Browsing by Subject "Informal settlements"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    Analysis of nature-based treatment of surface water runoff from an informal settlement to irrigate vegetables
    (2025) Lubobo, Lwandile; Winter, Kevin
    An increasingly common feature among cities in the Global South (including South Africa) is informal urban settlements (IS). This study was conducted to analyse and make a comparative analysis of the physicochemistry of the soil, and nutrient concentration in crops following irrigation with biofiltration-treated surface runoff from IS. Municipal Treated Water (MTW) was used alongside Biofiltration-treated Water (BTW) to irrigate crops for nine months. Three soil treatments were prepared along each irrigation system mirroring each other: 1) control soil, 2) duckweed-treated soil, and 3) biochar-treated soil. Bulbous (belowground) and leafy (aboveground) crops were selected for the experiment. Following each successive harvest during the experimental period, soil samples from a depth of 10 cm were collected and analysed for Soil Organic Carbon (SOC), Sodium (Na+), Cations herein referred to as Exchange Capacity (CEC), Zinc (Zn+), and Iron (Fe+). In addition, the concentration of macro-and micronutrients (N, P, Ca, Mg, Na, Mn, Fe, and Zn) levels of the resulting produce were collected of each successive harvest and analysed at the end of the experiment. Compared with the concentration found in MTW-irrigated soil, the results from the experiment revealed that the concentration of Na +, Ca2 +, Zn+, and CEC was relatively high. Moreover, the results revealed that the concentrations of Zn and Na as measured by range in lettuce, spinach, and beetroot were high. These values were within the World Health Organization [WHO] guidelines and laboratory norms for the concentration of nutrients in vegetables for human consumption. However, the concentration of Na in spinach irrigated using BTW was higher than the laboratory norms and the WHO guidelines. Long-term monitoring and evaluation of soil physicochemistry and soil nutrient changes from BTW irrigation are required.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    Enhancing livelihood and community diversity through wetland- approach to living with the wetland
    (2025) Malapile, Malose; Ewing, Kathryn; Crooijmans-Lemmer, Hedwig
    Numerous scholars studying urban informal settlements unanimously acknowledge the interconnected challenges these settlements face, encompassing health issues, hazardous natural surroundings, accidental human-induced fires, deficient public health infrastructure, limited social and shared spaces, and high crime rates, among other concerns. Despite multiple research and policy initiatives, there remains a limited understanding of informal settlements, often located in inadequate environments without the same services as wealthier urban areas. This enduring disparity highlights the stark contrast in living conditions between urban poor and rich communities. Masiphumelele, as one such informal settlement, encounters inadequate service delivery, exposing its residents to health and safety threats. This research project responds to these issues by delving into the quality of life in Masiphumelele. The primary goal is to explore the key factors influencing the community's well-being and to comprehend the intricate obstacles hindering spatial improvement. The research aims to investigate the spatial, social, and cultural dimensions of informal settlements, seeking to unravel the underlying causes and challenges faced by the community. Employing methods such as interviews with open-ended questions, guided walkabouts, analysis of archived newspapers, and engagement with both the community and the NGO, the research seeks a comprehensive understanding of the issues shaping the quality of life in environments that are unsafe and hazardous.The research culminates in several spatial design suggestions and proposals, offering potential solutions to enhance the quality of life in Masiphumelele
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    The dynamic interaction of land use and transport in a highly fragmented city: the case of Cape Town, South Africa
    (2019) Moyo, Hazvinei Tsitsi Tamuka; Zuidgeest, Marcus
    The need for more inclusive and integrated cities has resulted in a paradigm shift in the South African transport and land use policy environment where transport and land use planning are viewed as a continuum as opposed to isolated planning aspects. Issues such as residential segregation, social exclusion, spatial inefficiencies, inequality, residential informality, marginalisation of the low-income cohort continue to form part of the current planning discourse. While policy acknowledges the need to redress these issues, the urban spatial patterns in South African cities continue to trace the historical planning trajectory. Recently, congestion has become an issue in some of South Africa’s cities with Johannesburg and Cape Town appearing in the list of the top hundred most congested cities in the world. It is thus essential to understand how South African cities can address urban accessibility and mobility issues along with redressing apartheid spatial planning to attain sustainable cities that allow for inclusivity of all population groups. Like most South African cities, Cape Town is a relic of apartheid planning where the urban spatial patterns reinforce social exclusion among other issues. Urban and transport planning in Cape Town focuses on addressing issues of spatial inefficiencies, social exclusion, congestion due to rapid motorisation and the proliferation of informal settlements. It is against this backdrop that the central concern of this research is to understand urban dynamics linked to the spatiotemporal interaction of transport and land use in Cape Town to aid in the formulation of proactive urban policies. There is compelling evidence in the literature that dynamic integrated land use transport models provide an avenue through which the urban change process can be understood to aid in the development of adaptive land use and transport strategies. METRONAMICA, a dynamic land use transport model, is applied in this research to simulate and understand land use and transport change in Cape Town. A sequential stage-wise procedure was implemented to calibrate the model for the period 1995- 2005 and an independent validation was carried out from 2005 to 2010 to evaluate the model. Kappa statistic and its associated variants were applied to assess the ability of the land use model block to reproduce land use patterns while the EMME model and previous transport studies for Cape Town were used to evaluate the transport model. The results from the calibration and validation exercise show that the model can reproduce historical land use and transport patterns. The integration of the transport and land use model through accessibility improved the Kappa Simulation and Fuzzy Kappa Simulation. This showed that the model explained urban change better when land use and transport interacted compared to an independent land use model. This shows that accessibility can be employed in the Cape Town context to enhance the understanding of the urban change process. In addition to the Kappa statistics, the fractal dimension which measures the landscape complexity was used to assess the predictive accuracy of the model. The model performance revealed that the landscape patterns simulated by the model resemble observed land use patterns signifying a good calibration of the model. The calibrated land use transport model for the Cape Town Metropolitan region (CTMRLUT) was applied for policy scenarios. Three scenarios were simulated, specifically the business as usual (BAU), redressing social exclusion and the potential for in situ upgrading of informal settlements. The study found that intensive land use development along the Metro South East Integration Zone (MSEIZ) was linked to a reduction in commuting distances to economic activities which is in contrast to the BAU scenario. While these scenarios looked at the urban spatial patterns, the effect of land use patterns on congestion was also explored. The findings from the scenario simulations suggest that despite the reduction in distance to economic centres, the congestion condition in Cape Town will continue to deteriorate. Further, the findings indicate that interventions that only target land use developments are not sufficient to address congestion issues in Cape Town. Instead, to address the congestion problem in Cape Town, mixed land use and compact growth strategies need to be complemented with travel demand management strategies that target private car usage and intensive investment in transport infrastructure, especially rail, to facilitate the use of alternative modes. With regards to informal settlements, the study found that in situ upgrading could be a viable option to tackle some informal settlements. However, for proper inclusionary informal settlement policy, an approach that resonates with contextual realities would be more suitable to assess the viability of in situ upgrading based on the location of informal settlements relative to centres of economic activities. Additionally, the study revealed that instead of informal settlements locating as stand-alone settlements, some of them located adjacent to low-income housing which might be indicative of a growth in backyard shacks which is an existing housing trend in some lowincome suburbs in Cape Town. While this research has shown that integrating land use and transport in policy is potentially useful in solving urban issues, it has also revealed the value of urban modelling as a platform on which to assess the potential impacts of policies before their implementation. This is a strong case for the utilisation of decision support tools in land use and transport planning in contemporary South African cities.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Using Multi-criteria Evaluation and GIS for Flood Risk Analysis in Informal Settlements of Cape Town: The Case of Graveyard Pond
    (2013) Musungu, Kevin; Motala, Siddique; Smit, Julian
    Rural-urban migrations have contributed to the steady increase in the population of Cape Town. Many of the migrants have settled in informal settlements because they cannot afford to rent or buy decent housing. Many of these settlements are however located on marginal and often poorly drained land. Consequently, most of these settelements are prone to flooding after prolonged rainfall. Current flood risk management techniques implemented by the authorities of the Cape Town City Council (CTCC) are not designed to support informal settlements. In fact, owing to a lack of information about the levels of flood risk within the individual settlements, either the CTCC has often been uninvolved or has implemented inappropriate remedies within such settlements. This study sought to investigate a methodology that the CTCC could use to improve flood risk assessment. Using a case study of an informal settlement in Cape Town, this study proposed a methodology of integration of community-based information into a Geographic Information System that can be used by the CTCC for risk assessment. In addition, this research demonstrated the use of a participatory multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) for risk assessment. A questionnaire was used to collect community-based information. The shack outlines of the informal settlement were digitised using CTCC aerial imagery. The questionnaires were captured using spreadsheets and linked to the corresponding shacks in the GIS. Risk weights were subsequently calculated using pairwise comparisons for each household, based on their responses to the questionnaires. The risk weights were then mapped in the GIS to show the spatial disparities in risk.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    Using urban facilities management principles to promote sustainable water management in informal settlements in South Africa
    (2025) Ngobeni, Lulama; Michell, Kathleen; Carden Kirsty
    This research investigates the potential of Urban Facilities Management (UFM) in the promotion of sustainable water management practices in informal settlements in South Africa. The rationale for the study is that with the rapid increase in urban populations and the number of people living in informal settlements, there is an increased need for the adoption of sustainable water management. Guidance is required to implement Water Sensitive Design (WSD) approaches related to drainage and greywater management in informal settlements. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach. Key findings from the mixed-methods approach and UFM theoretical perspectives were used to develop a conceptual UFM-based framework for sustainable water management in informal settlements. The quantitative phase of the study made use of a Contingent Valuation based household survey to investigate Hout Bay residents' willingness to pay (WTP) for the provision of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) and greywater management infrastructure in the neighbouring informal settlement of Imizamo Yethu situated upstream of Hout Bay, Cape Town. Findings reveal that the WTP for once-off payments was R408, and R71 for once-off payments over 12 months. Cumulatively, the household WTP contributed an aggregate total value (TWTP) of R3 200 700 of potential revenue for the implementation of WSD infrastructure in Imizamo Yethu. The respondents' attitudes and perceptions towards water and sanitation service delivery, and their interactions with the Disa River estuary were ranked using their Relative Importance Index (RII). The ranking indicated that the provision and facilitation of safe access to water and sanitation to all citizens, protection of freshwater systems, improving solid waste removal and the rehabilitation and restoration of freshwater systems were ranked first, second, third and fourth respectively. Furthermore, a linear regression analysis was conducted to examine the correlation between WTP and various independent variables including gender, income, age, employment status, satisfaction with the provision and maintenance of effective stormwater drainage in informal settlements and the rating of the importance of the rehabilitation and restoration of freshwater systems. The findings from the regression analysis revealed that the most significant (p = 0.0209) influence on the Willingness to Pay is the safety aspects related to the estuary. This research adopted the qualitative approach of interviewing stakeholders with experience in or knowledge about stormwater management projects in informal settlements was adopted. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted. The qualitative data collected was analysed using the Reflexive Thematic Analysis approach (Reflexive TA). A total of five themes emerged from the Reflexive TA process. The results derived from the qualitative interviews and the subsequent themes that emerged, revealed the complexity of informal settlements, challenges associated with stormwater service delivery in informal settlements, key stakeholders in stormwater management projects, SuDS practices and processes, and the institutional knowledge and skill requirements for stormwater projects. The study contributes to knowledge of urban water service delivery and the implementation of WSD in informal settlements. Although UFM is acknowledged as having the potential to integrate people, places, processes and technology for the purpose of attaining sustainable urban environments, its applicability in the urban water management context has not been explored. The UFM-based framework developed from the study describes the focus areas that will assist with the implementation of WSD projects in informal settlements and gives insight into the factors that should be prioritised. The components of the framework include people (i.e., key stakeholders in projects), planning and design, products (the infrastructure and/or services), finances, maintenance and management, and processes that were identified as key components for the successful implementation of WSD projects. The study recommends that the framework be adopted in WSD projects, ensuring that the application thereof is context- specific to promote the overall development and liveability of informal settlements in South Africa.