Map of the month

At 2 am most of us are home and asleep, and the city-region at its quietest. Yet not everyone is asleep, and many activities run 24 hours a day. And even where most people are asleep and there is little activity, it doesn't mean that the places we live in are dark. This Map of the Month uses freely available 1 km resolution light intensity data taken at 2 am to show where the brightest lights at night are in the Gauteng City Region and is visualised in an interactive 3D model. This data shows the extent to which humans have shaped urban form and where economic activity occurs.

This Map of the Month is an interactive visualisation – an online story map – exploring the various facets of graffiti in Maboneng, Johannesburg. The story map examines the spatial relationships between graffiti and the surrounding urban environment, notably the distribution and density of graffiti, the visibility of graffiti, and the themes conveyed by the artworks themselves.

The total number of commercial and industrial buildings in Gauteng increased by 30% from 2001 to 2016. This series of maps shows the distribution of these buildings broken down by commercial buildings, industrial buildings and informal trading structures. They also show areas of growth and decline.

City regions like Gauteng provide a range of services that contribute to improving quality of life, such as schools, shops, hospitals and clinics, parks and public transport. However, in order to make a difference, these services need to be accessible to potential users. The June 2019 Map of the Month presents an Accessibility Index, derived from the Quality of Life V (2017/18) survey, that measures residents’ overall accessibility to a range of services and opportunities and focuses, in particular, on people living within government housing programmes.

In May 2014, we released a series of ‘dot-density’ maps that plotted the spatial distribution of votes in the 2014 provincial elections. Here we repeat this exercise, this time comparing the distribution of votes in the 2019 provincial elections against that in 2014 for the five top parties. The maps show fascinating patterns of change, in particular the growth of the Vryheidsfront Plus and the EFF in certain areas.