Browsing by Department "African Centre for Cities"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    A critical review of the housing policy and the State's intervention in mining towns in South Africa
    (2018) Manenzhe, Thiathu Darriyl; Cirolia, Liza
    Since 2012, there has been increasing government interest in mining towns. This interest was occasioned by the Marikana shooting. This interest, led by the presidency through Inter-ministerial Committee on the Revitalisation of Distressed Mining Towns and Communities has had impact on human settlements. This dissertation provides an overview of the Mining Towns Programme and its evolution, identify some of the major pitfalls and assumptions of the programme, and propose an alternative. It also provides and reflects a sustained critique of the approach of the state in the creation of human settlements and the provision of housing in mining towns. Furthermore, the dissertation attempts to assess the efficacy of human settlements approach to mining towns. In doing this, I argue that despite the increased interest, the approach adopted has fundamental weaknesses. These weaknesses range from the fundamental departure from the original intention and focus of the programme, the over-reliance on the existing but inappropriate human settlements delivery instruments and the ignorance of and the weakened role of local government in the programme. In its reliance on the existing human settlements delivery instruments, the implementation and delivery of houses has not addressed the problems faced by mineworkers. Moreover, the state has also overlooked the deep historical challenges of mining towns, both in terms of context and practice and this has undermined the effective implementation of the programme. There are also other institutional and socioeconomic problems associated with mining towns and this has not been properly assessed. The dissertation critically evaluates the approach and the shortcomings of the Mining Towns Programme against these challenges and posits some alternatives.
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    Being a teen, tween and in-between girl in Mitchell's Plain: toward a heterogenous conception of youth agency in a Global South city
    (University of Cape Town, 2020) Brain, Ruth; Haysom, Gareth
    How do young South Africans assert agency? This study uses Emirbayer and Mische's (1998) theoretical conception of agency as temporally embedded and constantly reconfiguring; and combines it with the idea of shifting strategies as manifestations of agency. I introduce the seminal works in South African everyday youth literature to orient my study to explore how youth in South Africa assert agency through everyday strategies. Using qualitative methods - photo voice, focus groups, mapping and individual interviews - with four teenage girls from a high school in Mitchell's Plain, this study offers an enriched approach to a conception of youth agency, by overlaying a youth study with a theoretical conception of agency. The girls' everyday accounts show that as young teenagers they are waiting to enter the unknown prospect of teenagehood. To navigate their everyday lives, they draw on iterative (past), practical evaluative (present) and projective (future) agency in shifting configurations to maximise their agency in their lifeworlds. Although their agency is in tension with structures of safety concerns, familial expectations and culturally validated narratives of being a 'good girl'; the girls find ways around and through these limitations by strategically asserting their agency. This study applies a comprehensive theory of agency to a small youth study with rich everyday descriptions, in an effort towards enriching and grounding a conception of youth agency in an urban environment in the Global South.
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    Data replication and update propagation in XML P2P data management systems
    (2008) Paulse, Marlon; Berman, S
    XML P2P data management systems are P2P systems that use XML as the underlying data format shared between peers in the network. These systems aim to bring the benefits of XML and P2P systems to the distributed data management field. However, P2P systems are known for their lack of central control and high degree of autonomy. Peers may leave the network at any time at will, increasing the risk of data loss. Despite this, most research in XML P2P systems focus on novel and efficient XML indexing and retrieval techniques. Mechanisms for ensuring data availability in XML P2P systems has received comparatively little attention. This project attempts to address this issue. We design an XML P2P data management framework to improve data availability. This framework includes mechanisms for wide-spread data replication, replica location and update propagation. It allows XML documents to be broken down into fragments. By doing so, we aim to reduce the cost of replicating data by distributing smaller XML fragments throughout the network rather than entire documents. To tackle the data replication problem, we propose a suite of selection and placement algorithms that may be interchanged to form a particular replication strategy. To support the placement of replicas anywhere in the network, we use a Fragment Location Catalogue, a global index that maintains the locations of replicas. We also propose a lazy update propagation algorithm to propagate updates to replicas. Experiments show that the data replication algorithms improve data availability in our experimental network environment. We also find that breaking XML documents into smaller pieces and replicating those instead of whole XML documents considerably reduces the replication cost, but at the price of some loss in data availability. For the update propagation tests, we find that the probability that queries return up-to-date results increases, but improvements to the algorithm are necessary to handle environments with high update rates.
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    Exploring and profiling of childhood illnesses in informal settlements in relation to flooding: a case study of Barcelona, Cape Town South Africa
    (2013) Machiridza, Rumbudzayi Dorothy; Smit, Warren
    A significant number of studies have documented illnesses that follow flooding as a result of people coming into contact with contaminated water. Floods cause health risks by exposing children to bacteria, protozoa, viruses and fungi through contaminated water, contaminated household items, dead animals and mould, as a result of inhalation, ingestion and wound infections. This study focuses on the impacts of flooding on child health in the informal settlement of Barcelona, Cape Town. The health outcomes of flooding are conceptualized within the vulnerability framework of Turner and colleagues (2003), which explores human vulnerability in terms of exposure, sensitivity and resilience. In addition, the framework reflects global environment change and it powerfully defines the term vulnerability. There were three main research objectives. Firstly, the research established factors and other stressors that determined the occurrence of water-related illnesses among children in informal settlements as a result of flooding. Secondly, the research explored and identified the flood-related childhood illnesses. Lastly, the research identified strategies households applied in order to protect their children from flood-related illnesses. The study was conducted through the administration of 45 questionnaires, 2 focus group interviews and personal observation. The study adopted both qualitative and quantitative methodologies in order to understand the perceptions of what flood-related illnesses were and what caused them. Results from the qualitative research were used to triangulate data from the quantitative research. The integration of both methodologies provided additional solutions to understanding the impacts of floods on child health in Barcelona. Ethics approval was granted by Ethics Committee of the Engineering and the Built Environment Faculty at the University of Cape Town. The research findings suggest that flood-related illnesses in Barcelona were a result of different and interlinking factors. The various factors included poor access to basic services, general poor urban health, and location of the settlement and household hygienic factors. In addition, children were more exposed to risks inside dwellings as compared to risks outside dwellings. Vector-borne illnesses were the least recorded cases. In order to mitigate child illnesses resulting from flooding the households applied both proactive and reactive strategies such as buying of medication before and during flooding, bathing their children after they finish playing, and sending children to relatives during the flooding period and cleaning dwellings after flooding. Research findings highlighted that there is a significant association between child health and flooding in Barcelona. The types of illnesses that were reported were mainly water-related illnesses, which included respiratory illnesses, gastrointestinal illnesses, skin and ear infections and vector-borne illnesses.
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    Housing for the poor: A case study of the Johannesburg inner city
    (2018) Robb, Carla; Hyman, Katherine
    This research focuses on the Johannesburg inner city, which is located in the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, Gauteng Province, South Africa. Johannesburg inner city has had a tumultuous history, from being the most economically powerful urban centres in Sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1900s, to falling into a state of disrepair from the 1980s, the inner city is now home to more than 300 000 households. The public sector and private sector both play a critical role in the delivery of affordable accommodation opportunities in the Johannesburg inner city, but the lack of formal supply of housing for the urban poor, specifically the “poorest of the poor” is stark. It is with this knowledge that this dissertation explores the commitment, from both public and private sector, to delivering accommodation options for the poorest of the poor in the inner city. The Johannesburg inner city has seen increased involvement from the private sector in the delivery of housing since 1994. Significantly, housing delivered by the private sector is accessible to the households in the income group referred to as the gap market. The lowest income group is left to resort to the informal sector to seek shelter. The lack of adequate housing supply for this group has given rise to illegal occupation of buildings, often run by slumlords with appalling living conditions. The public sector has many plans and strategies in place with identified mechanisms to assist in increasing the delivery of accommodation for this income group. However, there is still a massive gap in the delivery. Many plans and strategies have been put in place with the intention of addressing the housing demand in the inner city. Although many of these policies and strategies, created by the government, were intended to increase the delivery of affordable rental accommodation, what is obvious is the lack of delivery. This dissertation, therefore, intends to determine why there has been no formal provision made for the lowest income group in the Johannesburg inner city and, if there are plans or mechanisms in place to rectify this, why they have not come to fruition. The City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality has been criticised for not responding to the emergency accommodation cases seriously and creating realistic strategies to deal with the poorest income group or destitute. There is a lack of a programmatic approach to meet the housing demand, which is evident from the number of bad buildings in the Johannesburg inner city. Without a realistic strategy to assist this income bracket, a domino effect of failure seems to plague housing delivery in the inner city. A lack of opportunities for this income group gives rise to bad buildings, which in turn affects the livelihood of the people in the inner city, across all sectors.
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    Responding to Climate Change in Small and Intermediate Cities: Comparative Policy Perspectives from India and South Africa
    (2021-02-23) Simon, David; Vora, Yutika; Sharma, Tarun; Smit, Warren
    Remarkably little is known about how small and intermediate urban centres tackle their various sustainability challenges, particularly climate and broader environmental change. Accordingly, we address this in the very different contexts of India and South Africa. We conceptualise the small and intermediate towns, and the policy challenges and priorities for mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate/environmental change that can enable transformative adaptations to changing conditions. Central issues are the divisions of powers, responsibilities and the fiscal capacity and independence of local authorities within the respective countries’ multi-level policy and governance frameworks. In India, various functions have been constitutionally devolved to city governments to enable them to govern themselves, while more strategic ones lie at state level. In South Africa, the divisions of power and responsibility vary by city size category. We compare the relevant city government functions in each country and how they can enable/disable policy responses to climate change. The relationship between their sustainable development strategies, plans, budgets, and actions are assessed and illustrated with particular reference to Thiruvananthapuram, Shimla and Bhubaneswar in India and Drakenstein, George and Stellenbosch in South Africa.
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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.