The City Brand Index (CBI) for South Africa
& the Smart City Challenge: A way to rise S.A. cities in the CBI Index?
Poster of The first Big Data summer school in Africa in Cape Town, 2017. A partnership between the astronomy research organisation (Square Kilometre Array South Africa (SKA SA)) and the medical research council (South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC)
During Academic year 2017–2018, while studying towards an MA in Cultural Management at Panteion University and under the lead of Professor Betty Tsakarestou, our tutor in Cultural Marketing & Communication and project initiator of the Athens Co-Creation City Branding Project, we were challenged to discuss issues regarding paths towards a sustainable and resilient city. A further step of my research involved looking at the case studies of 3 major South African cities in relation to the City Brand Index CBI and the impact of technology on people’s lives.
A: The CBI and South Africa cities: The case studies of Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg
B: The Smart City Challenge: A way to rise S.A. cities in the CBI Index?
1) E-success stories where technology has an impact on African people’s lives.
2) Facing the housing deficit via Smart City achievements in South Africa: The debate
A: The CBI and South Africa cities: The case studies of Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg
The 2017 City Brand Index (CBI) Methodology
Simon Anholt is recognized as the world’s leading authority on national image and identity. Professor Anholt was Vice-Chair of the UK Government’s Public Diplomacy Board, and works as an independent policy advisor to the Heads of State and Heads of Government of more than 50 other countries. Anholt developed the concept of the Nation Brands IndexSM and the City Brands IndexSM in 2005.
The Anholt-GfK CBI runs once every two years and measures the image of 50 cities, providing a holistic and detailed perspective based on six key dimensions:
The Presence (the city’s international status and standing)
Respondents were asked how familiar people are with each of the 50 cities in the survey and whether each city has made an important contribution to the world in culture, science, or in the way cities are governed, during the last 30 years.
• The Place (its physical outdoors aspect and transport)
Here, people’s perceptions are explored about the physical aspect of each city: how pleasant or unpleasant they imagine it is to be outdoors and to travel around the city, how attractive it is, and what the climate is like.
• The Pre-requisites (basic requirements, such as affordable accommodations and the standard of public amenities)
Respondents are asked about their basic requirements of a city: how easy they think it would be to find satisfactory, affordable accommodation, and what they believe the general standard of public amenities is like — schools, hospitals, public transport, sports facilities, and so on.
• The People (friendliness, cultural diversity, how safe one feels)
The people make the city; respondents think the inhabitants would be warm and friendly, or cold and prejudiced against outsiders. Would be easy for them to find and fit into a community which shares their language and culture. Additionally, respondents are asked how safe would feel in the city.
•The Pulse (interesting things to do)
How easy would it be to find interesting things to do, both as a short term visitor and as a long term resident.
•The Potential (the economic and educational opportunities available).
Economic and educational opportunities to offer businesses, immigrants, and students. How easy it would be to find a job in the city, and, if they had a business, how good a place they think it would be to do business.
For the 2017 study, 5,057 interviews were conducted across the10 Panel countries namely, Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Russia, South Korea, UK, and USA), with at least 500 interviews per country. Adults aged 18 or over were interviewed online in each country. Using the most up-to-date online population parameters, the achieved sample in each country is weighted to reflect key demographic characteristics including age, gender, and education of the online population in that country. Fieldwork was conducted from 20 September to 3 October 2017.
Comparing 2015 and 2017: CBI’s top 10 Cities on the 6 key dimensions
Zoom in at 3 South African Cities: Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg
CBI measurements of the relative global reputation of three South African cities indicate that of all the South African cities, Durban reaches the best results in improving its image.
The 2017 CBI indicates that since 2015, Durban’s rank has improved by one position in the Presence, Place, and Prerequisites Indices, by two in the Pulse Index, by three in the Potential Index and by four in the People Index. Durban ranks 49th in Presence, 42nd in Place, 41st in Prerequisite, 40th in People, 47th in Pulse and 39th in Potential.
Cape Town remains in the 43rd place overall, which is the same as in 2015, but seems to be admired for its climate (23rd). Johannesburg continues to rank 44th in CBI 2017, a position it has held since 2013, with a modest overall score increase (+0.76 points, versus the average score gain of +0.91 points). In 2015, Johannesburg experienced a three position rank improvement in the Place Index, as well as a one position rank upgrade in the Presence, Pulse, and Potential sectors.
B: The Smart City Challenge: A way to rise S.A. cities in the CBI Index?
1) E-success stories where technology has an impact on African people’s lives.
Africa consists of 54 countries with different sovereign leadership and at different stages of development without a central authority. South Africa is the 25th largest country in the world by land area and has close to 55 million people population.
The image of Africa to a large amount of population is related to either a fascinating landscape and wildlife or images of war, disease, poverty and luck of control of its own destiny. Unfortunately, the above are true to a large extend, taken in account the continent’s long history of struggle and instability.
However, in recent years, various Africa cities seem to be standing up for themselves, bringing up an African Agenda to the table that goes beyond the allocations of Aid.
Furthermore, there has been a great amount of innovation across the continent, largely catalyzed by mobile and technology often initiated by Africa’s youth, who believe and will fight for a better Africa. The continent’s digital economy including e- learning, e-government, e-health and e-banking is rapidly on the rise.
E-success stories for African people’s lives improvements
· RapidSMS: This innovation has improved maternal and child health in Rwanda. Community health workers are able to report in real time on pregnant women at risk, antenatal care visits and deaths of mothers or children.
It is a platform for data-gathering and group communication using the short message service (SMS) on mobile phones. The aim is to tackle the problem of slow data transmission . It was developed in 2009 by the Ministry of Health in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
With a simple message sent by phone, an ambulance can be made available in an emergency even in the remotest parts of Rwanda.
Between 2010 and 2015, the infant mortality and under-five mortality rates fell from 50 per cent to 32 per cent and from 76 per cent to 50 per cent respectively
Code for Africa is driven and co-funded by grassroots citizen organizations and the mass media and is focused primarily on building civic technology capacity within civil society and the media.
· “Code for Africa is a people-driven movement that aims to empower active citizenry and strengthen civic watchdogs to help government shape and improve its services to citizens. It promises to change the power dynamics that govern our societies, giving ordinary citizens more and deeper information in real time, along with digital tools for engaging with fellow citizens and with those in positions of power”.
Info graphs for more e-success African stories:
B: The Smart City Challenge: A way to rise S.A. cities in the CBI Index?
2) Facing the housing deficit via Smart City achievements in South Africa: The debate
Dark Fibre Africa is a major open access fiber optic company in South Africa. Through their services they empower large, medium and small businesses, enabling them to expand their infrastructure.These companies include conglomerates, big business, telecoms operators, Internet service providers, municipalities and governments, who then sell their services to the public.
Reshaad Sha, chief strategy officer at Dark Fibre Africa, notes government has, in the past, committed to establishing forward-thinking smarter cities across the country, with particular focus given to Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
According to Dark Fibre Africa in order to achieve smart city goals, SA has to get right six basic prerequisites.
1. Long-term urban planning
2. Utilities management
3. Systems
4. Integration
5. Service delivery
6. Stakeholder management
There are significant benefits to be had from SA investing in smart cities around the country, but to achieve these benefits, the right infrastructure needs to be put in place to harness advanced technologies that will improve education, traffic management, billing, city resource and asset management, crime control and public safety. At the top of the priority list is connectivity infrastructure. Yet, climbing rankings in a smart city index is not the ultimate aim — the improvement of the lives of citizens in SA’s cities is”. Reshaad Sha, chief strategy officer at Dark Fibre Africa.
Urban Future: Catering for the housing deficit?
Africa’s rapidly-expanding urban areas require improvement to basic infrastructure and the use of technology is crucial to that as it could replace otherwise more costly developments: Instead of building more parking spots, build more lift-automated smart car parks.
The new, satellite cities are also a concept, and in the past few years actualized developments, promoted by governments and large corporations as a solution to the continent’s housing deficit, too.
While supporters of “smart cities” advocate the upscaling of existing urban centers with technologies, the most expensive, striking examples are new landmark locations built entirely from scratch. Often built on the peripheries of overpopulated cities, these modern developments are funded by a mix of private and public organizations.
Those projects are massive: They include “Vision City” on the edge of Kigali in Rwanda, “King City” in Ghana, “Eko Atlantic” in Lagos in Nigeria and “Waterfall City” in South Africa.
“Our projects provide a range of housing and the benefits are scale: large mixed-use, mixed-income communities, and those are non-gated communities so they’re quite open”. Tim Beighton, Urban Developer.
However, a different view is expressed by Mira Slavov, a fellow at LSE with expertise in Smart Cities: “Initiatives should be centered on empowering city-dwellers and on small and medium sized urban areas that will likely be the future of Africa’s urban growth -not the eye-grabbing urban megacities”.
Overall, there has been a great amount of innovation across a large number of African cities, largely catalyzed by mobile and technology, which has a huge impact on various aspects of life offering access to a variety of services to the previously deprived and in some cases even disrupting the status quo via technological innovation as in the case of Open Data & Open Government.
Yet, in the battle of finding more efficient ways of improving urban life of the 21st century, perhaps the question is whether the often eye-catching, large projects will be offering solutions to Africa’s people as a whole or for only a lucky few who can afford them. Long term and strategic urban planning oughs to be the base where The Presence, The Place,The Pre-requisites, The People, The Pulse and The Potential will hope for a better ranking to CBI or any other City Index aiming ,above all, at representing a real positive impact on people’s lives.
