Getting to know the environment

Durban lies on South Africa's eastern coast on the Indian Ocean at 29 degrees south and 31 degrees east.  The city, and its beautiful, sandy beaches, stretch about fourteen miles along the coast but the city centre sits compactly around a deep-set harbour, the nation's busiest port, which is accessible from the ocean through a narrow canal between two pointy capes.  The main circuit of urban streets appear to extend inland no further than four miles at any given point, after which the suburbs become increasingly less populated and more remote as one continues west.  Including the smaller towns further along the coast and further inland, Durban's municipality is the biggest on Africa's east coast.

While the satellite view of Durban (above) is useful for distinguishing more densely built-up areas from more spacious tree-lined suburbs, open spaces, or parks, we glean different pieces of information from the other views available on AfricaMap.  The roadmap view does not directly distinguish areas by concentration but one would guess that areas with more and shorter roads are more urban.  The hybrid map, overlapping satellite and roads, confirms that hypothesis.  The open street map details even the minor roads and reveals a pattern in which streets in town centres tend to follow a rough grid, while roads are more random and infrequent in the suburbs.  Finally, the terrain map reveals that while Durban does not feature any extreme changes in elevation, it is quite hilly throughout, particularly as one moves further inland.

A look from lower altitude satellite begins to distinguish different neighbourhoods from each other.  The neighbourhood of Central Durban (map below), north of the harbour, is packed with roads following a fairly rigid grid pattern as well as businesses ranging from restaurants to sports centres, and from spas to hotels.  It opens out onto the Golden Mile, a particularly popular stretch of the beach that attracts South African and international tourists.  In contrast, the neighbourhood of Bluff (second map below), south of the harbour, appears largely residential with narrower roads and organized lines of similarly-sized red-roofed houses.  It barely has any Google Earth "gallery" markers and, while some areas may have received more labeling attention from Google Earth just by chance, it seems likely that the absence of notable markers confirms that this neighbourhood is less about tourists, more about everyday residential life.  Both Central Durban and Bluff feature parks and, in general, green spaces seem to be common throughout the city.

An additional distinguishing feature of Central Durban, the city centre marked with a yellow pin, is the way in which major roads in the area converge towards it.  As seen on the Google Earth map below, the M4 from the southwest and the N3 from the northwest are only the two most prominent of many roads into that area.   What look like three major east-west avenues also run past the city centre.

The Dewit Totius Africae Accuratis map from 1675 portrays what is now South Africa's east coast without any labeled cities.  Proportions and coastal edges are distorted so it's challenging to tell where Durban should be on the map, but a region on the coast labeled "Natalis Stat" is a definite possibility.  Similarly on the Desnos l'Afrique 1770 map, one might guess that Durban's location is in the region, "Terre Natal," south of the river, "St. Lucie," and north of "Riviere Large."

Based on the malaria distribution AfricaMap, Durban appears to have a high prevalence of malaria, like much of the coastal region around it.  The distribution of malaria decreases as one moves further inland into KwaZulu-Natal. 

Finally, to study Durban through different AfricaMap layers, I chose to use smaller-scale maps of Durban and surrounding South Africa in order to get some context.  

First, the map below layers language families and locations of armed conflict.  It reveals that the large area surrounding Durban speaks predominantly Bantu languages, but Durban itself has remained unclassified, presumably due to the linguistic diversitiy to be found in cities.  (The area marked in red adjacent to Durban is specifically associated with the Khumalo family, reflected on the ethnicity map further below!)  The locations of armed conflicts are particularly interesting because, in addition to the expected accumulation of markers around Durban because it is a city, the rural areas around Durban and Johannesburg have notably more markers than do rural areas in south-central or western South Africa.  

Zooming in a bit on the next map, one can further explore the predominance of different ethnic families across regions (2001).  Again, we see that the Khumalo family represents the prime ethnicity in the region around Durban, but the smaller area including Durban is not identified with a dominant ethnicity.    

On the last map, zooming in even further, we can get a sense of the travel and power facilities available in Durban and the vicinity.  Durban is serviced by two airports at either end of the city, and another much further away in the northwest corner of this map, but it does not have any power plants.