Browsing by Subject "Urban Planning"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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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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    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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    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.