Developing spatial indicators using a uniform tessellation to measure urban transformation

Abstract

South Africa’s largest cities are subjected to high rates of urbanization with a projected 8 million people migrating to these urban spaces by 2030 [ 1]. Managing and guiding this growth is made more difficult due to the countries ‘apartheid city’ past - a segregated city form inherited from the pre-democratic order in 1994 where towns and cities were spatially engineered along racial divides. With the advent of a democratic order in South Africa in 1994 a number of policy frameworks have seen the light all of which have indicated the need to spatially transform cities and settlements – to break from the pre-1994 apartheid city. Measuring the progress made in spatial and socio-economic transformation has proven difficult as some information have only been provided at city or Local Municipal scale. To measure spatial outcomes, city performance, quality of life etc. a series of local and international city scale indicators has been developed. These however are only useful when comparing cities; it does not convey sub-city scale change or transformation. This paper profiles an approach that uses a single-sized uniform tessellation to create demographic and economic indicators for nine cities and explores the utilisation of this tessellated framework to analyse and depict demographic and economic change over time.