Cultural Policy, Heritage and Creative Economy in South Africa’s Largest City
Cultural Policy
Located in the Gauteng province of South Africa, Johannesburg’s creative economy spans live music, visual art, fashion, theatre and screen, anchored by both municipally supported and sector driven festivals, cultural events and globally significant cultural exports. In 2023, the city’s cultural, creative and sports industries generated 40% of Gauteng’s sector gross value added, and by 2024 they supported 42% of the province’s sector employment – making it a key sector for the city and province.
As a result, cultural policy in Johannesburg is built around the principle that culture functions as infrastructure in the city, shaping how people remember, debate, earn, gather and imagine the future. Responsibility for this task is shared across government departments, and the city seeks to act simultaneously as a steward, funder, convener and enabler through its work. Its role includes increasing cultural participation, supporting cultural institutions, heritage protection, artist development and investing in cultural infrastructure.
Among these aims is the city’s Public Art Policy is one of the most established, mandating municipal investment in public art as a driver of the creative economy and a means of broadening citizens’ access to arts and culture. Established in 2006, the policy requires that up to 1% of the budget for major city-led building projects (those costing R10 million – USD$600k – or more) be devoted to public art. The public art initiative, includes an online public art directory that features over 70 installations across the city. Through this initiative, the city aims to represent its multicultural and multilingual population, reflect on its political history, and boost the creative economy.
Cultural Programmes
The city’s cultural programmes draw on its rich cultural tapestry, celebrating and supporting creative production. The amapiano genre, a house-jazz-lounge hybrid that emerged from Gauteng’s townships in the mid-2010s, has become one of South Africa’s most valuable cultural exports: South African artists earned R504 million (US$30.69 million) on Spotify in 2025, with 74% of that revenue generated by listeners outside South Africa. Johannesburg helped birth and globalise the genre, and its artists, dancers, clubs, radio stations, festivals and digital networks remain instrumental in carrying its township rhythms from interconnected local scenes to global audiences, reinforcing the city’s role in South Africa’s night-time economy and cultural diplomacy ambitions.
Johannesburg’s rich musical roots are reflected in the city’s music and performance calendar. Back to the City is Africa’s largest hip-hop festival, while the Standard Bank Joy of Jazz Festival is the continent’s flagship jazz festival. Arts Alive, now in its 34th year, has grown into a year-round cultural platform encompassing Jazz in the Lights, Joburg Choral and the Joburg Indigenous Gospel Festival, and sits within a wider landscape that includes FNB Art Joburg, the Joburg Film Festival, Basha Uhuru, the Fashion Industry Awards and Showcase, Open Studios Joburg and the Kaza Kamba Pan-African Theatre Festival. The new Jozi aMuse initiative is also connecting the city’s museums and galleries through a dedicated festival of museums.
Beyond festivals, Johannesburg works to support creative enterprise, using its cultural calendar to provide opportunities for small businesses and to expand trade opportunities for the broader creative sector. Its Jazzy Joburg Market initiative supports local small, medium and micro enterprises, providing affordable market space for vendors selling everything from handmade jewellery to traditional home décor. This approach extends to the city’s major fairs and conventions, including FNB Art Joburg (Africa’s longest-running contemporary art fair), South Africa Fashion Week, and Comic Con Africa. Across the sector, audio-visual media, design, publishing, music and fashion increasingly combine formal firms, freelancers, informal enterprise and platform work, as new technologies reshape skills and routes to market.
Cultural Heritage and Infrastructure
Johannesburg, also known as eGoli in isiZulu, has lived through profound political change, from the racial segregation of apartheid to the establishment of democracy in 1994. Its cultural memory carries both invention and rupture: Sophiatown remains both a beacon of artistic expression and a painful memory of forced removal, while Soweto holds the history of the 1976 student uprising and a living legacy of cultural resistance, marked today by the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, the Nelson Mandela House Museum and the June 16 Interpretation Centre, amongst others. In recognition of this history, the city’s Directorate for Arts, Culture and Heritage has followed many cities in mapping its cultural infrastructure, through the creation of the Johannesburg Heritage Register, which catalogues over 90 sites of historic significance across the city, from historic buildings, sites of heritage significance, cinemas, libraries, museums and war memorials.
Johannesburg’s multi-layered history is encapsulated in the heritage precinct of Constitution Hill. During apartheid, the complex contained the Old Fort prison where both Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were imprisoned. Since 1994 the Hill has been the seat of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the country’s highest court of law, and its former prisons now house a museum alongside a publicly accessible collection of over 800 pieces of South African art. The site also housed the women’s jail that operated from 1910 until 1983, which saw the incarceration of participants in the historic 1956 Women’s March and other women’s-struggle icons such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Albertina Sisulu.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery, which opened in 1915, holds sub-Saharan Africa’s largest public collection of modern and contemporary art and has long stood as one of the city’s most significant art institutions, spanning the pre- and post-apartheid eras. A newer generation of spaces – including the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation, the Standard Bank Gallery and Gallery MOMO – has since grown up around it, championing contemporary South African and pan-African artists and expanding platforms for the continent’s creative talent. New infrastructure currently under development includes the Hip Hop Museum and the reimagination of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
The eye-catching Soweto Theatre, which opened its doors on Africa Liberation Day, 25 May 2012, forms part of the Joburg City Theatres network of performance spaces that support the aspirations of theatre practitioners, musicians, poets and dancers. The Market Theatre also stands as a beacon of artistic performance, and celebrated its 50th Anniversary in 2026, having opened its doors on 19 June 1976.
Community engagement, social impact, and policy innovation
Johannesburg’s Public Art Policy aims to engage and involve citizens, encouraging both open and invitational competitions to display artworks. Rather than relying solely on top-down selection by city officials, the initiative facilitated the redevelopment of the Vilakazi Street precinct in Soweto through direct community consultation. Creative consultants worked alongside residents to co-create artworks, including a metal sculpture by artist Mboya Moroa symbolising Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, both of whom lived on the street.
The Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) is also expanding the city’s rapid bus network, aiming to move people around the city in ways that are safe, cost-effective and sustainable with a meaningful knock-on impact for the creative economy, whose workers and audiences depend on affordable, reliable transport. This responds to a wider policy challenge: spatial inequality, uneven transport access, safety concerns, ageing infrastructure and constrained household incomes continue to limit participation in culture and constrain market growth across the city.
The JDA works in tandem with the Directorate for Arts, Culture and Heritage to ensure the development and maintenance of public art as part of the City beautification project and to build a wider appreciation for art through murals, sculptures, monuments and statues. These encourage place-making and a sense of collective meaning for residents.