Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO)

Permanent URI for this community

https://hdl.handle.net/10539/36900
The Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) was established in 2008 as a partnership between the University of Johannesburg (UJ), the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits) and the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG), with local government in Gauteng also represented on the GCRO Board. Behind the motivation for setting up the GCRO is a vision for South Africa's economic heartland as a region that is competitive, spatially integrated, environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive. GCRO is charged with helping to build the knowledge base that government, business, labour, civil society and citizens all need to make this vision a reality. GCRO collects data and benchmarks the city-region, provides policy analysis and support, undertakes applied research, and publishes critically reflective academic work.

Visit the GCRO home page at www.gcro.ac.za

For information on accessing Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) content please contact Bongi Mphuti via email : bongi.mphuti@wits.ac.za or Tel (W) : 011 717 1978

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Browsing Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) by Keyword "Gauteng"

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    Quality of Life IV Survey (2015/16): City Benchmarking Report
    (Gauteng City Region Observatory, 2018-09) Culwick, Christina
    South Africa’s post-apartheid government has been successful in raising the standard of living for millions of people. It has provided them with access to housing and basic services, improved health and education, and developed social services and urban amenities where none existed before. However, there remain many thorny development challenges that government is, at least at present, poorly equipped to address. Consequently, there remains deep dissatisfaction among many residents, which at various times and in certain contexts has led to widespread community protests. This report stems from the premise that data, and analysis thereof, are critical for local and provincial governments in Gauteng to understand where progress has been made and where intervention is required. The City Benchmarking Report presents some key findings from the Quality of Life IV (2015/16) survey at the municipal and provincial levels. The results provide insight into a range of objective indicators such as access to basic services, travel patterns, and economic activity, as well as respondents’ subjective opinions, perceptions and levels of satisfaction. This combination allows us to gain a multi-dimensional understanding of quality of life in the province as well as some of the drivers that improve or worsen it. While there are many aspects of quality of life measured by the survey, this report focuses on specific issues related to municipal service access, satisfaction with services received, satisfaction with the municipality providing those services, and the relationship between access, satisfaction and overall quality of life. Although this report allows government, residents and stakeholders to compare municipalities with one another, its benchmarking analysis should not be read as a competitive scoring of cities, which in turn becomes a basis for municipalities to market themselves as having the ‘highest quality of life’, or to vie with one another over who has the best performance. Some municipalities do better on some variables, but worse on others. The point of this report is to help each municipality understand its own strengths and weaknesses in relation to others and to the broader Gauteng context.
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    Strengthening governance in the Gauteng City-Region through a spatial data infrastructure
    (Gauteng City-Region Obervatory, 2020-05-25) Coetzee, Serena; Cooper, Antony K; Katumba, Samy
    coordination and an information-driven approach that can unlock the value of geospatial data. This Provocation reviews the current state of affairs regarding address data in the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) and explores prospects for coordinating a GCR address dataset in an SDI context. The focus is on addresses because of their important role in service delivery, the socio-economic well-being of residents and the recognition of civic and human rights. For example, good quality addresses are vital in the current COVID-19 crisis, as government strives to map COVID-19 cases in order to identify emerging local clusters of infections and spatially target responses. Currently, address data in the GCR are maintained in silos at different provincial departments and municipalities, without any coordination and without adherence to international standards and good practices for addressing and information management. This results in duplication, inconsistencies and even fraud, which not only costs the municipalities, national and provincial governments billions but also damages their reputations. To rectify this, this Provocation identifies various entities for taking the responsibility to methodically coordinate GCR address data into a single reference dataset. Since many entities have a legal accountability related to address data, a decision and strong political leadership are required to lead multiple interventions and initiatives in parallel with the aim of reaping benefits for governance and society in the long run. As Gauteng is one of few provinces with municipal address datasets, the GCR could serve as an example for coordinating the maintenance of geospatial datasets among its municipalities, as few (if any) such datasets exist in South African municipalities, provinces and national departments. However, private companies have successfully created such datasets.