are governance gaps due to limited financial, land, and infrastructural resources. Non-state actors can thus insert themselves between residents and the local state, or private development companies can take the lead even in the early stages of large-scale redevelopment processes.

Concluding remarks

Our research in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) and the Alpine Rhine Valley (ARV) developed out of a fascination with how densification unfolds. Through “experimental comparison” between “radically different contexts that have seemingly little in common” (Lancione and McFarlane, 2016: 2405) we were able to derive five modalities of the business of housing densification. The modalities illustrate that speaking of an “emerging” business of densification falls short of the historical trajectories of densification in both cases. And while some social-justice and environmental objectives were achieved, the production of the housing landscape tended to consolidate existing power relations between developers and governments, and perpetuate existing patterns and practices of socio-spatial inequality for ordinary people. We thus argue that housing densification in both cases can only be understood through the commodification of urban space.

In the GCR, the housing landscape originates from patterns of urban expansion and expulsion established from the early 1900s forwards, in which development for strictly demarcated racial groups embedded capital into spatially disparate and increasingly remote urban peripheries (cf. Freund and Mabin, 2023; Mabin, 2013). Overwhelmingly, there was an economic objective underpinning housing production: to keep labor costs low for mining and industry, to spatially isolate people to control flows of everyday life, and to extract value from commodified housing stock. The primary issue discussed today in the GCR remains addressing the production of “adequate” housing for a rapidly growing urban population. In this, people retain a strong prevailing idea of home ownership – preferably a single-family home – as the ideal way to live. Such phenomena, as well as the even more dense alternatives like condominiums encroaching deep into urban peripheries, are exacerbating serious infrastructure problems fundamental to sustaining housing densification. In many African contexts, states and local governments simply do not have the resources to deliver on economic development through urban expansion and housing densification (Rubin et al., 2023a). To deliver public services, welfare benefits, and infrastructure modernization, the local state establishes alliances with resourceful non-governmental actors (Anciano and Piper, 2018).

In the ARV, densification also first emerged as mass housing for immigrant workers. It took different stages of housing subsidies and housing law liberalization at the national level to make densification a “proper business.” In the ARV, housing densification builds on a strong political-ideological tradition that housing provision for the general population is the responsibility of the market and the private individual. Coupled with the commodification of housing, as well as a promotion of “sustainable” densification through urban planning, both large and small, locally well-networked private development companies emerged. The financial, land, and organizational resources of the private sector foster this the (local) state’s dependence for housing provision. Simultaneously, a paternalistic approach to non-profit housing in the ARV established long-lasting patterns of stigmatization, even though the non-profit sector is increasingly under pressure to deliver affordable housing due to a significant housing price crisis. For the local state, planning regulations and land ownership are the main instruments to influence housing densification – which they do in careful orchestration with a vocal public that stills supports low-density housing (Herburger, 2022).

Comparing and contrasting densification through the lens of housing in two radically different sites illustrated surprisingly similar trajectories of value extraction, power relations, and social suppression. Housing allows us to understand contestations between different ideological positions: ideas of what the city could or should be; who a citizen is; and how exclusion or inclusion is upheld. The GCR and the ARV depicted contrasting logics and ideologies, even within themselves, as to whether housing should be governed by markets, a welfarist state, or another rationale entirely. Underlying this is a fundamental tension over who should have dominions over resources and how they should be controlled. Thus, we argue that housing represents the exercise and expression of power relations. As Charlton et al. (2023: 20) aptly express, housing is politics in built form. Politics has long-lasting effects, and results in the overlapping of different types of more or less dense, and de- or re-commodified housing. These phenomena are interesting in each case individually, but locating which questions to ask and the categories we should use for analysis only come into sharp focus through comparison of material outcomes and built-environment policy analysis in our cases.

In conclusion, by interrogating the constellation of the (various levels of the) state, developers, and ordinary people through empirical work in the GCR and ARV, we discovered that housing densification is a key element of growth and development strategies – and has been throughout the histories of these two urban regions. Continuing to examine the politics and governance of housing through additional comparisons, or more deeply through the languages of extended urbanization and peripheralization, could yield further meaningful insight into how value is generated and extracted for and by all of these actors, what implications this has for policy and space, as well as what all of this means for the field of urban studies.