Country · 9 regions
Where South Africa's land ends up, by people and by money
Every block on the map is 0.1% of South Africa. By land, Gauteng holds 1.5%. By people, it holds 27%. Northern Cape goes the other way, from 31% of the land to 2.1% of the people.
| Region | Land | People | GDP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gauteng | 1.5 | 27 | 37 |
| KwaZulu-Natal | 7.8 | 19 | 14 |
| Western Cape | 10 | 12 | 15 |
| Eastern Cape | 14 | 11 | 7.1 |
| Limpopo | 10 | 10 | 6.8 |
| Mpumalanga | 6.5 | 7.7 | 7.4 |
| North West | 8.8 | 6.3 | 6.3 |
| Free State | 10 | 4.6 | 4.4 |
| Northern Cape | 31 | 2.1 | 2.1 |
How the map is made
Regions are drawn on an equal-area grid of about 1,000 blocks. For land, each region keeps the blocks its territory covers. For people and GDP, the country is reshaped so every region gets a whole number of blocks in proportion to its share (Hamilton's largest-remainder method), keeping neighbours next to each other. Then every block is matched to one block on the next map, so you watch the same thousand blocks rearrange.
Grids: popgrid by Josep Ferrer (MIT). Boundaries: Natural Earth. Population: national censuses where curated, GHS-POP 2025 (JRC, European Commission) elsewhere. GDP: Kummu et al. 2025 gridded GDP PPP (CC BY 4.0). Built by Crafter Station.