Who lives within reach of Harare’s lifestyle centres? We measured four

Every lease signed at a Harare shopping centre, every loan against one and every new store opened near one rests on a number: how many people live close enough to shop there. Landlords quote it to tenants, developers to lenders, retailers to their boards. It is rarely checked.

We checked it for four of Harare's best-known centres: Sam Levy's Village in Borrowdale, Arundel Village in Mount Pleasant, Honeydew in Greendale and Kamfinsa, a few minutes to the north-east. We built drive and walk times on the city's road network from OpenStreetMap, laid them over Google's satellite outlines of 1.24 million buildings in and around the city, and tested three population maps that analysts commonly use against ZIMSTAT's census counts for each of Harare's 78 wards.

The test matters more than we expected. The maps disagree by a factor of four to five on how many people live in Harare's northern suburbs, and only one of them agrees with the census. Numbers built on the others can make a catchment look several times larger than it is.

What follows is the corrected picture: who can reach each centre, how wealthy those neighbourhoods look from above, how they have changed since 2012, and where Harare has actually been growing. It is a picture every retailer, developer and lender in the city should have before the next decision.