Project Overview

︎ Location: Durban, South Africa
︎ Keywords: Informal Economy; Street Vending


Durban is one of the few cities in the world actively trying to integrate informal economies within its urban development frameworks. Durban’s current street trader sites diversify the spectrum of commercial property in very important ways — they offer both a lower cost rent to traders and also a much smaller footprint.

The purpose of the study is to better understand the urban informal economy and find out how cities integrate the informal economy.

By working with communities to gather, analyze and visualize data, we could in-depth understand vendors’ living condition and we are able to easily find out the existing problems. Eventually, we could help them build urban intelligence.

*This data visualization research is a collaborative project with MIT CREAT.




︎ Data Visualization Demo
* Because of the confidential policy, we could only show some parts of the data visualization.

Background

The Markets of Warwick in Durban, South Africa, are often described as the largest public marketplace in South Africa with over 6,000 vendors and 400,000+ people passing through every day, in less than one square kilometer. Each market has a different physical, economic and social profile.

Vendors have variable and inconsistent access to critical infrastructure including water, sanitation, electricity, waste collection, and permanent vending space and they also invest varying amounts in their stalls.

Research I

Lime & Impepho Market Survey (Vendors' Daily Life in the Market)

In this part, we want to show vendors’ daily life in the market. Firstly, we cleaned dataset. Then we extracted eleven sets of the valid data which included three parts:

1)    Get Water Time
2)    Toilet Time
3)    Business Hours



Conclusion:

When we finished the data visualization, we found that half of the vendors in the market chose to stay there for 24 hours. In order to figure out the reason, we did deeper research and we found most of the vendors’ homes were very far from the market (Warwick Junction, Durban). As a result, they prefer to
stay in the market to sell out their goods.

Research II

Three Hours Mealie Market's Utilities & Vendors (10AM-1PM)



This is all the outgoing traffic from the Mealie market to show how much activity there is throughout different times of the morning. In the Mealie Market, the mealie cooks make the food and they take mealies to the market to sell.

In this part, we use two different methods to represent data (2D Bar Chart & 3D Bar Chart) which could give users better experiences.





Conclusion:

When we finished the data visualization, we found that half of the vendors in the market chose to stay there for 24 hours. In order to figure out the reason, we did deeper research and we found most of the vendors’ homes were very far from the market (Warwick Junction, Durban). As a result, they prefer to stay in the market to sell out their goods.

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