USER STORY

Creating Smart Cities Using Spatial Thinking

& Geotechnologies

Smart Cities” have become a worldwide focus on better means for local and provincial government to address the challenges of rapid urbanization to improve the livelihoods of residents. The Smart Cities concept is being gradually adopted globally because of the value it brings into the development of self-sustaining cities.

The Gauteng City-Region is South Africa’s economic heartland. It holds 13million people and generates a third of the country’s GDP, on 2% of its land area. The Gauteng City-Region observatory (GCRO) builds the data and analyses to help inform development in this region.
The GCRO is 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. As part of its mandate, the GCRO has the task of generating the data sets by means of which the region of cities and towns making up Gauteng can better understand itself and compare itself to equivalent city-regions in other parts of the world.

In August 2015, the GCRO hosted a one-day symposium and exhibition to debate concepts of a smart city and what this means for the Gauteng City-Region. As part of the symposium, various digital platforms in the GCRO’s expanding urban data gallery, including the Esri’s urban observatory website were exhibited. The GCRO worked with Esri South Africa, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane metropolitan municipalities to contribute to the current ESRI Urban Observatory website.

The Urban observatory application is a multifaceted geographic information system platform that incorporates a number of existing ideas into one place. The goal is to share data between departments and create applications that allow users — both those in and outside of government — to get information about systems that interact with one another and make better infrastructure decisions. The City of Johannesburg is already involved and all municipalities or cities are encouraged to participate at no financial cost. The official site contains documentation on the themes and how local and provincial government can get involved in the “Smart City” initiative. GIS technology is at the heart of smart cities!

Esri South Africa’s contribution is to allow for the municipalities to compare themselves with other municipalities in the world using the //www.urbanobservatory.org/application.

More on Smart Cities
GCRO Smart Cities – //www.gcro.ac.za/research/project/detail/data-smart-gcr/
Urban Data Gallery – //www.gcro.ac.za/data-gallery/overview/