First, some context for the survey, and why it is so important: At the heart of the inquiry is the fact that, after 1994, we inherited the consequences of apartheid spatial planning and material access to services, and the deep inequalities that this generated. The legacy of race-based disadvantage was strongly spatially embedded in urban areas. This, with associated psycho-social impacts, has made it particularly difficult to address the issues of poverty and marginalisation in our city region.

The Quality of Life (QoL) survey sets out to track how we’ve managed this legacy of inequality, but also tracks how the city-region is evolving, not least as a consequence of the considerable growth in Gauteng’s population over the last quarter-century. While Gauteng is by far the fastest growing region in the country with a large concentration of the country’s issues, it also provides an important opportunity to help address these issues.

The focus on just the Gauteng city-region is deliberate and unapologetic, but is also of significance for urban areas generally in South Africa. The health of our cities is vital for the success of our society more broadly. Globally, the phenomenon of the “urban dividend” is gaining increasing attention. This is how cities generally provide people with better opportunities to improve their life-chances than do rural livelihoods.

Human Science Research Council researchers Ivan Turok and Justin Visagie recently released research that shows that this trend applies here in South Africa too. Their research indicated that “rural-urban migrants started out just as poor as rural communities, but managed to cut their poverty levels in half. In other words, the migrant cohort all started out as rural and mostly poor but ended up as urban and largely non-poor”. (Turok, I. and J. Visagie (2018). Inclusive Urban Development in South Africa: What Does It Mean and How Can It Be Measured? IDS Working Paper. Volume 2018 No. 512.)

Processes of urbanisation, and how cities function, need therefore to be increasingly well understood, and to be optimised, not only for the well-being of the population, but for the vitality and sustainability of the economy.

The issue for us is whether today we are making the best use of the urban dividend, and whether we can plan for a greater proportion of our (especially poorer) urban population to benefit from this. Given that around a quarter of our national population lives in Gauteng, which occupies less than 2% of South Africa’s land-mass, and one-third of South Africa’s GDP is generated here, our individual and collective fortunes depend on how well our cities function.

A long-term, evidence-based understanding of people’s lived experiences — and the extent to which they are (or are not) able to change their life chances — is therefore essential in order to be able to effectively strategise and implement a sustainable urban future for Gauteng. For this, we need insight into how residents access the amenities, resources and opportunities of the city — employment, education, health, transport, and so on.

How successful is government in providing basic services and creating an enabling environment for dignity and well-being? Are people finding jobs and are businesses thriving? How do we understand the social fabric of a society that strives to transcend division and inequality? Are we optimistic or pessimistic about the future, and what shapes these attitudes?

As one of the most extensive surveys of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa, and with a uniquely multi-dimensional approach to understanding the urban lived experience, the Quality of Life survey provides independent, granular and spatially-specific insight into how lives vary across the different neighbourhoods of our city-region. With this information, government is better equipped to plan its programmes of work and to target areas of particular need. The value of the survey therefore is that it is both demographically and spatially representative. The survey interviews randomly selected individuals at their place of residence, across every ward in the city-region. This representative sample of respondents provides a generalised picture of how people experience life in Gauteng and in their particular areas.

The survey is thus very different from the great majority of polls that frequently test, for example, political voting sentiment, in that it takes a broad, multi-dimensional approach to defining what constitutes quality of life. In the 2017/2018 iteration of the survey, 248 questions were asked across 14 categories, and 24,889 randomly selected adult respondents were interviewed across Gauteng’s 529 wards. In total, 257 days of fieldwork were carried out, with 80 to 90 fieldworkers conducting interviews on the ground every day.

The insights arising from this latest QoL survey present a necessarily nuanced set of insights to the questions above, with encouraging trends in some cases, and worrying continuing challenges in others.

Overall, we can take some comfort from the fact that the Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s (GCRO) multi-dimensional Quality of Life index has shown small but steady improvement over the last three surveys (improving from 6.02 out of a possible 10 in 2011 to 6.30 in 2017/2018). This is despite a growing population, continuing high levels of joblessness and a lacklustre economy.

However, the detail provided in the survey allows this high-level trend to be broken down into less comforting constituents: prosperous (mostly white and Indian) communities are thriving while African respondents to the survey are seeing only very modest improvements and still lag behind the average. In other words, despite some improvements in quality of life across the board, we are not succeeding in addressing the deep inequalities in our society.

What measures are available to us to condition the lived experience of urban dwellers in Gauteng? Of primary interest is to understand how people are experiencing the kind of service delivery that government provides — the basic services in terms of water, sanitation, energy and waste removal, as well as other considerations like ease of transport, access to educational facilities and, very important, access to economic opportunities.

Remarkably, especially in light of the population growth in the city-region, service levels have remained consistent over time, with some notable exceptions — for example, serious declines in the quality of refuse removal, especially in Emfuleni. Only just over half (57%) of Emfuleni respondents report that their refuse is removed by the municipality at least once a week — a significant drop from 80% in the 2015/16 survey.

Because the survey has been conducted every two years for the last decade, we are also now able to see an increasingly clear sense of trends over time. There are some very valuable insights emerging now on how municipalities are faring with service delivery — some, like Ekurhuleni, maintaining consistent and rising levels of service, but others, like Tshwane, battling to maintain service levels.

Similarly, we are able to trace the growth of particular societal problems experienced in communities. Crime continues to be the leading cause of anxiety in communities, closely followed by joblessness and drug-abuse. The survey tracks the attitudes of respondents towards various forms of violence, and although violent dispositions towards migrants and LGBTQI identities have softened in the most recent survey, there nevertheless continue to be violent undercurrents in our social fabric.

Altogether, these dimensions add up to whether people feel secure and connected in their respective communities, and whether or not Gauteng feels like “home”. What are the possible consequences (for individuals and communities) if significant proportions of people in a neighbourhood feel threatened by crime, alienated by the hostility of community members, or marginalised from opportunities for fulfilment?

Needless to say, the radically different levels of prosperity between, for example, gated housing estates at one extreme and informal settlements at the other, are made dramatically visible in the data. The results provide sharp insights into the starkly different circumstances in which communities live and thus provide important signals for municipal development priorities within and across individual wards.

Perhaps most essential to the success of a city in providing opportunities to change livelihoods is the vitality of the economy, the growth of new enterprises, and the ability to provide employment. Here the insights from the QoL survey provide little comfort.

Almost 70% of respondents say it is harder to find employment now compared to just five years ago. Respondents express their greatest dissatisfaction with the performance of government in supporting the economy, with only 19% of respondents expressing satisfaction with government initiatives to grow the economy and create jobs. This is down from an already low 22% in the 2015/16 survey. Significantly, more than half of business owners operate in the informal economy, predominantly in — or serving — poorer communities. Only 10% of those who currently own, or who previously owned a business, know of a government department that supports SMMEs.

While the enabling conditions for a complex economy like Gauteng’s stretch across all three spheres of government (and indeed in global economic flows), this insight more than anything else provides the compelling priority for co-operative governance to pay serious attention to growing the economies of cities and city-regions and doing so to increasing inclusive effect.

These forms of insight are essential to inform decision-making by those who have the responsibility to steer the fortunes of cities and wellbeing of residents. It was thus a particularly far-sighted decision by Gauteng provincial government to fund an organisation to do this work, and further to guarantee its independence by collaborating with two universities (the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg), who ensure both the scholarly quality of the work and the continuing autonomy of the GCRO itself. Observatories of this format and calibre are rare globally, and the GCRO is often called on to give advice for city-regions elsewhere who look to establish something similar.

Of particular interest is the extent to which government makes use of the research carried out by the GCRO. The work holds value only when it is taken up and made use of in a variety of contexts. Although evidence-based decision-making in the public sector is a goal rather than a norm, the GCRO is pleased to note the growing use of the QoL survey data, and its other research, by departments at all three tiers of government.

We are able to report that provincial government and the metros increasingly spend more time with the GCRO conducting closer examination of data so they can be more responsive to particular issues that arise in particular places and can use accurate insights for evidence-based decision and policy making, and target setting.

The data sets allow us to address particular questions that might arise — for example, whether there are particular service delivery failures in certain areas that need to be addressed, or whether particular levels of deprivation exist in some areas.

Because the survey provides such a rich and spatially specific database, researchers and government officers can come back to it again and again with different questions and extract information that serves a variety of purposes, strategic, administrative or scholarly. Recently there were a number of determined protests arising from the “coloured” community in various areas, and the provincial government asked the GCRO to draw on the survey data for insight into the conditions experienced in some neighbourhoods.

We were able to show that, for example, because of particular planning decisions taken during the apartheid era, certain communities experience unusual levels of inconvenience which deepen the challenges they already face. Government wanted quick answers about these conditions, and the GCRO was able to supply them because of long-term systematic forms of research.

Of particular importance is the fact that Gauteng, like many other cities globally, experiences high levels of in-migration, with several hundred thousand new residents arriving annually seeking to improve their lives. These are overwhelmingly South African citizens from other parts of the country, together with a smattering of (often skilled) fellow Africans from across the border.

If we were to create the right conditions in Gauteng, we could benefit from another dividend — the demographic dividend that arises from a youthful and energetic population which, under the right circumstances, makes for the vitality and dynamism of successful cities.

However, getting this right depends on a far-sighted model of urbanisation, with significant investment made in the amenities and infrastructure that enable cities to become engines of ingenuity, innovation and prosperity. This obviously includes high-quality education provision from early childhood development through to post-schooling of all kinds.

This also includes creating the enabling conditions for a vibrant economy that encompasses the full range of economic activity, formal and informal; and that residents are not hampered from participating in the economy by distance, lack of skills or any other consideration.

Developing such a model of urbanisation, and giving practical effect to this across our varied geography, is not a job for government alone.

Partnerships between government, academia, the private sector and communities are vital to generating the insight and innovations that will contribute to a more functionally inclusive city-region.

The partnership that has given rise to the GCRO is an important demonstration of the value of collaboration, and the insight that is to be drawn from the survey results just released is the very practical evidence that will now be available to government, and all other interested parties. DM

Dr Rob Moore is executive director: Gauteng City-Region Observatory.