About this page, the data and the disclaimer
What this is
The Pulse of A City is a personal portfolio and study project. It shows City of Cape Town service requests on a map, counted by area and by suburb, so that you can see where requests are open and for how long. It is not a service for reporting faults.
Disclaimer
This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the City of Cape Town. It is not an official City product and nothing on it speaks for the City. The City's name is used only to say where the data comes from.
The numbers are provided as they are, with no warranty of any kind. They may be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and they will differ from the City's own records, because they come from a copy of the data taken on the date shown on the map page and have been cleaned and grouped. Please do not rely on them for any decision about safety, property, money or legal matters. You use this page at your own risk.
The data
The data is a copy of the City's open service request layer, taken once. The City no longer refreshes that layer, so every age and every open or closed status on the page is measured from the copy date, which is shown on the map page. The page publishes counts only: it does not contain request numbers, names, addresses or exact locations. Requests that have no usable position are counted by suburb only and are not drawn on the map. The notes on the map page ("Read this first" and "Gaps in the data") list the main limits.
The City's terms
The data comes from the City of Cape Town's Open Data Portal and is used under the City's own terms. Please read them, because they can change:
Privacy
This page does not use cookies, accounts, analytics or advertising, and it does not ask you for any personal information. To draw the map, your browser fetches map tiles from OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org). Like any map provider, it can see your IP address and which part of the map you look at; its own privacy statement applies. The page is hosted on GitHub Pages, which may keep ordinary server logs; GitHub's privacy statement applies to those.
Contact
Questions or corrections: erick.ndava [at] gmail.com
Credits
Basemap: © OpenFreeMap, © OpenMapTiles, data from OpenStreetMap (also shown in the corner of the map). The page is built with the open-source libraries MapLibre GL JS, deck.gl and h3-js.