The Gauteng city-region covers the whole of Gauteng province as well as outlying economic centres and apartheid-induced displaced urbanisation in at least four neighbouring provinces. Johannesburg is the beating heart of the economic powerhouse that is the city-region, which generates over 40 per cent of national GDP. In this chapter I argue that Johannesburg needs to be understood within its broader socio-economic context, that of the Gauteng city-region. A focus on poverty and inequality shows that Johannesburg fares well when compared to other parts of the city-region, but also highlights the inequalities within the city itself, and their relative severity. Spatially understood, relative deprivation may be a better measure for understanding need, provision and protest (the context in which much writing and activism around poverty is located) in Johannesburg than national measures of absolute poverty, given the relative affluence of the Gauteng city-region and the extent of basic needs that have been met since 1994. I then briefly analyse the way in which the City of Johannesburg has attempted to use a multiple deprivation index to allow spatial targeting of ‘the poor’, and suggest that if this were combined with a more nuanced approach that includes value and attitude data about people's ‘headspace’ (unattainable from Census data, for obvious reasons), the targeting may be more effective. Finally, I argue that post-apartheid Johannesburg – like the city-region it sits in – is far from static. Class formation, population movement, spatial growth and shrinkage are occurring apace (though the pace is, predictably, politically contested). Empty spaces can be filled with shacks seemingly overnight, as Gauteng's population continues to grow at 2.6 per cent per annum in a country where birth rates are dropping; but can empty just as fast (GCRO 2011a). However, all these processes – urbanisation, class formation and so on – are dogged by the persistence of apartheid's racially segregated townships, post-apartheid's (equally racially segregated) inner-city slums, and new (similarly profiled) informal settlements that have emerged and spread post-apartheid. The new geography has done little to uproot apartheid geography.