Browsing by Subject "Southern Urbanism"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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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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    Cosmo City Greens: contested aspirations of ecologically sustainable lifestyles in mixed-income housing
    (2023) Funde, Sinazo; Selmeczi, Anna
    This thesis is concerned with the relationship between the residents of Cosmo City, a mixedincome housing development in Gauteng, and green spaces in the development. It argues that the legacy of apartheid spatial planning has led to the unequal distribution of green infrastructure across the development, and this has disenfranchised the low-income residents. Segregation was the core of maintaining the apartheid regime. South Africans were not only divided according to race, culture and economically, but they were also divided spatially and so was the provision, proximity, and distribution of services. This segregation primarily affected the Black population negatively, as they were the ones moved to the outskirts of urban centres with little to no access to tenure or basic services. Access to green spaces was also limited as the history of South Africa was immersed in the displacement of the indigenous people out of their homes that honed their relationships between culture and nature. High economic status and access to green spaces have a positive relationship especially in the housing space. But what happens in the case of mixed-income developments? Since the change from apartheid to democracy, South Africa has implemented many housing plans and policies to undo fragmentation caused by apartheid spatial planning. Many of these plans failed over the course of implementation but their revision continues. Mixed-income housing policies have gained momentum in urban planning, especially in southern cities. These policies potentially not only bridge racial and economic disparities but they also confront issues of fragmented environmentalism through housing developments. South Africa's first mixed-income housing development, Cosmo City in Johannesburg has been the blueprint for many other mixed-income developments in the country. Cosmo City was successful in fulfilling its objectives of bringing people from the different socioeconomic backgrounds into the same neighbourhood. However, its objectives of promoting environmental sustainability across the development have not been realized. This research uses the stories of a group and middle- and low-income residents of Cosmo City as a case study to investigate the potential of mixed-income housing in South Africa to address the legacies of green apartheid through the equitable distribution of green infrastructure in mixed-income housing spaces. By investigating residents' greening aspirations, this research explores the ways in which the equitable distribution of green infrastructure in such developments can contribute to more egalitarian approaches to sustainability and facilitate social inclusion and cohesion among the residents. Qualitative research methods and desktop research were used to achieve the objectives of the study. A case study was conducted, which included regular visits to Cosmo City and open-ended interviews conducted with residents and an environmental officer from the developing company. The findings show that inequalities in the distribution and quality of green infrastructure in Cosmo City have led to reinforcing negative stereotypes and supress the livelihoods of low-income residents. In response, some residents have adopted diverse ways of breaking with the past through self-taught greening practices, even in complex situations that have already been pre-established for them. The recommendation which is made by this thesis in order promote a more holistic idea of environmental sustainability in mixed-income housing, is that stakeholders must understand the socioenvironmental dynamics of low-income residents in their respective urban spaces to accommodate their ecological needs.
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    Electricity Supply in Khartoum: the planned, the delivered, the experienced
    (2021) Hassan, Basheir Hassan Razaz; Selmeczi, Anna
    As the first step in rethinking infrastructure configurations and their alternatives, this thesis aims at looking into the existing policy framework that governs electricity supply in Khartoum, its implementation and how it's experienced by Khartoum's residents. By zooming into one locality in Khartoum, the “Eastern Nile Locality”, the research has attempted to analyse the ways with which the limited electricity infrastructure is planned and allocated through its translation into policy frameworks in neighbouring areas falling under different zoning classification that correspond to their residents' income brackets. Review of the policy framework was conducted firstly, using a mix of desktop research and interviews with officials from the relevant institutions, investigating the key guidelines that govern electricity distribution across the various residential zones in terms of no/access to the grid, tariff regimes, contractual arrangements, alternative configurations and so on. The second part of the research was using ethnographic research methodologies to examine users' experience of electricity supply in its material and non-material dimensions. The studied cases revealed three main user categories; firstly, those grid-connected via the standard producers set by the Electricity Distribution Company. The second are those gridconnected via emerging models that could be classified as micro-financed co-production gridconnection. The third are those who remain off-grid and follow alternative routes. These varying regimes of service delivery are experienced by Khartoum residents on multiple levels, the most significant of which are firstly linked to users' experience of electricity as an unrivalled energy form that could be converted into a multiplicity of other forms, or its functional dimension as a modern technology that dis/enables greater space-time manipulation. Secondly, its more symbolic or representational aspects and their translation into social codes that define modern citizens and modernized states. Lastly, users' experience has pointed to the close link that the users make between electricity and the different relations that they form in their endeavors to access power services as in the different set of financial, legal, institutional and social relations and their implications in shaping subjectivities and articulating political positions.
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    Improving access to maternal health care beyond health care policy: pregnant women's experience of maternal public health care services in Cape Town, South Africa
    (2023) Rhoda, Bronwin; Sitas, Friderike; Oldfield Sophie
    Unequal access to maternal health care continues to be a concern in South Africa despite the efforts of government and health practitioners to make the system more inclusive and accessible to all women, especially for women who have been previously disadvantaged prior to and during Apartheid. Research in maternal health care has shifted and emphasized the delivery of quality care by medical staff to ensure that the goal of reducing maternal deaths is to improve maternal health care. Despite the global concern and interventions of the local government, many women still experience limited access to quality maternal healthcare services. Waiting for public health care services further highlights women's challenges. There is a need to understand further how waiting impacts the patients' experience and access to care. Acknowledging that gaps exist in the current literature focused on maternal health care, this study employs qualitative research methods to explore pregnant women's experience within the maternal public health care system in the Cape Town Metropole Region. Four specific objectives guided this aim: one, exploring the challenges pregnant women encounter when accessing state maternal facilities; two, exploring the bodily and physical experience of waiting on the delivery of public health care services; three, exploring the vulnerability in waiting through the lens of pregnant women; and four, exploring the relationship of government interventions through waiting. The findings of this research demonstrate that public maternal health care is accessible for most women based on the effectiveness of government policies and interventions. However, medical personnel experience constraints that restrict access to quality care. The challenges associated with waiting and medical personnel continue to impact the perception that women create of the delivery of public health care services. Addressing the challenge of waiting requires policies and interventions to align with expanding human resources to deliver the highest quality services.
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    “We are going to turn this place into a place!” Affective politics and everyday life in a pavement occupation in Cape Town
    (2022) Jackson, Jinty; Oldfield, Sophie
    This empirically- based research contributes to a vibrant debate on the role of occupations in city-making in the Global South. Much scholarly debate, however, fails to engage with the embodied nature of resistance to power, nor how cities are transformed through affective encounters of the everyday in what might look like contingent and precarious spaces. While most of the research on occupation in Cape Town have focused on land occupation in peripheral areas, a small, but growing area of research focuses on the occupation of existing buildings of the inner and central areas. However, scant attention has been given to the occupation of public space in the inner city to date. This case suggests some, emerging ways in which this Southern City is transforming through informal inhabitation of interstitial spaces. It does so at a time when the appearance of tents and makeshift shelters under bridges, along unfinished highways and pavements are initially associated, initially with the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the case study from which thesis departs is an unusual one: It began as an occupation of an abandoned building, but became a long-term land occupation outside it, after the group's eviction. Furthermore, it pre-dated the pandemic by several months and was part of an organised social movement insisting on the right to live close to the economic heart of the city and the social privileges this implies. Based on qualitative research over a five-month period, (including in-depth interviews, nonparticipant observation, and photography) this case study shows how the occupiers maintained a space that held not only lives but heterogeneous imaginaries, experimental practices. The micro-politics emergent from this site, forged through resisting efforts to regulate and displace them, is characterised, (inter-alia) by the insistence of being hom(ed) and homemaking – as opposed to “home-less”. In suggesting that an attentiveness to the everyday, affective politics of occupations moves beyond conventional readings of the occupations as a contestation between citizens and state, it will interest those engaged in social movements, occupations, and critical urban scholarship in the Global South.
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    Your Mess, My Life: The Junction between Land Use Planning and Street Vending in the Accra Mall Enclave
    (2022) Quarcoo, Joseph Dennis Nii Noi; Haysom, Gareth
    City managers and planners in the global South, particularly in African cities are confronted with an unprecedented urbanisation fraught with complexities such as urban sprawl, jobless growth, and informality. Urban planning practice in Ghana has retained colonial legacies that outlaw informality, be it economic, such as, street trading or housing, such as, slums. This has led to the marginalisation of the urban poor, who make up the majority of urban dwellers. Consequently, the masses invent ways to survive in the city and thus reshape the materiality of urban spaces. Most planners and state officials consider the activities of street vendors as a nuisance that mar the beauty of our cities. For this reason, 24% of the Ghanaian labour force who work on the streets are targets of misaligned and officious controls that include but are not limited to evictions. However, when evicted, most generally return to the streets. Building on existing work on urban planning in the global South and feeding into Southern urban theory, the research focuses explicitly on the Accra Mall Enclave (AME) as a microcosm of African cities. It explores how various players – planners/vendors/politicians – interact and navigate the dynamics of daily experiences. The research asks, how are planners navigating the tensions between planning regulations and the reality of street trading around the Accra Mall Enclave (AME)? What are street traders' logics, strategies, and experiences? How are vendors negotiating their interactions with state actors such as police, planners, city guards, toll collectors, etc.? The questions were answered through qualitative research methods; field observations, interviews, and a review of planning regulations and policies. The results of the study contribute to our understanding of how cities are being built in Africa, particularly Accra, Ghana. As a case study, the focus on the AME assisted in exposing the role of planners in this mode of urbanisation, while also uncovering meaning associated with space and place. Findings show that the state is reluctantly, if not unwillingly, coming to terms with vending within the AME. This could however change quickly if politics change, so still precarious. There are no viable alternatives to relocation, and vendors have established significant relationships and tactics that somehow entrench their position howbeit insecure. Besides all these, state officials, when acting in their individual capacity side with the vending profession because the state has not created jobs. Despite this personal understanding, the system, specifically state bureaucracy, generates obstacles, and as a result existing state structures frustrate the planning practice. This is complicated further by politics. Hence, planners themselves feel helpless, marginalised, and trapped. Further, spatial plans do not adequately provide access to the land needed by informal sector actors. The state resorts to occasional evictions when there is an adequate budget for this action. Imaginations of world class cityness dominate perceptions of the space. This is a candid depiction of the do-nothing scenario – the active contribution of the state in the creation of informality within the AME and the city of Accra, Ghana.