Neighbourhood change and spatial inequalities in Cape Town

Christopher Lloyd; Saad Bhatti; David McLennan; Michael Noble; Gerbrand Mans

doi:10.1111/geoj.12400

Neighbourhood change and spatial inequalities in Cape Town

Christopher Lloyd, Saad Bhatti, David McLennan, Michael Noble, Gerbrand Mans

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Abstract

Capturing the dynamics of population change in urban areas necessitates access to geographically fine-grained and temporally consistent data for several time points. Such data are generally not available and they must be created using standard population data which cannot usually be compared across time periods. In this paper, the focus is on changing spatial inequalities in Cape Town, South Africa. This paper details an approach to generation of gridded population counts (250 m by 250 m) for two census years – 2001 and 2011. Census data for Small Area Layers (SALs), Spot Building Count (SBC) data, and Open Street Map (OSM) landuse data were used to construct a grid of populated cells to which population counts are then reallocated. The reallocation of population counts from SALs to grid cells was undertaken using area-to-point kriging – an approach which is informed by the spatial variation in the population groups of interest as measured using the variogram. A case study based on population grids of unemployment rates shows how the grids can be used to chart changes and also to measure spatial inequalities across the city at two time points. The advantages of grids for capturing fine-scale complexities and correctly accounting for physical separation between communities are demonstrated and the results show, while the broad patterns of inequality are consistent across time, there are pronounced increases in inequalities in some neighbourhoods. These areas – and what leads some areas to fall further behind – should be the subject of attention by policy-makers.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	315-330
Number of pages	16
Journal	GEOGRAPHICAL JOURNAL
Volume	187
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12400
Publication status	Published (in print/issue) - 5 Jun 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Research Councils UK > Economic and Social Research Council [Grant number: ES/N014022/1] InequalitiesSA was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Research Fund (NRF) under the ESRC-NRF Newton Call for Collaborative Research Urban Transformations in South Africa call (project ES/N014022/1), supported by the Newton Fund. This support is acknowledged gratefully. The project builds upon an earlier ESRC Pathfinder project which was undertaken by members of the core research team: ?The relationship between spatial inequality and attitudes to inequality in post-apartheid South Africa? (project ES/I034889/1). Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from https://www.openstreetmap.org. We are grateful to Statistics South Africa for provision of Census data for 2001 and 2011. We thank the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for provision of the SBC data. The authors thank the reviewers for their helpful comments which have helped to refine the paper.

Funding Information:
InequalitiesSA was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Research Fund (NRF) under the ESRC‐NRF Newton Call for Collaborative Research Urban Transformations in South Africa call (project ES/N014022/1), supported by the Newton Fund. This support is acknowledged gratefully. The project builds upon an earlier ESRC Pathfinder project which was undertaken by members of the core research team: “The relationship between spatial inequality and attitudes to inequality in post‐apartheid South Africa” (project ES/I034889/1). Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from https://www.openstreetmap.org . We are grateful to Statistics South Africa for provision of Census data for 2001 and 2011. We thank the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for provision of the SBC data. The authors thank the reviewers for their helpful comments which have helped to refine the paper.

Publisher Copyright:
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2021 The Authors. The Geographical Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Keywords

South Africa
census
grids
inequalities
scale
Geography, Planning and Development
Earth-Surface Processes

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1111/geoj.12400Licence: CC BY

Neighbourhood change_Final VersionFinal published version, 1.99 MBLicence: CC BY

https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12400

Cite this

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title = "Neighbourhood change and spatial inequalities in Cape Town",

abstract = "Capturing the dynamics of population change in urban areas necessitates access to geographically fine-grained and temporally consistent data for several time points. Such data are generally not available and they must be created using standard population data which cannot usually be compared across time periods. In this paper, the focus is on changing spatial inequalities in Cape Town, South Africa. This paper details an approach to generation of gridded population counts (250 m by 250 m) for two census years – 2001 and 2011. Census data for Small Area Layers (SALs), Spot Building Count (SBC) data, and Open Street Map (OSM) landuse data were used to construct a grid of populated cells to which population counts are then reallocated. The reallocation of population counts from SALs to grid cells was undertaken using area-to-point kriging – an approach which is informed by the spatial variation in the population groups of interest as measured using the variogram. A case study based on population grids of unemployment rates shows how the grids can be used to chart changes and also to measure spatial inequalities across the city at two time points. The advantages of grids for capturing fine-scale complexities and correctly accounting for physical separation between communities are demonstrated and the results show, while the broad patterns of inequality are consistent across time, there are pronounced increases in inequalities in some neighbourhoods. These areas – and what leads some areas to fall further behind – should be the subject of attention by policy-makers.",

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author = "Christopher Lloyd and Saad Bhatti and David McLennan and Michael Noble and Gerbrand Mans",

note = "Funding Information: Research Councils UK > Economic and Social Research Council [Grant number: ES/N014022/1] InequalitiesSA was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Research Fund (NRF) under the ESRC-NRF Newton Call for Collaborative Research Urban Transformations in South Africa call (project ES/N014022/1), supported by the Newton Fund. This support is acknowledged gratefully. The project builds upon an earlier ESRC Pathfinder project which was undertaken by members of the core research team: ?The relationship between spatial inequality and attitudes to inequality in post-apartheid South Africa? (project ES/I034889/1). Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from https://www.openstreetmap.org. We are grateful to Statistics South Africa for provision of Census data for 2001 and 2011. We thank the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for provision of the SBC data. The authors thank the reviewers for their helpful comments which have helped to refine the paper. Funding Information: InequalitiesSA was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Research Fund (NRF) under the ESRC‐NRF Newton Call for Collaborative Research Urban Transformations in South Africa call (project ES/N014022/1), supported by the Newton Fund. This support is acknowledged gratefully. The project builds upon an earlier ESRC Pathfinder project which was undertaken by members of the core research team: “The relationship between spatial inequality and attitudes to inequality in post‐apartheid South Africa” (project ES/I034889/1). Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from https://www.openstreetmap.org . We are grateful to Statistics South Africa for provision of Census data for 2001 and 2011. We thank the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for provision of the SBC data. The authors thank the reviewers for their helpful comments which have helped to refine the paper. Publisher Copyright: The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). {\textcopyright} 2021 The Authors. The Geographical Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)",

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Neighbourhood change and spatial inequalities in Cape Town

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

UN SDGs

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