Cape town urban development index a rubric for urban transformation

Abstract

The City of Cape Town has been working towards understanding the intricate relationship between land-use and transportation in order to develop growth management strategies that seek to create a more balanced travel demand profile of the city over time by enabling a better spatial relationship between trip producing and trip attracting land-uses. The City produced the TOD Strategic Framework in 2016, the revised Integrated Development Plan in 2017 and the new Municipal Spatial Development Framework in 2018 all of which emphasise the need for Spatial Transformation. An important question then arises from this which is: The City has aligned its key policies, strategies and priorities towards urban and spatial transformation but how do we know that the implementation of these is effective and what should we measure to assess this? The Urban Development Index (UDI) was conceived as a mechanism to answer this question but also to enable the identification of future transformation priorities. The Cape Town UDI builds on the previously developed Transport Development Index (TDI) by adding spatially disaggregated indices relating to land-use diversity, residential and employment density in public transport corridors, housing price diversity and informality ratios in the City. Eleven indices covering transport, land-use and housing were defined to measure the different facets of spatial and urban transformation.