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A key feature of urbanisation in African and many other Global South cities is the prevalence and persistence of urban informal settlements. Despite planning attempts and claims to directly address and contain informal settlements, informality nonetheless continues to be the dominant form of shelter. However, there is insufficient understanding of how and why informality persists in the African urban context and why urban planning seems unable to engage with this aspect of urban growth and change. This situation also prevails in Malawian cities. This study sought to explore and understand the role of state-society engagements in the production and proliferation of housing informality in Mzuzu City. The thesis is informed by a recognition that planning theory has predominantly relied on Global North (Western) ideologies such as Habermesian inspired collaborative and communicative planning approaches which argue that consensus can realise planning goals and visions. The appeal, and hence adoption and application of these approaches in the Global South have largely failed to deliver the kind of planning outcomes seen in the Global North for many reasons, including the different political power dynamics and colonial historical contexts within which planning operates. The state-society engagements in the Global South contexts show that the state, rather than regulating development, is implicated in the production of informality in ways similar to those of inhabitants. These contexts point to the need to develop planning concepts which have a better relevance in rapidly growing and under-resourced urban settlements in the Global South. The thesis contributes to an emerging body of knowledge that has come to be called the Global South Planning Theory Project. The scholars promoting this project argue for the importance of context in planning theory development and in this case the need to consider the contribution of the Global South to planning and understanding of the urbanisation processes. In this regard, the thesis draws on various Global South concepts such as informality as a mode of urbanisation (Roy, 2009), gray spaces (Yiftachel, 2009), conflicting rationalities (Watson 2003), quiet encroachment (Bayat, 2010), insurgency (Holston, 2008) and hidden transcripts (Scott,1990) to frame the analysis of housing informality in Mzuzu City. The case study method (Yin 2014) was used to collect and analyse data from three informal settlements of Luwinga, Salisburyline and Geisha each having developed on land of a specific tenure: customary, public and private, respectively. Interviews and discussions were held with state officials, chiefs, block leaders, clan leaders, and senior citizens as well as groups of inhabitants in form of focus group discussions. Observations, literature review and archival data supplemented the information from the interviews and discussions. The analysis of the results indicates that state-society engagement in the informal settlements is about the application of the various strategies by each side in seeking to either achieve planned orderly urban growth or the right to land and life in the city. The study also shows that these strategies manifest, from the perspective of the state, through several laws, policies, regulations, and an assortment of practices that the planning system uses as a tool of the state. Among the state strategies are threats of evictions, demolitions and organising citizens to participate in development committees. However, when the state utilises these strategies, it is not always for the achievement of planned orderly urban growth as professed, but on many occasions for revenue generation through property taxation, for land control, for vote-gaining or for personal gain. On the other hand, inhabitants use threats of court action, violence, collaboration with state actors, hidden transcripts (Scott, 1990), spatial protests ( Yakobi, 2004) and quiet encroachment (Bayat, 2010) to achieve their objectives to retain their land rights, to provide their basic need of shelter and to stay in the city. The inhabitants seeking survival strategies were also found not immune to the clientelist ambitions of local politicians. The study noted the shifting state discourses of informal settlements from a view of them as utter illegality to gradual political acceptance or regularisation of their existence. Finally, the study found many aspects of rationality conflicts, which either occurred between the state and society directly, among state actors, among citizen actors and across the two spheres. Within the state, ethical conflicts in which state officials deliberately frustrated the visioning of planned orderly urban growth were found to be rampant. State-society engagements therefore can be said to be a contributor to housing informality. In the case of Mzuzu, these engagements occur in multiple settlements regardless of land tenure situation. These engagements suggest that rationality conflicts occur within multi-layered settings, across state-society spheres as well as beyond specific project interventions implemented within single settlements.

Bibliography: leaves 72-78.

Word processed copy. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-232) / The purpose of this study was to suggest a model by which the existing diverse and complex land tenure systems of Uganda could be harmonised into a formal land tenure structure that is simple, easily managed by the land registry officials, focused on the local level and readily understood by the community. Moreover, it would be regulated by official property laws.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / It is essential for geospatial and mapping organisations that changes to the landscapeare regularly detected and captured, so that map databases can be updated. The Chief Directorate of National Geospatial Information (CD: NGI), South Africa’s national mapping agency, currently relies on manual methods for digitizing features and detecting changes. These methods are time consuming and labour intensive, and rely on the skills and interpretation of the operator. It is therefore necessary to move towards more automated methods in the production process at CD: NGI. The objective of this research is to develop a process for semi-automatic classification of built-up areas from aerial imagery in South Africa. Built-up areas are important as they can grow and change rapidly. Since the South African landscape is varied and climatological conditions differ from one area to another, a general and robust method that can be applied across the country is needed. This project aims to find the best approach for classifying urban built-up areas from high-resolution aerial imagery by comparing various image classification methods, so that a method that is transferable and applicable in diverse South African scenes may be developed. Image classification methods were compared and it was found that pixel-based classifiers were unsatisfactory in classifying built-up areas, whereas object-based classifiers had better results. Image segmentation, the first step in an object-based classification, can considerably influence the results of the classification task. It is therefore essential that suitable image segments be generated before the segments are classified. The proposed The proposed methodology involves the use of cadastral data in the image segmentation process and texture measures in the classification of built-up areas within an object-based process. The method can be applied to diverse scenes across South Africa to find built-up areas. This is a generalised approach and can assist the CD: NGI in the process of updating their topographic database by reducing the time that operators spend on identifying and manually digitizing built-up areas.

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Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / Impeding Efficiency is based on my interest in the manner in which we experience space and in particular, the moment we become conscious of our surrounding built environment. The point of change between spaces, the threshold. Contemporary society lives in fast-forward; everything we do has been streamlined, developed in principles of efficiency. This phenomenon has caused a divide between user and the experience of architecture. We move rapidly, only with goal in mind, very rarely pausing, to adjust and reflect on our surroundings. This sparked a study of the threshold in architecture through the lens of four architects and the architectural strategies they have applied in a manner that impedes efficiency, hinders mobility, slows down time and allows for personal interpretation of the build environment.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / With this in mind, the underlying notion of my thesis is that of the everyday and the extraordinary, and how within the ordinary, the (extra)ordinary may be revealed. A part of my personal everyday experience and one that is shared by many Capetonians traveling to and from the Cape Town CBO on a daily basis is the image and presence of the Cape Town Harbour which has become an everyday backdrop and like our majestic Table Mountain, often goes unnoticed. In particular, an aspect of my everyday harbour experience which stands out is the image of the shipping containers at the container terminal. When seen as individual objects, the shipping containers appear quite ordinary - a corrugated steel box. However, when combined and stacked vertically and positioned side by side, the multitude of colours an d configurations of the seemingly ordinary steel boxes begin to reveal intriguing forms and spatial qualities and I often found myself envisioning the spaces which may be revealed within and around the containers. With the notion of the shipping container as a spatial object of an ordinary, everyday nature, my architectural proposal intends to explore the making of an extraordinary space utilising these ordinary steel boxes of the everyday. As the shipping containers are standardised and modular, and therefore the space within the box is essentially a given, the focus of my thesis is not constrained to the space within the box, but instead it is more an investigation into the spatial qualities which can be created between and around the boxes and how one deals with the making of these (extra)ordinary spaces.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This paper serves as a pretext to the resulting architectural project and traces the progression of the design process born from the entry point of this thesis, of a site. It portrays an attempt to conceive a considered methodology for approaching architectural design. Thus this dissertation traces the unexpected route from conception to product. The experimentations and research direct, divert and redirect the trajectory of the design process with the intention of creating an investigation that is hopefully personal, rich and most certainly not predetermined.