Browsing by Author "Pieterse, Edgar"

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    Becoming otherwise: two thousand and ten reasons to live in a small town
    (2015) Sitas, Friderike; Pieterse, Edgar; Daya, Shari
    The past few decades have seen a 'cultural turn' in urban planning, and public art has become an important component within urban design strategies. Accordingly, public art is most commonly encountered in the urban literature as commissioned public sculptures. Simultaneously operating are a range of critical, subversive, and experimental practices that interact with the public space of cities in a myriad of ways. Although these other types of public art projects may have been engaged in the fields of Fine Art and Cultural Studies, this has been predominantly in the global North and they have yet to enter Urban Studies in the global South in any comprehensive way. Through an analysis of three examples from the Visual Arts Network South Africa's 'Two Thousand and Ten Reasons to Live in a Small Town', this thesis argues that experimental, inclusionary and less object-oriented forms of public art offers useful lessons for Urban Studies. The research presented in this thesis involved a qualitative study of: The Domino Effect which followed a participatory process to develop a domino tournament in the Western Cape town of Hermon; Living within History, a performative collage project which explored the local museum archive in the town of Dundee in KwaZulu-Natal; and Dlala Indima which was a graffiti-led Hip-hop project in the rural township of Phakamisa in the Eastern Cape. Each involved affective engagements with the vastly unequal contexts typical of South African public spaces. Although there is an increasing recognition that affect plays an important role in understanding and designing the urban, it is still largely assumed that citizenship is enacted according to rational criteria. The public art of 'Two Thousand and Ten Reason s to Live in a Small Town' demonstrated that affect impacts on how people can access complex spatial issues and perform citizenship. Furthermore, as part of a larger epistemological project of 'southerning' urban theory, this thesis therefore argues that intersecting conceptual threads from three bodies of literature: public space, public art and public pedagogy, is important. More specifically, it demonstrates that public art can harness an affective rationality that may foster alternative ways of knowing and acting in/on the urban, thereby offering public art as a unique pedagogy for exploring and deepening cityness .
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    Exploring walking and mapping in an architecture design studio
    (2015) Papanicolaou, Stiliani Sofia; Pieterse, Edgar
    The aim of the research was to develop and explore a practice in architecture that would respond to the shifting nature of everyday contemporary life. The practice of design is examined and ideas about space from philosophy are used to broaden the scope of architecture without moving away from its disciplinary intentions and obligations. A theoretical framework is used to underpin the method proposed for student-collaborators to test. The testing by students took place over a number of iterations, each iteration being used to improve the proposal. This dissertation captures the proposal in a moment of its unfolding.The proposal requires a few more iterations before its conclusion.
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    Heritage discontinued: tracing cultural ecologies within a context of urban transition
    (2016) Sohie, Caroline; Pieterse, Edgar
    Culture has been consistently underrepresented in the sustainability debate and often perceived as a constraining factor to modern-day advancement. However in recent years, the broadening development paradigm in the Global South is increasingly asserting culture's indispensable role in sustainable human development. This dominant cultural paradigm mainstreamed by UNESCO is subscribed to by government and other role-players within the domain of culture and urban development. Despite its significant achievements, it however comes with a specific heritage conceptualisation, which is disconnected from local reality and perpetuates a problematic theoretical construct of cultural legacy, which is steeped in a Eurocentric conservation bias with colonial undertones. The thesis argues that this model will not lead to transformative interventions in urban areas that harness the power of culture if its interpretation remains decontextualised and perpetuates an instrumentalised view of culture and cultural conservation practice, inherited from the past. The thesis explores how an alternative conceptualisation of culture, based on the concept of cultural ecologies, can be more meaningful and beneficial in contributing to the theoretical reassessment of the human settlements imaginary. This is achieved through an interdisciplinary literature review and a case study of Bagamoyo, a small urban settlement in Tanzania. Through a systematic diagnosis of this small scale locality, cultural ecologies are foregrounded through the primary lens of the urban public-private interface and framed within a context that is shaped by the dynamics of globalisation. Additionally, the study takes place against the backdrop of a failed UNESCO World Heritage application, which allows me to discuss the undercurrents and invested interests associated with cultural heritage politics and the traumatic impact global conventions can have on local sustainability. It concludes in a proposed approach that repositions culture at the core of social exchange and argues that cultural sensitive development is an ongoing socio-cultural production process. Its potential lies in capturing the layered 'ordinariness' of place and in harnessing the imaginative responses arising from local idioms, practices and traditions as the shared imaginary of tomorrow.
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    Sustainable urban infrastructure : the prospects and relevance for middle-income cities of the global South
    (2016) Hyman, Katherine Rose; Pieterse, Edgar
    In this thesis, I contribute to the emerging theoretical knowledge of and policy discourse on sustainable urban infrastructure, as a potential solution to the myriad of ecological and socioeconomic developmental challenges, for middle-income contexts of the global south. To understand this under-studied theme better, this dissertation uses three emblematic case studies of utility departments in the City of Cape Town (CCT) - an in-depth study of the Solid Waste Management Department and supporting studies of the Electricity Services Department, and the Water and Sanitation Department - to determine the prospects and relevance of sustainable infrastructure in such contexts. Through an analysis of urban networked infrastructure, I provide novel insight into the underpinning institutional dynamics that reproduce the service delivery model, and highlight how innovative activities that reflect the principles of sustainable urban infrastructure become embedded within institutional practice. Two conceptual frameworks, developed from the literature, have guided the empirical research and the analysis. The first is a heuristic device that enhances our understanding of sustainable urban infrastructure knowledge and discourse. The second offers a way to understand how it is institutionally mediated. Specifically, these conceptual frameworks are applied to the cases to reveal how the CCT's utility departments respond to an emergent crisis within a sector and how they pursue purposive interventions that reflect the sustainable urban infrastructure theory and discourse. The research was carried out over a period of two years and six months, during which I conducted semi-structured and informal interviews, and extensive document analysis.
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    The role of professional urban planners in understanding and managing the dynamism of informal settlements
    (2023) Hill, Danielle Grace; Pieterse, Edgar
    Informal settlements pose a major developmental challenge for professional urban planners and urban managers and are predicted to continue to do so in years to come. At the heart of this challenge lies the complex relationship between the nature of informality and that of urban planning as a profession and discipline. The greater part of research on informal settlements has focused, and continues to focus, on bottomup approaches. While these approaches are central to global South oriented research, I argue for more focus on what appears to be the overlooked role of the global South planner. Whereas my approach delves into the intersection between managing informal settlements, utopian ideals of urban planning, and a radical push for decolonial thinking, urban planning in both the global North and global South has long been critiqued for its persistent rigid, colonial-modernist approach to the managing and assessment of urban development. The specific emphasis of my approach is on the mindset and sensibility necessary for built environment professionals to adopt when undertaking processes of urban development, a focus which seems so far to have been missing in planning debates. I argue that change cannot fully start from the bottom, that, for several reasons, it needs to start from the top. The modernist colonial origins, influence, and culture of urban planning is critiqued by scholars, particularly in the global South planning field, for ‘saving', ‘hiding', or ‘eradicating', rather than liberating and empowering the ‘other' in urban development processes. Central to this liberation, I argue, is a radical reorientation of planners' consciousness toward the kind of mindset and sensibility necessary when managing ‘the other', i.e. the urban poor, the marginalised, and those living in informal settlements. Any acknowledgement of the importance of both social organisation and identity in informal place-making lies in the shift in urban planning practitioners' mindsets. The focus of my case study is an exploration of the specific ways in which planning practitioners collaborated with each other, and with informal settlement communities. This included the power relations at play within this collaborative process, and the potential this process has to harness and invigorate the informal upgrading process. I explore these by looking at a pilot (Phase 1) Upgrading of an Informal Settlement Programme (UISP) project in Thembalethu, municipality of George, Western Cape Province. Even though the UISP is a housing policy rather than a planning tool, the UISP is actively designed to address and upgrade informal settlements by following a four-phased approach to address broader socio-economic challenges. By exploring the Thembalethu UISP, I explore the degree to which planners are able to intervene and manage the complexities and contradictions inherent in informal settlement upgrading processes such as those in Thembalethu, and the specific factors limiting their role in this process. My study adopted a qualitative case study research design approach. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with the professionals who administered, and were responsible for, the upgrading project, together with field observation. Data were analysed using a system change lens, adjacent to using a deductive thematic analysis technique. The planners were found to have played a marginal role in the upgrading process, and their agency to have been restricted, both by their employers and by the UISP budget, as their role was limited to technical layouts. Even though planning in this case remained ‘powerless' and tended to fall prey to ‘institutional victimisation', the role of the planner as revealed by the interviews was seen as imperative in providing spatial direction and balance in upgrading projects. Nevertheless, the interviews revealed that, in spite of their lack of agency and power in upgrading processes in the Thembalethu UISP, the planners were starting to reimagine informal spaces and the function of these, and, in so doing, challenging conventional ideas of design and layout, as well as the role of the planner, and their participation with communities in the planning process. This was all in addition, and at times in resistance to, policy considerations. While this process of incipient reimagining may have been the case in this study, the collaboration of built environment practitioners continues to mirror a disproportion of responsiveness between the state and the UISP implementing agent, and, in so doing, exposes the strength of governance systems continuing to remain in place. The current study is expected to hold significance both at empirical and theoretical levels. Some of the theoretical significance resides in the move towards an African or de-colonial turn in planning, as well as towards a grounded learning-driven planning approach. While there is a body of research which shows how planning need not overlook power, I suggest specific ways in which ideas of decentralisation have exposed the strength (i.e., distribution of power) of existing urban governance systems and community participation. The empirical significance of the study calls for a greater emphasis on how the role of the implementing agent has been discounted in the literature. The findings also suggest the necessity for neighbourhood design and scale of intervention in upgrading projects, and for these projects to be more appropriate to the specific needs of informal communities than are large-scale one-size-fits-all state funded projects. Even though there has been a shift in scale and exploration in layout design, there remains a need for a holistic approach to urban development. On a policy level, the findings point to both a gap in, and a need for, greater alignment between housing and planning legislation and policies. Thus, the study offers a deeper knowledge and understanding of policy considerations, and of how custodianship of policies can become a major stronghold, if not a greater power contender, in the urban development spectrum. Furthermore, existing ideas of ‘community empowerment' language in policy documents are interrogated. In the process of understanding the workings of this, I look in detail at management styles and at the kind of leadership necessary for implementing upgrading programmes. Based on the findings, I put forward the importance of ambivalence in any upgrading project. Thus, in the context of urban development as a dynamic ‘collective', I consider the inability of planners to hold ambivalence to be a significant hindrance to their ability to envision, or to re-imagine, informal settlements. I argue that this in turn implicates the way planners think and manage the collective needs, together with the dynamism of informal settlements.
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    The transport of pollutants over South Africa and atmospheric sulphur in Cape Town
    (2013) Jenner, Samantha Louise; Abiodun, Babatunde Joseph; Pieterse, Edgar
    Cape Town experiences unpleasant pollution (called the Brown Haze) in winter. Sulphur is a major constituent of this haze. To reduce sulphur pollution, and its negative impact on health in Cape Town, air quality management has focussed on identifying local sources and reducing the local emissions of sulphur. Meanwhile, the transport of sulphur pollutants from areas outside Cape Town can contribute to ambient sulphur concentrations. This work studies the transport of sulphur pollutants over South Africa and examines whether Cape Town is a net source of or sink for the pollutant. It shows the link between sulphur emissions on the Mpumalanga Highveld (the most polluted area in South Africa) and sulphur pollution in Cape Town. Two atmosphere chemistry-transport models (RegCM-Chem and WRF-Chem) were used for this study. The models were applied to simulate the atmospheric flow and chemistry transport over South Africa for two years (2001 and 2002), and the results were validated with observations within Cape Town. The models reproduced observed seasonal variability in atmospheric wind flow and sulphur concentrations over Cape Town. Results from both models show a transport of sulphur pollutants from the Mpumalanga Highveld to Cape Town. While the sulphur pollutants from the Mpumalanga Highveld are transported eastward (toward the Indian Ocean) at middle atmospheric levels, the pollutants are transported south-westward (towards Cape Town) at lower atmospheric levels. In addition, the pollutants are transported from the Mpumalanga Highveld to Cape Town, following the south coast of South Africa, in April. During an extreme sulphur pollution event in Cape Town, there is formation of either a col or a converging flow over the city. These features encourage the accumulation of sulphur over Cape Town. The sulphur flux budget analysis shows that Cape Town can be a net source of or sink for sulphur during an extreme pollution event. This study has application potential in developing policies to reduce sulphur pollution in Cape Town and in other areas of South Africa.