Building Urban Resilience in the Face of Severe Drought through the Innovative Use of Open Data

This paper presents a case study that explores the important role played by Open Data when the City of Cape Town was faced with an imminent water "Day Zero" event after a sustained three-year drought. The local government employed several strategies, not only to save and augment dwindling water supplies, but also to reduce domestic consumption. Its dramatic success in getting its population to reduce water consumption by more than 50% in just a few months is unprecedented when compared to similar initiatives elsewhere and rightly regarded as breaking new ground. This paper isolates those interventions which employed novel open data strategies to achieve the above outcome. It is hoped that this may inform the policies and strategies of the many other cities which will face similar challenges.