Gauteng’s village of 100 people

GCRO Research Project
with Christina Culwick

Project website
2017

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As a researcher at the GCRO, I conceptualized an interactive online animation which brought to life the GCRO’s Quality of Life 2015 survey.

“This interactive animation presents Gauteng – a huge, vibrant and diverse city-region that is South Africa’s economic heartland – as a ‘village of 100 people’. In this interactive realm, 100 animated ‘people’ roam, with each person representing 1% of the respondents of GCRO’s 2015 Quality of Life survey.

The Quality of Life survey is conducted every two years across Gauteng. This animation is based on results from the fourth Quality of Life survey, commissioned in 2015. With just over 30 000 respondents, this is the largest social attitudes survey ever conducted in the Gauteng province. Through over 200 questions it collects data on basic services, satisfaction with government, transport and mobility, livelihoods, local community and neighbourhood dynamics, health and well-being, migration, as well as political and social values and attitudes. The survey provides rich information to policy makers and the public wanting to track where development progress is being made and where concerns remain.

In this ‘Gauteng as a village of 100 people’ visualisation, a series of questions from the 2015 Quality of Life survey show aspects of the life circumstances and opinions of people in the city-region through five interactive scenarios. Each scenario has five variables that a user can select. A selection changes the way in which the 100 people look and are clustered, reflecting the results from the Quality of Life survey. In other words, the village people are proxies for the survey data, with the user being able to choose through specified themes and questions what results they show. The animated urban setting is reminiscent of Gauteng. The square is surrounded by buildings and scenes from around the Gauteng City-Region. People in the square represent the gender and racial diversity of Gauteng in a non-’representative’ manner.”