Background: The concentration of development around airports is a topical subject on the relationship between transportation, accessibility and the distribution of land use. Notwithstanding the existing literature on the analysis of airports and surrounds, and normative models of airport-led development, extensions are required on the empirical analysis of spatial economic attributes of airports and surrounds.Objectives: Objectives of the article were twofold: firstly, to establish the economic activity mix and reasons for the location of firms on and around O.R. Tambo and Cape Town international airports; and secondly, to analyse linkages between firms on and around the two airports as well as linkages those firms have with their metropolitan, regional, national and international contexts.Method: The article focused on the South African case studies of O.R. Tambo and Cape Town international airports and used a telephone survey as the primary data collection method.Results: The article discovered that the developments around O.R. Tambo and Cape Town international airports are spatial clusters that are also linked with other airports in South Africa and beyond.Conclusion: The article extended existing knowledge by providing insights on the spatial economic characteristics of airports and surrounds. The findings can be improved upon with work on other case studies, and potentially be used as bases for extending a theoretical framework that describes and explains the spatial economic forces that drive development on and around airports.

Among other categories of literature on the relationship between airports and land use, planning models of airport-led development are becoming bandwagons hailed by the proponents as key to the future of cities. While acknowledging the insights of literature, it is argued that concerted focus is required on analysing the spatial economic evolution of airport-centric developments. The aim of this article is to explore the evolution of the airport-centric developments of Cape Town and OR Tambo international airports in South Africa. Through the use of topographical maps, aerial photography and historical literature, the evolution is traced over six decades, namely the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The article discovers that, despite policy and planning efforts, airport-centric developments occur over fairly long time frames. It is also imperative that the planning of airports and surrounds be informed by the integration of, among others, spatial, economic, and transportation planning at different scales.

The concept of public interest legitimises the planning profession, provides a foundational principle, and serves as an ethical norm for planners. However, critical discourses highlight the problems of the assumptions underlying the notion of public interest in spatial planning. Using an explorative literature review approach, the article aims to analyse various interpretations and applications of public interest in spatial planning. The literature search process, conducted between August and November 2023, targeted journal articles and books published in English and focused on the online databases of Academic Search Premier, Scopus, and Google Scholar. The final selected literature comprised 71 sources. The literature showed that diverse conceptualisations of public interest complicate the ways spatial planners and authorities incorporate it in planning tools, processes, and products. This article concludes by arguing that the prospects of achieving a single definition of the public interest concept are slim and may not be necessary given the heterogeneous conceptualisation and the multiple operational contexts of public interest. The article recommends the development of context-based analytical frameworks to establish linkages that would lead towards the equitable inclusion of public interest in spatial planning.

Background: A multi-faceted analysis of the positioning of logistics facilities relative to airports is a topical aspect of the interconnections between transport infrastructure and the spatial configuration of economic activities. Regardless of the wide range of studies that exist on the topic, little is known about the logistics catchment of airports. Towards extending the literature, the objective of the paper is to analyse the spatial configuration of logistics firms relative to Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) in South Africa. Methods: The inclination of logistics facilities to locate in industrial areas is widely acknowledged in the literature. As such, the data on the main industrial and economic nodes in the City of Cape Town metropolitan area were obtained from the City of Cape Town municipality and used to ascertain the extent of the industrial areas across the metropolitan area. The resultant geographic information system (GIS) shapefile of the industrial and economic nodes was used to obtain the logistics firms’ data from AfriGIS. Following the cleaning of the data from AfriGIS, ArcGIS 10.8 and QGIS 3.16 were used for spatial analysis (buffer, kernel density and network analysis) to establish the spatial configuration of the logistics firms relative to CTIA. Results: The results showed that of the 985 logistics firms in the metropolitan area, 937 were located within 20 km of CTIA. Furthermore, the kernel density results showed that high density values were found in the environs of the Cape Town central business district (CBD), Port of Cape Town and Milnerton. The results of the network analysis indicated that the furthest firm was 50 km and 64 min away on the shortest route to CTIA, while it was 55 km and 49 min away on the fastest route. Conclusions: Relative to the literature, the results show that CTIA has the potential to facilitate the emergence of a logistics hub at the city or metropolitan scale.

South Africa faces a multitude of social, economic and environmental challenges, which require well-considered planning efforts. However, the efficacy of the built environment professions to adequately plan for the current and future populations can to some extent be questioned. Factors that are arguably responsible for the failure of the professions to achieve the desired outcomes include the following: (1) the inability of professionals to comprehensively analyse community problems and (2) although the various professions might work on the same issues, they largely fail to transcend disciplinary boundaries. This state of affairs can in part be linked to the role of higher education, which is in a good position to equip future professionals with the skills required for the analysis of diverse societal problems. In spite of the importance of education and training, there is a paucity of literature that explore ways in which the South African higher education sector instils transdisciplinary thinking and, accordingly, imparts the requisite soft skills to students. Using the case study of Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, the aim of this article was to present efforts that are pursued towards instilling transdisciplinarity in students. The efforts revolve around community service-learning pedagogy, which grants students a platform to work in close collaboration with communities. In the process, students and community members develop an in-depth understanding of the community’s problems and how they could be collectively resolved.

The Journal of Transport and Supply Chain Management (JTSCM) seeks to disseminate research results and to support high level learning, teaching and research in the areas of traffic and transportation (operations, policy, planning), customer service, warehousing, inventory management, procurement, packaging, materials handling, reverse logistics, demand forecasting, distribution communications and information technology.