Caring cities (with the City of Johannesburg) (2017)

The City of Johannesburg was awarded the right to host a Metropolis initiative known as the Caring Cities Initiative. The announcement was made at the Metropolis Congress in Hyderabad in October 2014, following Johannesburg's hosting of a Metropolis conference in 2013. The City of Johannesburg invited GCRO to join the Caring Cities Initiative as a content partner based on GCRO’s strength in quality of life surveys, indicators, as well as earlier work on the GCRO Barometer. This joint project provided an opportunity for the partners (i.e. CoJ and GCRO) to:

• Exchange information, knowledge, know-how and good practices on theme of mutual interest
• Learn from other cities
• Attain higher visibility and a good international positioning for the project and the city
• Enhance international cooperation
• Transform city-level practice and encourage the formation of an institutional culture of exchange, innovation and improvement.

One of GCRO’s approaches is to carry out benchmarking, comparing the GCR with other city regions in elsewhere in the world. This project provided an excellent opportunity to do just that.

Updates

This project was completed and report delivered to the City of Johannesburg in mid-2017. The outputs consisted of a final report and an online questionnaire which generated a caring cities index based in an individual responses.

Outputs

Mushongera, D., Abrahams, C. & Ebrahim, Z. (2017). 'Joburg Caring Cities Initiative - A ‘caring city’ - what matters every day to ordinary people in the city.' Research Report

Mushongera, D., Abrahams, C. & Ebrahim, Z. (2017). Caring Cities Questionnaire.