Browsing by Subject "Urban Studies"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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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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    Renaissance and revenants in an emerging global city: discourses of heritage and urban design in Cape Town's District One and District Six, 2002-2014
    (2017) Ernsten, Christian; Shepherd, Nick
    On 10 January 2014, the New York Times placed Cape Town at the top of its list of the "52 places to go in 2014". The hopeful rhetoric of the city as ultimate holiday destination, African creative metropolis, prime global-events location and city of freedom indicates powerful cultural discourses at work. Looking at how Cape Town is simultaneously reinvented and haunted, this thesis poses a set of questions regarding the discourses associated with the reinvention of the city, on the one hand, and the city's unresolved pasts, on the other. Situated at the convergence of two fields, Urban Studies and Heritage Studies, it sets out to investigate the workings of heritage and urban-design discourses in the city of Cape Town over the period of 2002 to 2014. It describes the unfolding of these discourses, and discusses the organisational process of both the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the 2014 World Design Capital in relation to the exhumation of human remains at District One and the restitution of land at District Six. Using as its methodology a combination of embedded ethnographic research, qualitative indepth interviews, desktop and archival research, and a form of embodied research, the thesis points to a historical hinge upon which these discourses shift. Through discourse analysis, it examines what this discursive shift entails, and how it takes place. It points to "moments of poignancy" in the construction of Cape Town's recent urban transformation. As such, this study offers a series of insights into the links between colonial modernity, on the one hand, and the origins of contemporary heritage and urban-design discourses in Cape Town, on the other. It examines the function of official discourse concerning the design of the city, as well as the sudden eruptions of public dissent that disturb this official discourse. The central argument of this thesis is that, through an in-depth understanding of the shifts, transformations and internal workings of the discourses of heritage and urban design, a critique can be made of the way contemporary Cape Town has been repositioned in relation to the city's past, present and future.
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    Suffering for water: infrastructure, household access and its fluid negotiations in peri-urban Tamale, Ghana
    (2020) Ngben, Joseph Mborijah; Oldfield, Sophie; Tucker, Andrew
    Analysis of access to water in the global South tends to disproportionately focus on the presence of water infrastructure such as the piped network to estimate the proportion of population that have access to water. While interest in access to water has advanced considerably, less research has focused on practices, strategies and experiences of everyday water access. This study engages with this issue in two neighborhoods, Kpanvo and Katariga, in Tamale, Ghana, exploring the ways in which residents negotiate to access water services in practice. Through participant observations and in-depth interviews, the study sets out to address three specific objectives, namely to understand how households experience and describe water access; to explore the various strategies and infrastructures households mobilise to gain and maintain access to water; and to examine the factors that mediate households’ water access. Water infrastructure in the study neighbourhoods includes pipes, but critically also other sources of water (dams, boreholes and wells) and storage infrastructure (underground reservoirs, poly tanks, plastic drums, metal drums, earthen ware pots, aluminium pots and jerry cans) where residents store water for use during periods of interruptions of supplies. Also given that water is not always readily available in the private homes of residents, vehicles such as tanker trucks, bicycles, motorbikes and motorised tricycles are used to haul water from various sources, making them part of water infrastructure that make water flow in and to the neighbourhoods. Similarly, humans themselves, particularly women and girls, are a part of the infrastructure that make water flow as they carry water from both improved and unimproved sources to meet households water needs. Findings from the study demonstrate that continuous access to water, even if a household is directly connected to a piped water system, is impossible due to practices of water rationing, contrary to a normative assumption of universal and reliable water service provisioning associated with networked water supply. Household access to water is constructed through multiple strategies and infrastructures, mediated as much by access to financial resources as by networks of social relationships. Affluent households are able to acquire household connections, and some, a priori rejected connections to the pipe network due to erratic supply, in favour of the more expensive options of installation of mechanised boreholes and buying water from tanker operators. In contrast, poor households leveraged networks of social relationships to enter into tap sharing arrangements with neighbours on agreed conditions of payment of monthly service bills or gifts of water from owners of private water sources. Building on Anand (2011) and Peloso and Morinville (2014) this thesis therefore concludes that the way in which access to water needs to be understood is not simply in terms of access to pipes - as critical as they are - but also in terms of the strategies and negotiations that structure and are embedded in practices through which access to water is gained, maintained and potentially controlled at the household and neighbourhood level. Analysing access to water in this way makes visible the various ways that humans shape water infrastructure and water access.
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    Urban regeneration through transit-oriented development: an initial perspective from the global South
    (2015) Vandewater, Samuel; Winkler, Tanja
    As cities age and change, certain areas begin to physically decay and suffer from the flight of both its residents, as well as socioeconomic activities. The means by which these areas are regenerated remains an issue for many cities, who are unable to reconnect these places with opportunities needed to thrive. In response to this challenge, transit-oriented developments have become a more recent, sustainable form of urban growth that allow people to navigate a city's socioeconomic activities and opportunities through well-established modes of transportation. This has the potential to create cities in which people are able to have a 'live, work, play' lifestyle, supported by various modes of public transportation that also connects them to the broader urban context. The case study method is used to determine the viability of utilising transit-oriented developments as a path for enabling urban regeneration and to examine a space in need of regeneration that is also well-connected to various modes of urban transportation. Bellville Central provides an example of attempts to address urban decay through various efforts of regeneration, with the insights of the users of the space became invaluable resources for the study. The users found that safety, walkability, and transportation were of the utmost importance and should be improved to help regenerate the area, while other data suggested a need for more diverse socioeconomic activities. The results of the study reveal many overlapping principles such as notions of liveability, that, while aimed at different goals, use methods that are often complementary or even identical to each other, thus regenerative interventions should include additional theories (like transit-oriented development) and broader, inclusive impacts.
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    When the Power is Out: Strategizing for Electricity Disruptions in Lilongwe
    (2021) Jana, Wilfred; Oldfield, Sophie
    Electricity disruptions are a common feature of cities of the global south. However, not much is known of how households cope, and strategize around these electricity disruptions. In this thesis, I focus on middle-class households in Lilongwe, who are connected to the formal electricity grid but experience frequent power cuts. I examine this space of disrupted electricity, paying attention to household's experiences. I explore the varied ways in which households cope with and navigate around disruptions, by piecing together an array of technologies and infrastructures. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observation, I argue that households build assemblages of infrastructures, bringing into their energy sources a mix of older technologies, as well as new ones, to ensure an uninterrupted flow of energy even during an electricity disruption. Households find alternative ways to link to power, by reorganising themselves, their energy choices and food choices. In this piecing together, households themselves constitute a critical infrastructure that makes the alternative technologies work. It takes their agency, knowledge, and creativity to piece the multiple technologies together, bridge them, and make them work. In short, I demonstrate that in the event of a power disruption, households do not sit back and wait passively for electricity to come back on. They plan and strategize, making do using any resources within their capacities. A form of infrastructural citizenship, making do around electricity disruptions has the potential to reconfigure citizenship.
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    Working for Small Change: Investigating the Livelihoods of Ride-hailing Drivers in Cape Town, South Africa
    (2021) Stein, Malte; Selmeczi, Anna
    Since its introduction in 2009, ride-hailing has been at the centre of many critical discussions concerning the disruption of the (public) transportation sector, labour issues and tax matters. Missing voices in this discourse have notably been the employees of ride-hailing companies, specifically in the Global South. Setting out to inquire about the living and working conditions of ride-hailing drivers, this study employed a qualitative research framework and ethnographic methods in a case study of Uber drivers in Cape Town, South Africa. Semi-structured and in depth interviews were used as leading method to find out more about the drivers' hopes, troubles, aspirations and coping mechanisms. Particularly in the Global South, the growing informalisation and commodification of labour pose a threat to workers. Drivers in need of income are subject to unstable short-term employment that is low pay, does not offer social security, exhibits highly uneven employment relationships, includes large financial risks and predominantly serves customer and corporate interests. Yet, countering fatalistic narratives that frame drivers as helpless and exposed, this thesis offers accounts of creative rule-bending, mitigation strategies and community organisation used to mitigate precarity. I argue that ride hailing work is located at least partially in a grey zone as the everyday struggle for opportunity forces workers to search for alternative spaces on the fringes between the formal and informal and the legal and illegal. In a comparable manner, ride-hailing companies use legal grey zones and loopholes to advance their business and become the benefactors of the precarious hustle of thousands of mostly migrant drivers in South Africa. This study adds in-depth and original ethnographic research and critical theorisation to the literature on ride-hailing and the living and working conditions of marginalised workers. It illustrates the urgent need to further inquire about the proliferating commodification and informalisation that ride-hailing and the gig economy entails 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.