With growing urbanisation, resulting in the majority of people now living in metropolitan areas, monitoring the performance of cities is important. Urban data is critical to effective planning and management in increasingly complex urban contexts, and allows cities to proactively drive evidence-based decision-making for planning and policy development. Good urban data and indicator sets allow for comparison between cities and over time enable cities to see whether or not they are achieving their objectives.
The SACN analyses data and assists cities in proactively managing their data and information to achieve the following:
Allow for effective planning and management in increasingly complex urban contexts
Simplify complicated information sets into easy to understand groups of urbanisation viewpoints
Enable easy current comparisons between different cities within South Africa
Give cities an accurate idea of how well each city is achieving its city development goals