This dissertation examines “post-agrarian” transformations in Kenyan rural areas. But where rural transformation is usually written as a story about land, Black Spots is a story about roads. Kenya’s massive investment in roads infrastructure over the last decade has intersected with the decline in smallholder agriculture in such a way that, for many rural residents, fortunes are now imagined on the road rather than on the land. Roadside trade, transport, and even salvage from crashes provide supplementary livings for rural populations facing declining agricultural opportunities. The dissertation argues that in the context of austerity policies and rural abandonment, road work and its “fast money” not only expose roadside residents to physical danger, but also entrench entrepreneurial risk ideology into local imaginaries. With the road accident as a lens illuminating a wider landscape of rural hazard, the dissertation shows how rural residents refashion relationships to land, work, technology, and loss in high-risk environments. At the same time, it demonstrates the limits of “risk”—that is, a calculated engagement with potential loss, conducted in the interest of profit—as a framework for managing contingency. In this sense, Black Spots is both an ethnography of risk and of what risk fails to capture. It tracks how rural residents learn to engage bodily and economic hazard and to understand it as risk; how they coordinate the disparate temporalities and technologies of life on the road and life on the land; and how they withstand loss when these attempts do not go as planned. The dissertation thus advances two parallel concerns: on the one hand, it demonstrates how economic practice is at once bodily and reasoned. On the other, it considers how experiences of and ideas about contingency are shaped in relation to shifting economic, social, and infrastructural possibilities.

The purpose of this study is to assess the developmental impact of the Mzinyathi access road in Durban (eThekwini) and to establish whether the construction of the road contributes to the poverty alleviation or not. The study begins by focusing on a review of literature on road infrastructure. Of importance is that the literature review provides a foundation for the study through the assessment of the existing literature on road infrastructure. Further, research gaps are presented allowing to this and other future researches to make new contributions to the existing literatures. Fifteen households were surveyed, a number of interviews were organised and two focus groups were organised. The information from all utilised techniques were analysed through the thematic approach. The results of the study indicate that the construction of the Mzinyathi access road has contributed significantly towards poverty alleviation in Mzinyathi area. The conclusion and recommendations drawn from the findings reveal that there is a crucial need for moving away from the former conception or way of thinking that the public works specifically the roads have to be constructed only for job purposes. The road is able to address many more developmental issues than job opportunities. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

The condition of the rural road network in South Africa is in a severe state of deterioration and remains a matter of concern for inhabitants of rural areas. Apart from heavy use, the main problem is that road development is often neglected and the main focus is placed on the geomorphic environment. The objective of this study is to identify the nature of the geomorphic constraints of vehicular access on unarmoured roads in the rural areas of KwaZulu Natal and the Limpopo Province of South Africa, and to gain a better understanding of how these function. It is hoped that some of the insights gained can then be used to inform policy decisions regarding the location and design of rural roads in the future. In this study, a number of unarmoured roads were studied in detail to identify the possible environmental constraints on vehicular access. A number of soil physical and chemical properties were used to examine the state of road degradation. These properties included particle size analysis, soil strength, Cation Exchangeable Capacity and Exchangeable Sodium Percentage. The results of the investigation of soil properties have shown that they play a significant role in road degradation. The major geomorphic factors involved in road deterioration include soil type, soil erosion and precipitation characteristics, mass movements, slope conditions and human activity. The physical characteristics, especially the soil and slope conditions, make the access roads in all study areas susceptible to soil loss. Factors such as geology, drainage and friable soils vulnerable to mass movements have been identified as seriously constraining vehicular access. Soil erosion problems in the study area are largely the result of physical and chemical properties of soils combined with steep gradients and have been identified as the primary cause of road degradation. It was further found that the socio-economic conditions, together with the anthropogenic influences such as the construction of rural access roads on vulnerable slopes, population density and the removal of vegetation cover in all the study areas have significantly enhanced road deterioration. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

M.Phil. (Engineering Management) / The daunting peak-hour traffic periods have affected Gauteng road users and the economy due to traffic congestion in the recent years. A total of 157 000 vehicles used the Gauteng freeway network each day in 2006, which went up to approximately 200 000 in 2011. This means that the average growth in traffic volumes had grown on average by 7% between 2006 and 2011. As a management strategy, The South African National Road Agency (SANRAL) launched the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP) in 2007 to improve the infrastructural network. The introduction of the GFIP road-user charging scheme in Gauteng has been followed by a renewed interest in the subject of urban road tolling both by practitioners and academics ...

Fung Hoi Yuen Matthew. / "Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 2007-2008, design report." / Includes bibliographical references.

In America today, adolescent boys do not have a structured, ritualized or guided passage From boyhood into manhood. Many young men feel unsure of their manhood even at an age that signifies the transition. This causes young males to need a self--‐created rite of passage. Tramping, the act of travelling by train, hitchhiking or foot, is one way in which young males can independently achieve manhood. This is a literary account of the lives of Jack Kerouac, Chris McCandless, and Zebu Recchia. Their personal stories allow a detailed view of the advantages and disadvantages found in a self--‐created rite of passage. While two of the accounts are successful, in Chris McCandless’s case the rite ends in a transition to death.Tramping as a rite of passage to adulthood seems effective but the danger in self--‐ creation appears to be the lack of guidance that comes in unstructured rites of passage. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

Like many other economic and social activities that are infrastructure-intensive, the transport sector is an important component of the economy impacting on national, regional and local development as well as the welfare of citizens. An efficient transport infrastructure provides a multitude of socioeconomic opportunities and benefits with positive multiplier effects such as better accessibility to markets, employment, education and health. If it is well managed, transport infrastructure transforms the quality of life of residents through dynamic externalities it generates. But when infrastructure is deficient in terms of capacity, efficiency or reliability, it can have unwarranted economic costs due to reduced or missed opportunities. Despite its central role in rural development, little is known about the extent and impact of the various benefits that arise from the development of roads, particularly in developing countries. A large body of literature exists documenting the spatial patterns of socioeconomic development which can be induced by road infrastructure development processes and are in most cases dynamic and temporal. The impacts of a given road infrastructure development can also be analysed at the local, regional or national perspectives. The local impact is expected to be limited to the immediate neighbourhoods of the highway including tukuls, towns and villages to be found on both sides of the road within a distance of 5kms defining the influence zone. Based on this, the main objective of this research is to assess socioeconomic impacts of road infrastructure development of three newly developed highways on their respective surrounding communities 5-10 years after the interventions. Two of the highways are gravel surfaced and one is paved type. The respective study names are: Gendewuha – Gelago road (Corridor 1), Mile – Weldiya road (Corridor 2) and Ginchi – Kachisi road (Corridor 3). Their respective lengths are 165; 125; and 105 kilometres, while the study refers 10 kilometres on both sides of the roads. The study had focused on primary data on selected variables that describe socioeconomic conditions both before and after the intervention by using mixed methods of data collection considering quasi experimental design (QED). The main methods of analysis employed are descriptive and inferential statistics. Models such as: Random model approach and double-difference regression were used. The research had utilized two types of impact analyses (temporal and spatial) for comparison and also tested by using paired sample t tests: First: for each of the three corridors, comparisons between current conditions and the situation before the road intervention and, second: comparing conditions in the zone of influence (ZOI) situated within 5kms with control zone (COZ) situated beyond 5kms which are considered not to benefit much from road improvements during the period covered by the study. The research is based on data collected from 392 household heads, 77 key informants, 69 FGD participants from seven different localities, traffic counts from seven points, physical observations, outputs of GIS analysis utilizing satellite imageries and vast secondary data. The findings show that there are more positive and less negative temporal and spatial socioeconomic impacts generated by the three corridors notwithstanding disparities among the different locations. Accordingly, the paved highway is found to have more powerful positive impacts than the gravel roads, which are of low standards and functioning poorly. The status of truck and bus terminals which should have been integrated in the highway development projects are still underdeveloped with obvious effects on the sustainability of their socioeconomic impacts in the study areas. Furthermore, certain natural and more importantly manmade factors are found to have pre-empted the realization of certain positive socioeconomic impacts to be obtained from road interventions. In a nutshell, the dissertation had proofed the importance of conducting impact evaluation in the study areas by answering the questions of ‘what works and what doesn’t? and what is the extent of the impact?; measuring the impacts and relating the changes in the dependent variables to developmental policies; investigating the positive and negative effects of road development interventions and their sustainability; producing information that is relevant from transparency and accountability perspective; and finally contributing to individual and organizational level learning that can be inspired by conducting impact evaluations from the perspectives of change theory, programme theory and central place theory. These also offer possibilities of informing decision makers as to whether to expand, or improve road development related interventions by way of programmes, projects and policies. Therefore, from the perspective of Transport Geography, it is the primary interest of the researcher to contribute towards filling the aforementioned gaps in the existing body of the knowledge in Ethiopia and elsewhere. / Geography / D. Litt. et Phil. (Geography)