Spatially disaggregate analysis of housing quality, urban services, and socio-demographics in South Asia: A case study of Rawalpindi, Pakistan

(This paper will be presented at the World Bank's Urban Research Symposium in Brasilia in April 2005)

This project presents the spatial analysis of urban form, the quality of housing stock, access to basic urban services and their interdependencies in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. In most cities in South Asia, the quality of housing stock varies significantly within a metropolitan area. Similarly, the provision of basic services, such as supply of potable water and sanitation, is not uniformly distributed even within the same city. In addition, neighborhoods with poor quality of housing stock also lack appropriate water supply and sanitation facilities. Likewise, there exists a correlation between the state of housing stock and socio-demographic attributes, such as literacy ratio.

Using the data from the last population and housing census, which was held in 1998, this project presents an analysis of the spatial distribution of the quality of housing stock (formal, semi formal, and informal housing) and provision of urban services (potable water, sanitation, and electricity) in Rawalpindi, a city with a population of 1.4 million. The analysis consists of two stages. The first stage includes a non-spatial analysis of housing and urban services and their correlation with socio-demographic attributes.  The second stage involves developing Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based maps of Rawalpindi, which divide the city into 171 mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive zones.  These maps allow a spatial analysis of urban form (spatial distribution of population, road density/accessibility and the like), housing characteristics, provision of urban services, and socio-demographic attributes.

The following maps present the preliminary results: