3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Relieving: reinterpreting the mall, the park and the public space in Sandton(2019) Batev, Minki MagdalenaStress is a reality of life. It can be good and bad and it can be constructive and the destructive. The destructive nature of stress can have a negative impact on a persons physical and mental health. Unfortunately, some stress is unavoidable, therefore a need to manage and alleviate stress is important. There is a general relationship between the built environment and stress. Looking at Sandton, the corporate centre of Johannesburg, it is understood why people experience professional, work pressure. The physical conditions of Sandton potentially further contribute to making Sandton a stressful environment. Sandton City, the mall situated in between Sandton’s corporate buildings, is in prime location with a under-utilised, empty flat roof. Herein lies an opportunity for a spatial intervention where people are able to alleviate constant streams of stress and in addition to improve the physical environment of Sandton to be more restorative and foster well-being in oder to enhance people’s ability to function effectively. This project is proposing that the roof of Sandton City is transformed into a public park. This responds to the need for more natural landscaping and to the need for public space in Sandton. The park will integrate into the mall at the main ‘social’ cores (the Checkers court, the Food court and Woolworths court). Most importantly, the park’s programming will address the issue of stress in the corporate environment by providing a variety of spaces and places for people to relax. This includes a exercise zone, a food zone and an urban escape zone which has a spa and short-stay rentable rooms.Item Exchange : a mixed metals market for 21st century mining(2014-04-03) Du Plessis, JacquesSociety is moving through the Information Age1, a period summarised by advancing information technologies, a world economy, and a global culture, where an ephemeral network has expanded to stir and captivate our everyday lives. While the seemingly unimaginable nature and spatial qualities associated with this digital age continue to captivate our imaginations, one cannot ignore that electronic space has grounding in physical place; a consequence that sees minerals, energy, technology, and people coming together in real spaces to construct the backbone upon which today’s global information networks are built. In this instantaneous era, where spatial tensions are characteristic of widespread change, one need not stretch one’s imagination to see that people and cities are increasingly pushed to find new ways to retain their grasp on and compete within the circuits of globalising space. The shifting nature of urban geographies everywhere materialise not only from the capacity of networks to disperse but also integrate increasingly complex components of productivity throughout specific regions of the world, while hollowing out spaces of marginality in others. Those cities located within developing contexts, which live so precariously along a cusp, become frontiers for unimagined resourcefulness and experimentation, where people as infrastructure assemble with remarkable reach and efficiency to oscillate between the universal and particular (Simone, 1998:173-187). These trajectories shift our perception from city to borderland, where the urban imaginary converges on themes of exclusion and incorporation, marginality and experimentation. Our incessant lifestyles and fixations with technology, consumption, and obsolesce have reproduced volatile circumstances, where mountains of discarded electronic waste are dumped near marginal communities. These wastelands are far removed from the promises once held by this machinery – instead offering opportunities only to those willing to salvage precious metals in smouldering pits. By providing an interface that operates to alleviate the collision between these phenomena; the Open Public Trade Forum, a hybrid market place where a liberalised trade in metal weaves in and out between actual and virtual space, informal and formal activities, local and global networks, could be the first to explore the intersection between these traditionally exclusive sectors. Through rethinking existing economic activities and socio-spatial environments the market is to become a lithe public realm – an arena for altering perceptions – where established notions of trade fuse with progressive concepts of exchange and production in an exploration of 1 Information Age: is a period characterised by widespread electronic access to information through the use of computer technology (Encarta English Dictionary). 3 | P a g e programmatic relations and typological inventions. This is a dynamic space to be used as much for commerce and industry as social collectives, where a myriad of citizens are brought together under the auspices of exchange: to trade in mixed metals, to visualise, debate, and shift their dreams of urban futures, to experience chance encounters and excite unique social interactions. And in so doing distinguish a new public architecture – a pioneering metal market embedded between Johannesburg’s informal, informational and industrial landscapes.Item Digi-mart: an interactive "SUPER"market that enhances the social and technological condition in Ivory Park(2011-10-12) Mahon, TennilleComputer technology has advanced to the point where it has invaded our lives and become embedded in our environment. The problem with this is that not everyone has it, can use it, understands it or finds value in it. This requires an innovative solution that couples technology use in a communal and public space that provides both free access to technology and technology that is meaningful. Interactive architecture suggest new modes of interacting and interfacing between users and their environments offering the potential for richer and more intuitive dialogues between users, each other and our wider environments. Harnessed in a sustainable platform like a supermarket, it can become a manageable grassroots solution that serves the civic, cultural and social needs of a community. If developed in line with the goals of facilitating public information exchange and discourse in the built environment the application of interactive environments to its context seems well suited to contribute towards encouraging active user participation, social interaction and personal empowerment.