Articulating the regional economy: Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg as gateways to Africa

Cites are vital for value chains. Serving as ‘gateways’, they interlink hinterland locations. Based on data from secondary sources and extensive interviews, the article explains how Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg play essential roles for several firms involved in the oil and gas sector, being logistics hubs, sites of industrial processing, locations of corporate control and service provision, and/or places where knowledge is generated. Beyond generating empirical insights, the article advances the gateway concept. It calls for better recognizing the diverse world of cities, as it shows that Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg are all gateways, but they are so in different ways.