Living Far from Work: How Urban Design Fuels Unemployment in South Africa

South African cities remain deeply shaped by apartheid-era planning, with poor and densely populated neighborhoods located far from jobs, making them global outliers in how people and employment are spatially distributed. This persistent separation raises commuting costs, weakens local labor markets, and reinforces unemployment and inequality decades after apartheid ended.

Produced by researchers at the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Department, a study examines why South Africa’s cities continue to struggle with unemployment and inequality three decades after apartheid ended. Using satellite imagery, census data, and administrative tax records, Javier E. Baez and Varun Kshirsagar argue that the country’s urban form itself has become a major obstacle to inclusive growth. Their core finding is that South African cities are unusually fragmented: people live far from jobs, and this distance places a heavy economic burden on poor households.

How South Africa’s Cities Differ from the World

In most cities around the world, population density is highest near employment centers and falls with distance. This reflects a basic trade-off: people accept smaller homes in exchange for better access to work. South African cities break this pattern. Comparing five major South African metros with 20 global cities across five continents, the authors show that South Africa has far fewer people living close to business districts than expected. Within five kilometers of employment hubs, population density is about 60 percent lower than the global median. Instead of clustering near jobs, large numbers of residents, especially the poor, are pushed to the outskirts.

Apartheid’s Shadow on Today’s Urban Form

This spatial mismatch is not accidental. The paper traces it to apartheid-era laws that deliberately forced Black South Africans into peripheral townships, far from economic activity. Although apartheid ended in 1994, post-apartheid housing policies often reinforced this pattern by building low-income housing on cheap land at the urban edge. Public transport has failed to compensate. Only a small share of commuters use trains or bus rapid transit systems, while most rely on costly and unreliable minibus taxis. As a result, commuting absorbs a large share of income for poor households, turning distance into a powerful barrier to employment.

Why Distance Makes Poverty Worse

Living far from jobs does more than increase travel time. The study shows that poor neighborhoods are surrounded by much weaker local labor markets. Using spatial tax data on formal employment, the authors find that in Johannesburg, the poorest neighborhoods have 87 percent less nearby formal employment than the richest ones; in Cape Town, the gap is 61 percent. Even when focusing only on low-wage formal jobs, which are most relevant for poor residents, access remains far lower in asset-deprived areas.

Job instability adds another layer of hardship. Employment near poorer neighborhoods fluctuates more sharply from month to month, making incomes less predictable and limiting opportunities to gain experience. In Johannesburg, employment volatility is more than 25 percentile points higher in the poorest areas than in the wealthiest. These patterns suggest that poverty is reinforced not only by distance from city centers but also by the thin and unstable job markets surrounding disadvantaged communities.

Mapping the Most Disconnected Neighborhoods

High-resolution analysis of Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban reveals how deeply these inequalities are embedded in the urban landscape. Former townships such as Soweto, the Cape Flats, and Umlazi stand out as extremely dense, overcrowded, and poorly connected to business districts. These areas have many small buildings packed tightly together and travel times to employment centers that are often double or triple the city averages. Crucially, this distance is not compensated for by better housing or amenities. The most remote neighborhoods are also the most crowded and asset-poor, contradicting the idea that cities naturally balance costs and benefits across space.

What Needs to Change

The paper concludes that South Africa’s cities have grown without capturing the economic benefits that urbanization usually brings. By spreading people across space while concentrating jobs in disconnected hubs, cities have weakened labor markets and entrenched inequality. The authors argue that fixing this problem requires more than expanding housing on the outskirts. Targeted transport investments, better integration of public and informal transit, and land-use reforms that allow people to live closer to jobs are essential. Without addressing the geography of exclusion, South Africa’s cities will remain places where opportunity depends as much on location as on skill or effort.