THE MOST DANGEROUS CITY ISN’T THE ONE THAT STOPS WORKING. IT’S THE ONE THAT LEARNS TO WORK AROUND FAILURE.
When households and businesses begin privately replacing electricity, water, security and transport, a city can appear remarkably resilient. But something more fundamental is happening underneath: access to ordinary urban life is slowly becoming dependent on what each resident can afford to provide for themselves.
A generator humming behind a restaurant is usually described as resilience. So is the solar installation on a suburban roof, the JoJo tank beside a house or the private security vehicle patrolling a neighbourhood. Each is a rational response to an unreliable public system. Taken together, however, they can signal something much more troubling: a city quietly transferring the responsibility for functioning from public institutions to private citizens.
Johannesburg offers an increasingly stark version of that problem. Its newly approved 2026/27 budget directs significant funding towards water, electricity, roads and public transport, but the city itself estimates the combined infrastructure-renewal backlog across Johannesburg Water, City Power and the Johannesburg Roads Agency at more than R185 billion. That is not the cost of one dramatic collapse. It is the accumulated price of systems that have been ageing faster than they have been renewed.
Journalist Ferial Hafajee gives the phenomenon a striking description in her conversation with Nkepile Mabuse: Johannesburg residents are becoming like “frogs in boiling water”. Her point is less about any particular outage than about habituation. Buckets, batteries, generators and route changes become part of the choreography of everyday life. What should trigger institutional alarm starts being treated as personal inconvenience.
The problem with that adaptation is that private resilience is distributed according to income. A household that can buy solar becomes less exposed to electricity instability. A company that can run diesel generators buys continuity. A neighbourhood capable of financing additional security creates another layer between itself and municipal decline. People without those resources remain fully exposed to the underlying system.
That gradually produces two cities occupying the same geography. One is supplied by municipal networks. The other is assembled from private substitutes.
Urban economics has always depended on the opposite idea. Cities work because shared infrastructure allows millions of people and businesses to access services more efficiently than if each had to reproduce them independently. The World Bank’s urban-development work places municipal services and infrastructure at the centre of productive, liveable cities, while research on African urbanisation has emphasised the economies of scale that should make dense urban service provision more efficient.
When every household becomes its own miniature utility company, those efficiencies begin running backwards.
The consequences reach beyond comfort. Electricity unreliability becomes a cost of doing business. Water interruptions affect restaurants, schools, hospitals and manufacturers. Road deterioration damages vehicles and slows movement. Businesses that can carry those costs survive; those operating on thin margins
cannot. Municipal failure therefore begins behaving like an unofficial tax — except it is levied most heavily on those least able to absorb it.
There is another danger. Once wealthier residents have successfully insulated themselves from public failure, the political constituency demanding universal repair can weaken. The service may still be broken, but the people with the loudest voices no longer experience its full consequences. A workaround designed as an emergency response becomes permanent.
Johannesburg is far from alone in confronting the cost of deferred infrastructure. OECD research increasingly treats maintenance as an economic issue rather than an unglamorous afterthought; across Africa, maintenance accounts for a substantial portion of estimated infrastructure investment needs. Infrastructure does not only require ribbon-cutting projects. It requires decades of inspection, replacement, technical competence and money spent before failure becomes visible.
That is why the most important measure of a city may not be whether ingenious residents can keep functioning when public systems fail.
People will improvise. Businesses will adapt. Communities will organise.
The better test is whether the city is making those workarounds less necessary over time.
Because resilience is valuable when it carries a city through a crisis. It becomes something else when it is required simply to live there.
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