Johannesburg

Johannesburg exists because in 1886, an Australian prospector named George Harrison stumbled on a gold outcrop at a farm called Langlaagte—and underneath lay the Witwatersrand, the largest gold deposit ever discovered. Within months, diggers stretched 40 miles along the ridge. Within a decade, a camp of 3,000 had become an industrial city of 100,000—larger than 200-year-old Cape Town. By 1899, the goldfields had attracted £75 million in investment, employed over 100,000 workers, and produced nearly a third of the world's gold.

The gold built everything, including apartheid. Mining required cheap labor, which required controlling where Black workers could live and move. The pass laws, the compounds, the township system—all evolved to serve the mines. By 1920, South Africa produced half the world's gold. The Witwatersrand basin contains 40,000 tonnes—22% of all gold ever mined from Earth. Miners dug 4 kilometres deep to extract it, in some of the most dangerous working conditions in any industry.

Today, Gauteng province (built around Johannesburg) holds 26% of South Africa's population, but the mines that created this concentration are dying. Gold prices hit record highs in 2024, yet the industry didn't revive. Hundreds of thousands of mining jobs have vanished; in many ex-mining towns, nothing replaced them. Johannesburg has pivoted to finance, services, and Africa's largest economy—but the infrastructure was designed for extraction, not services, and the social fractures mining created haven't healed.

By 2026, Johannesburg tests whether a city built for one purpose can reinvent itself when that purpose ends. The gold is still there, but the economics no longer work. The question isn't geological—it's whether human infrastructure can adapt faster than resource depletion.