School of Architecture and Planning (ETDs)
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Item An evaluation of city improvement districts in promoting positive social- spatial structures and management processes: a case study of Hillbrow Ekhaya Improvement District, Johannesburg(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Tepkeny, Gloria; Klug, NeilThis study aims to assess the effectiveness of City Improvement Districts (CIDs) in fostering positive social-spatial structures and management processes within urban areas. Specifically, the study focuses on the Hillbrow eKhaya Improvement District in Johannesburg, South Africa, as a case study. The research utilizes a qualitative research design method approach, combining semi-structured questionnaires, in-depth interviews, observation, photography, reconnaissance visits, and qualitative data analysis assessments and transcriptions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the impact of city improvement districts on the local community and urban management. By analysing the Hillbrow eKhaya Improvement District’s initiatives, successes, challenges, and stakeholders' perceptions, the study seeks to contribute valuable insights into the role of city improvement districts in enhancing urban living conditions and social cohesion. Understanding the intricate relationship between physical urban spaces and social interactions is crucial for urban planners, policymakers, and researchers seeking to create vibrant, inclusive, and liveable cities. By evaluating the Hillbrow eKhaya Improvement District, this study intends to provide insights into the potential of improvement districts to promote positive social- spatial structures and effective management processes in urban areas. The findings of this research could inform urban planners, policymakers, and local communities about the benefits and challenges associated with improvement districts, contributing to more sustainable and liveable cities.Item Investigating Ways in Which the Profile and Identity of Women Affects their Capacity to Work Effectively in the Urban Management Field(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Mazamane, Zintathu SigcineItem The dynamics of place branding in Johannesburg: 1994 - 2019(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Mbinza, Zenzile; Sihlongonyane, Mfaniseni FanaThis PhD thesis lays the ground for understanding place branding processes from cities of the Global South. It critically explores place branding as an emerging mechanism for urban governance in Johannesburg. It is critical because place branding and its related processes have increasingly gained momentum in countries, regions and cities jostling for niche status in global economics. This thesis explores the different place brands that Johannesburg coined over time, focussing on the period between 1994 and 2019. It explored the city’s place brands under the five mayors that presided over Johannesburg, beginning with Dan Pretorius (1994 – 1995), Isaac Mogase (1995 – 1999), Amos Masondo (2000 – 2011), Parks Tau (2011 – 2016) and Herman Mashaba (2016 – 2019). The thesis employed a qualitative research methodology and case study design. Primary data Archival research and interviews were the primary data collection strategies. The ensuing discussion of place brands in Johannesburg reveals the dynamics and push factors that have contributed to the development of place brands under the time in question. Politics, economics, and activities related to globalisation emerged as leading drivers for the city of Johannesburg to develop its various place brands. The thesis found that Johannesburg followed a template similar to the cities of the Global North in its application of place branding. However, the thesis also found gaps in the city’s place branding processes. For example, there was limited engagement with the city residents when developing Johannesburg’s place brands. It pointed to a unilateral, top-down application of place branding in the city, which precluded it from using these processes as democracy-building tools. It necessitates the exploration of place branding from the perspective of city governments to begin encompassing issues of inclusivity and public participation. In this light, the thesis calls for a more strategic application of place branding in the Johannesburg.Item Understanding the Contribution of Informal Non-State Actors in the Governance of Cities of the Global South through Informal Institutions: The Case Study of Informal Car Guarding in Johannesburg, South Africa(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Monakedi, Tshepo Albia; Karam, AlyThe re-emergence of coproduction to explain service delivery initiatives by ordinary citizens has transcended different scholarship disciplines, including urban planning. The governance of cities of the global South is characterised by coproduction initiatives that are either unnoticed, overlooked or disregarded because they occur outside the formal institutions of the State. This thesis uses the case study of informal car guarding in Johannesburg, South Africa, to highlight the coproduction contribution of informal non- state actors in the governance of cities of the global South, thus arguing for urban theory and policy agenda that is informed by the realities of the global South. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by arguing for the scope of non- state actor coproduction in governance to include informal non-state actors. Moreover, the idea is part of the scholarship to understand informality as a site of critical analysis thus moving beyond seeing informality as a function of people experiencing poverty. Informality in cities of the global South must be broader than livelihood debates or housing needs for the needy. Studies must be comprehensive and acknowledge the contribution of informality to how the cities function. In addition to the original contribution, this study generated empirical data about informal car guarding, which still needs to be studied further. The data was generated using in- depth interviews, which were largely unstructured, and participant observation. In total, 75 respondents informed this thesis across four study sites in Johannesburg: Maboneng Precinct, Maponya Mall, Parktown Office Park and Noord central business district. The study sites are representative of the localities typically associated with informal car guards in cities of the global South. Twenty themes were generated to answer the research sub-questions. The findings of the thesis are wide-ranging, pointing to the contribution of informal non-state actors and associated challenges. Notably, the idea outlines several policy recommendations for urban planning and urges cities of the global South to understand the contribution of informal non-state actors considering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Eleven (11) Sustainable Cities and Communities, SDG One (1) No Poverty and SDG Two (2) iii Zero Hunger). SDG 11 is about access and inclusion for informal non-state actors, and SDGs 1 and 2 are critical for the livelihoods of those in the informal sectoItem “Artful Sustainability” Inquiry into Urban Waste and Public Space Practices: a Case Study of Riverside View Mega City, Johannesburg(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Mantshoane, Trevor; Charlton, SarahThe UN-Habitat (2021a, p. 29) has been spearheading efforts at ensuring that “placemaking institutionalizes the role of art and culture to achieve a lasting sense of place for [communities]” as per the SDG 11 agenda. Place-making foregrounds the central role of communities in ensuring quality and liveable public spaces often through arts-led interventions. To date, little research exists on how this global place-making agenda is faring at the neighbourhood level. Even less studied are the arts and cultural (ecosystem) services of public space and the impact of waste on people’s ability to benefit from these services. Against the global place-making agenda, this research artistically interrogates the eco-cultural dimensions of sustainability issues of waste and public spaces. It does this through a case study of Riverside View Mega City, Johannesburg (South Africa) This qualitative research study uses a case study strategy and draws on a range of practices broadly associated with the arts-based and practice- based methods. The study utilises a set of methodological tools like drawings, written and photo diaries to gain a window into the resident participants’ embodied experiences of waste and public space. In all, the research finds that waste malpractices have a disruptive impact on the residents’ ability to benefit from the eco-cultural services of public spaces in Riverside View Mega City. Consequently, public spaces are generally perceived and experienced negatively, although this is not uniform across all sections of the settlement. Moreover, efforts at institutionalising the arts and culture through place-making interventions remain ambiguous with little apparent relevance to the everyday sustainability issue of waste and public spaces.Item Place leadership for the governance of complex urban agglomerations(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Naicker, Thilgavathie; Harrison, PhilipCity-regions are complex agglomerations – spatially, economically, and politically. Understanding the dynamics and mechanisms that create the foundation for their development is an important undertaking in the face of rising globalisation, urbanisation, migration, and climate change. This research explores the concept of place leadership and its relevance for a complex space like the Gauteng City-Region (GCR). Place leadership is a concept that has been studied extensively in the global North and proposes the rise of leaders across local spaces. The city- region is a dynamic space of contested politics, coalition governments, diffuse power, differing agendas, fragmented, and silo planning and a deeply rooted socio-economic history that has left a lasting impact of inequality. Building a globally competitive city-region has been on the Gauteng Provincial Government’s agenda since the mid-2000s. The city-region argument in Gauteng, South Africa, still lingers, but party politics, differing agendas, the complexities of governance in the city-region, and frequent changes in leadership have prevented the vision from being achieved. The research question of this thesis is: How may the emerging concept of place leadership be applied in the complex, dynamic, and low-trust environment of the GCR? The thesis explores three thematics to analyse place leadership – temporality, crisis, and trans-scalarity. Gauteng, a city-region in South Africa, was examined as a case study. Water governance and the COVID-19 crisis were utilised as lenses to examine place leadership in the GCR. The exploratory mixed-methods study used semi-structured interviews with leaders from political, government administration, academia, and the water sector in Gauteng. A set of questions designed to explore a thematic on leadership and governance was also included in an established broad survey done in the city-region by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, the Quality-of-LifeVI 2020/21. The outcomes of this quantitative element were analysed by performing cross-tabulations across other thematics, including trust, corruption, participatory governance, and demographic data, to draw conclusions. The interviews were assessed and analysed across the themes of temporality, crisis, and trans-scalarity through the lenses of COVID-19 and water.Item Urban design coding: A Qualitative Study into the Relevance of Urban Design Coding in Informal Settlements: The Case of Mushroomville Settlement, Centurion, Pretoria, South Africa(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Donga-Matambo, Thandeka; Msingaphantsi, MawaboIn the year 1994, South Africa saw the end of Apartheid and the beginning of a new democratic era. The African National Congress (ANC) came into power and adopted neoliberal policies that favor capitalism, entrepreneurship, a free-market economy and the privatization of some economic sectors. This approach benefited and provided resources to a handful of people at the cost of many – the rich became richer, and the poor became poorer. Today, the commodification of all aspects of life has forced the “urban poor” who cannot afford the city lifestyle to turn to informal means in order to be closer to socio-economic opportunities. Informal settlements have become a major concern to capitalists because they affect investors’ perception of an area and reduce the value of surrounding properties. For a long time, the government’s response to informal settlements has either been to upgrade the settlements in their current location or to evict the residents and relocate them on the urban periphery, far from opportunities, services, facilities and institutions. Unfortunately, the government’s efforts have resulted in the further marginalization and segregation of the poor. This research aims to assess the extent to which urban design codes can be used to redevelop informal settlements into livable, good quality human settlements that are stitched into their existing urban fabric. The Mushroomville Informal Settlement in Centurion, Pretoria will be used as a case study. The research will use qualitative research methods to achieve the set aims. The primary sources of data will include site visits, photography, interviews with an attorney and the informal settlement residents as well as observations of the residents within their natural setting. The secondary data will be sourced through desktop research on site-related court cases, newspaper articles, policies, precedents and other relevant literature. It is expected that the research findings will show that urban design codes can be a useful instrument in redeveloping informal settlements into livable settlements with good quality housing.Item Exhumation of forgotten souls: Indigenous knowledge systems and sustainable design approach to Patlong Village Relocation and place of memory(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Matlanyane, Samson Matlokotsi; Matsipa, MphoSince the 1940s, rapidly increasing demand for green energy globally along with water supply demands in growing urban areas have led to de- velopment of hydropower dams and reservoirs at an unprecedented scale across the globe. Although hydro facilities are a relatively clean energy, they have environmental and social impact at country, basin, and regional levels. At country level, construction of these mega hydro-projects comes at a great cost to directly affected communities as they cause involuntary dis- placement, lose of rangelands and means of sustaining livelihood in gener- al. Furthermore, existing social links are broken leaving indigenous knowl- edge systems at risk of erasure. Lastly, affected communities are usually undercompensated, relocated, and hosted in other villages or moved to new designated settlements where resources are already limited thus causing a further strain on such resources. Not only do said hydro-projects have negative impacts in their respective countries, unsustainable management of river flows and unequal use of the Basin’s water lead to conflicts between riparian states. Environmen- tally, damming of valleys negatively affect fauna and flora upstream by flooding and inadequate water downstream. The Lesotho Highlands wa- ter, a 4 phased bilateral agreement between Republic of South Africa and Kingdom of Lesotho is no exception to these negative impacts. This research Report investigated how indigenous knowledge of material and social culture can inform new relocation stratergies which will help anchor a newly developed village. Through recording of oral and literary history, mapping, and conducting semi-structured interviews at Patlong, an understanding of the community’s current livelihood was established. Based on the author’s findings, an Architectural intervention in a form of a settlement anchored by an agricultural skills development centre, a seed bank and a commercial retail node was proposed to ensure a sustainable relocation strategy.Item Evaluating the state’s response to flooding disasters: the case of deelpan village emergency housing(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Rirhandzu, ChumaOver the past few years, South Africa has been struggling with managing flooding episodes. From a housing point of view, one then worries about the living conditions of the poor people who do not have the necessary resources to recover from the effects of the disaster, like the people of Deelpan Village in the North West province. To obtain data for this research, I analysed secondary data in relation to disaster management, housing, and planning accessed from government websites. I also conducted a total of 18 semi-structured interviews with the officials and community representatives who were actively involved in the Deelpan Village emergency housing project. This study revealed that the people of Deelpan preferred permanent housing structures over temporary solutions; hence, the Temporary Residential Units have not been provided. The study concluded that the Deelpan residents rejected TRUs for permanent structures due to fear of state failure. Three years after the 2021 flooding, no housing support has been provided by the state, indicating a lack of resources to handle disasters.Item Cultural memories and place-identity: a case study of Syrian refugees’ resettlement and acculturation strategies in Egypt(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Fahmy, Randa; Elleh, NnamdiFocusing on the Syrian refugees in Egypt—the aftermath of the 2011 public uprising, and the so called “Arab Spring”, or the “Jasmine Revolution”—this thesis explores the interaction of four main social factors influencing Syrian refugees place identity in the host country, Egypt. The first factor is the circumstances that caused the displacement of Syrians to become refugees in Egypt. The second factor is the refugees’ production of architectonic elements in the host country that are ideologically presumed to be ‘authentic’ architectural cultural heritage from their homeland. The presumed authentic architectural culture manifests as territorialisation in the host country for the protection of Syrian refugees’ identity. The third factor is the ‘globalisation’ forces that blend commercially inspired diverse trendy architectural styles into universal interchangeable consumables while ignoring contextual and cultural specificity. The fourth factor is the elucidation of what was realised when the three factors—the refugees, presumed authentic architectural culture, and globalisation forces—come together in the host country. Preliminary studies suggest that Syrian refugees maintain interactive tensions among the perceived original homeland architectural cultural identity, globalisation forces, and the necessity to modify the presumed original culture to adjust and settle in the host country. Examining the intersections of these four factors is the topic of this thesis. It is also observed that refugees tend to conceptualise authentic heritage ideology in placemaking to maintain an assumed cultural- identity in these globalising times of displacements and movements. Thus, in the effort to realise the assumed authentic architectural cultural heritage in the host country, Syrian refugees’ placemaking in Egypt defaults into another form of territorialisation that is inspired by architectural cultural memories from their homeland. Territorialisation disaggregates, personalises, and distorts the image of cultural identity of the places where refugees dream to be because it motivates them to be distinguished from their host culture while at the same time seeking to assimilate into the host country. This irony and the conflict of wanting to belong to the host country but, at the same time, wanting to be separate by retaining their Syrian identity, is the core of the study. Also, this thesis uses the architectural production of Syrian refugees in the host land, Egypt, in examining how architectural cultural memories are used for recreating personalised places of displaced groups. It is observed that the refugees present the personalized new creations in the host country as their “authentic” architectural culture purely on ideological bases.