WIReDSpace

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Communities in WIReDSpace

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 19

Recent Submissions

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Envisioning Empowerment: Crafting a Realm of Learning for Visually Impaired Scholars in Mondeor
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Van Heerden , Stefan
To address the critical need for more inclusive schools in South Africa, this project focussed on designing a school for visually impaired learner in Mondeor, Johannesburg. Currently, only three of these schools exist in Gauteng, which limits the opportunity for children with visual impairment to access quality inclusive education. My proposal aimed to change this, by making education accessible to the visually impaired . According to the White Paper 6 model, children between the ages of 7 and 15 need to be in school. This project placed the building where it would likely have maximum impact in terms of assisting the communities in the chosen area. The location of the school should not dictate who can attend. Anyone who is able to enroll will be able to do so, with preference being given to the visually impaired. The research and the building design aimed to create an inclusive building and to question what an architectural design for the visually impaired would entail. The research delved into experimentation and architectural precedents. The experimentation involved a sensory analysis, during which I spent time blindfolded to get a better sense of what it is like to be blind. The outcomes of these experiments informed the design of the school. The project examined various design precedents for these types of buildings and used the human body as an important design concept. I envisioned the classrooms as the centre points or nodes of the design, similar to the core of a human body, branching out, like limbs, into the different services that the building will offer. The building design aims to engage with the community by having a percentage of its site allocated to public space. This will hopefully ensure that the public can be involved in the inner workings of the school, creating a sense of place and belonging. The building presents opportunities for prototyping a circular economy, thereby enriching the residential context. These combined concepts and ideas strengthen the connections between the research and design development for a building of this nature. I can briefly conclude that the integrated research methods did assist in creating a design proposal that places itself into the context.
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Crafting Communities: Empowering Bezuidenhout Valley Through Construction Workshops: A Blueprint for Self-Sufficiency and Collaboration
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Maxwell , Ryan
South Africa faces significant challenges in areas such as housing, job security, and skill development and addressing these issues requires a holistic approach. Providing training in construction skills enables the people to build necessary infrastructure like housing, training centers, and social spaces. In addition to this, many communities have spaces that are underutilized or neglected due to various factors such as limited accessibility, safety concerns (demolished buildings, dumping sites, etc), or distance from central areas. Despite these drawbacks, people often find ways to occupy these spaces. Why do they choose to use these areas? The utilization of such spaces typically stems from a lack of alternative options for housing, commerce, or social activities. In the blue-collar northeastern areas of Johannesburg such as Bezuidenhout valley, residents face a multitude of challenges that undermine the quality of life and urban fabric. The Jukskei River, a vital waterway, suffers from pollution, affecting both the environment and public health. Additionally, the community suffers from high unemployment rates and a significant skills shortage. Housing is insufficient, and many existing structures are in a state of disrepair, further compounding social and economic issues. The theories that have influenced my thinking and response are resilience, densification, sustainability, Renewable materials, the Garden city, and hands on teaching. These theories help to understand and view urban areas as dynamic systems and productive environments. “Productivity” in this context includes economic, social, cultural, and environmental dimensions. By addressing these factors, we create a foundation for identifying, planning, and designing appropriate interventions through research and design. The central research theme focuses on the connection between architecture and resilient urban spaces Architecture offers a unique opportunity to address these interconnected issues by empowering the community through construction skills training. By establishing a construction and learning center, residents can gain practical skills while contributing to the development of essential infrastructure, such as housing, training centers, craft spaces for entrepreneurs and social spaces. This approach not only addresses immediate needs but also fosters long-term socio-economic growth
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Examining the role of Braamfontein’s bike lanes: A potential infrastructural asset for waste reclaimers
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Makena, Pheladi Pearl; Charlton, Sarah
The research sought to address the mobility challenges that street reclaimers encountered and the misuse of bike lanes. Street reclaimers depend on their mobility to earn a sustainable income. Their mobility allows them to work from the early hours of the day, salvaging recyclables to sell to the buy-back centres in the late afternoons. The roads used by reclaimers are a territory for vehicles where street reclaimers are often stigmatised and not viewed as the rightful users of this infrastructure. On the other hand, to encourage cycling, the City of Johannesburg implemented bike lanes that have since been used by vehicles for parking and to bypass traffic, and by informal traders as a trading spots. Bike lanes are a potential infrastructural asset for street reclaimers as they can ease their mobility challenges and include them on the road space. With the concepts of Infrastructure Re-adaptation, Informal Economies and Non- Motorised Transport (NMT), the research discovered that street reclaimers had found ways to move around the roads and that transportation was at the bottom of their hierarchy of necessities. Furthermore, the city implemented bike lanes with reclaimers in mind; however, this form of the cycle lane infrastructure cannot be appropriated by physically modifying the material construction. Finally, the study concluded that with a bottom-up approach including reclaimers and other stakeholders, the city could consider converting bike lanes to NMT lanes, and the routes used by reclaimers can frame targeted interventions for future lanes.
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Nutrient and Salinity Loading Based On The Temporal And Spatial Water Quality Data In The Upper Crocodile River Basin
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024-03) Mistry, Nikhil Jayant; Ali, K. Adam; Abiye, Tamiru
The Upper Crocodile River Basin has undergone a drastic change through anthropogenic factors such as rapid urban growth, industrial activities, agriculture and mining in the past thirty-eight years. This has led to an increase in nutrient and salinity loads with decreasing water quality. The Upper Crocodile River Basin wastewater treatment works struggle to maintain loading rates, causing partially treated wastewater to enter the river systems that increased the salinity loads. Water chemistry and discharge data from the DWS were collected, cleaned and processed; data were summated across the necessary river channels in which they are located to determine the nutrient and salinity loads in all rivers in the Upper Crocodile River Basin. The results indicated that the Hennops, Jukskei and Crocodile Rivers are responsible for the largest nutrient and salinity loading rates. Changes in land use activities and climate over the past thirty-eight years, since 1980, have drastically impacted the rate at which nutrient and salinity loads enter into the UCRB. During the early 1980s to 1990s a significant drop was observed in nutrient and salinity loading rates, spiking in the late 1990s and early 2000s, influenced by changes in water management and climatic events like the La Niña and the El Niño phenomena. The inter-basin transfer in the early 2000s and subsequent two decades have led to an overall rise in nutrient and salinity loading rates, posing serious water quality and health risks to people in the UCRB area. Mining activities, poor landfill management and leaking tailing storage facilities have resulted in increased sulphate loading rates into the UCRB. Nitrogen loading has risen due to uncontrolled waste disposal from informal settlements, industrial activities and sewage spills in the Johannesburg region. Phosphorus loading rates have risen due to agricultural fertiliser runoff, with the Jukskei River being the largest contributor to these loads in the Upper Crocodile River Basin. The loads entering the Hartbeespoort dam during summer and winter seasons in the 2016-2018 period for sulphate is 6819.24 kg/hr, 4873.62kg/hr; for nitrogen 4179.24 kg/hr, 4021.55 kg/hr and for phosphorus 40.08 kg/hr, 34.724 kg/hr, respectively. Salinity loads entering the Hartbeespoort dam during summer and winter are 42952.87 kg/hr and 27548.39 kg/hr, respectively. According to the findings, water resource management must act quickly to improve the overall quality of the water; in the upcoming ten years, as loading rates are expected to rise exponentially as a result of increased demand and stressed water use, which will lead to poor water quality. This will pose serious health and economic risks to the people of the Upper Crocodile River Basin and the populace of South Africa.
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Envisioning the Future of Fashion: The Creation And Application Of Diverse Body Pose Datasets for Real-World Virtual Try-On
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024-08) Molefe, Molefe Reabetsoe-Phenyo; Klein, Richard
Fashion presents an opportunity for research methods to unite machine learning concepts with e-commerce to meet the growing demands of consumers. A recent development in intelligent fashion research envisions how individuals might appear in different clothes based on their selection, a process known as “virtual try-on”. Our research introduces a novel dataset that ensures multi-view consistency, facilitating the effective warping and synthesis of clothing onto individuals from any given perspective or pose. This addresses a significant shortfall in existing datasets, which struggle to recognise various views, thus limiting the versatility of virtual try-on. By fine-tuning state-of-the-art architectures on our dataset, we expand the utility of virtual try-on, making them more adaptable and robust across a diverse range of scenarios. A noteworthy additional advantage of our dataset is its capacity to facilitate 3D scene reconstruction. This capability arises from utilising a sparse collection of images captured from multiple angles, which, while primarily aimed at enriching 2D virtual try-on, inadvertently supports the simulation of 3D environments. This enhancement not only broadens the practical applications of virtual try-on in the real-world but also advances the field by demonstrating a novel application of deep learning within the fashion industry, enabling more realistic and comprehensive virtual try-on experiences. Therefore, our work heralds a novel dataset and approach for virtually synthesising clothing in an accessible way for real-world scenarios.