When HIV/AIDS first emerged from the shadows decades ago, few people could visualise how the epidemic would evolve, and fewer still could describe with any certainty the best ways of combating it. Today, we know from experience that the impact of HIV/AIDS thrives in conditions of socio-economic vulnerability and inequity. We are witnessing how HIV/AIDS is devastating regions, widening the gap between the rich and the poor, pushing the already stigmatised groups further away and destroying the sustainability of communities and their development conditions. The burden lies on local governments, National as well as regional authorities to take a more proactive role in confronting the pandemic and to prioritise activities geared towards the prevention of the spread of the disease. To fight poverty is to promote human development thus broadening people’s choices. This research project assesses the current practices that Johannesburg government has taken as an appropriate strategy to fight HIV/AIDS in Informal Settlements using the Human Development Strategy. Assessing the appropriateness of Human Development Strategy, an Informal Settlement named Sol Plaatjies, which is situated in Region 5 of Johannesburg, is used as a case study. The appropriateness of this strategy is measured against its ability to reduce the effects that are brought about by the HIV/AIDS since this strategy has been implemented in Sol Plaatjies.

This research explored the City of Johannesburg’s response to floods in the lower-income settlement of Soweto in February 2009, through participant observation, interviews and examination of official documentation. The municipality’s response indicates the governance forces that may shape adaptation to increasingly severe and frequent climate events in the context of development pressures and needs. It was found that the flood event provided a ‘window of opportunity’ for action and learning on flooding, but governance factors hindered an effective response. These included the framing of flood risk, limitations in the City of Johannesburg’s municipal structure, institutional power dynamics, and the performance culture. The research demonstrated that networked governance is critical to adaptation in global South cities. In the case of Johannesburg city, conflicting governance paradigms constrained the realisation of networked governance modes. Resolving tensions amongst competing governance approaches is necessary to advance both the climate and development agenda in Johannesburg.

Historically, Zimbabwe’s urban population enjoyed high water supply and sanitation service levels and standards, having one of the highest coverage levels in Africa. However, over the last two decades, the quality of Zimbabwe’s urban water supply and sanitation services has slowly been eroded. The poor, displaced and disenfranchised Zimbabweans that occupy Harare’s informal urban settlements are vulnerable to challenges posed by unavailability of basic water and sanitation services. This qualitative research project, carried out between January and June 2013 in Harare’s Hopley and Retreat informal settlements, investigates factors that have been preventing delivery of basic sanitation services to residents in these two settlements. Presenting evidence from the two informal settlements of Hopley and Retreat, this research establishes that there is a complex relationship at play between policy processes, the prevailing political environment and the way in which institutions have responded to the problem of sanitation in these settlements. The study was undertaken towards the end of an era of a negotiated Government of National Unity between ZANU-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change, highlights the dominance of power and political contestation between the two parties that has spilled into policy decisions on basic service provision in the informal settlements. The deep rooted culture of political violence which characterised the political environment from 2000 onwards, with very little commitment to democratic processes, was instrumental in the development of Hopley settlement after the 2005 elections. At face value, ZANU-PF was providing displaced people with alternative accommodation. However, as Muzondidya notes, this along with other ZANU-PF strategies is ‘(c)onsistent with its hegemonic political culture… to engage in cosmetic political and economic reforms that will not result in further democracy or result in a loss of its historic monopoly over power…’ (Muzondidya in Raftopolous, 2013, p.50). Informal settlements are a relatively new phenomenon in Zimbabwe. However, since their inception, they have continued to grow, fuelled by ZANU-PF’s strategy to allocate unserviced residential stands in exchange for residents’ allegiance to the party, with the most recent illegal residential stand allocations taking place in Chitungwiza town in 2013. A close examination of Hopley and Retreat revealed that water and sanitation services provided in Zimbabwe’s informal settlements are typically inadequate or non-existent – a situation that has the potential for severe public health impacts. The emergency actions taken by Non-Governmental Organisations during the height of the 2008 cholera outbreak only provided short-term sanitation solutions. The research concludes that water and sanitation services in Zimbabwe’s informal urban settlements have come to this point, mainly due to the interacting forces of politics. These have influenced policy processes on decision-making, formulation and implementation of sanitation policies for informal settlements. Despite the political origins of several informal settlements, there is a notable absence of practical policies to tackle the issues posed by this development and a lack of institutions capable of instigating the plans needed for change.

Student Number : 2503365 MSc Building (Housing) research report School of Architecture Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment / The failure of governments to promote efficient housing policies coupled with increasing speculation in land markets has resulted in scarcity of serviced land, leading to a lack of adequate housing for the majority of the urban population. This has resulted in illegal land use and development and the eventual situation of informal settlements developing at a rapid rate. However most governments in the developing world, including South Africa have failed to acknowledge that most new urban informal settlements are developed by an illegal process as informal settlement residents willingly or unwittingly contravene planning regulations, contravene laws out of ignorance of the legal requirements, coupled with the inability to conform to the high standards set. Consequently, States respond to this illegality in the form of eviction as it threatens the economic, social and political stability of the urban environment. Concepts promoted internationally and identified in international literature recognize that the solution to informality lies in appropriate protection of rights which should ensure access to secure shelter leading to access to other benefits such as livelihood opportunities, public services and credits. That flowing from International Laws and Covenants, Human Rights Law needs to be looked at as a system of law that creates legally binding obligations for states with the aim of protecting, respecting and promoting housing rights for informal settlement residents. In the context of rights, Fernandes goes further in emphasising the legal constitutional perspective of the urban phenomenon where law is used as a vehicle for urban development and social change as well as encouraging state action and its attempts at socio-political legitimization in the context of informal settlement intervention.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Johannesburg 2017. / Pre-colonial Stone Walled Structures (SWS) in southern Africa have been studied since the 17th Century. Studies focused on establishing the origins of SWS, classification and other socio-economic components associated with these settlements. The physical environment played a significant role in shaping these communities, therefore making it important to establish the correlation between these pre-colonial cultures and the physical environment. Using Google Earth and GIS Sadr and Rodier (2012) undertook a settlement analysis of a 350 area near the Suikerbosrand nature reserve in southern Gauteng. They observed that settlement patterns revealed a shift from small and dispersed egalitarian societies to more stratified communities between the 15th and 19th century. Using the same techniques that Sadr and Rodier (2012) employed, a settlement pattern analysis was conducted on the rest of the research area in southern Gauteng which is slightly under 9000. Results from an exploratory and a statistical analysis from the research area revealed observations made by Sadr and Rodier 2012 from a 350 concur with the observations made from the rest of the study area. / LG2018

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-124). / The colonia popular is one of the most typical types of settlement used in Mexico City, and with some variations in other Latin American cities. Fifty per cent of the urban land in Mexico City is occupied by this type of dwelling. The purpose of this study is to develop a method to detect and measure the physical changes over time of a group of dwelling units in a colonia popular. A group of 20 dwelling units has been selected randomly in three blocks of a colonia popular. Each dwelling unit has been recorded on maps showing two physical changes that have taken place over time. The changes that we recorded were those that took place at morpholgical and functional views. A comparison of these changes will help to suggest patterns of future growth. Since we feel that these physical changes are an expression of social economic, and political changes experienced by the house holders we consider this study to be a preliminary step in a project which would relate changes in dwellings to larger social forces. / by Jorge Andrade-Narvaez. / M.Arch.

Thesis. 1979. M.Arch.A.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: p. 70. / M.Arch.A.S.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning; and, (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1977. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references. / M.C.P. / M.Arch.

Thesis. 1978. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 199-208. / M.C.P.

The intellectual boundaries of heritage have developed considerably during the last half-century. The theme ‘historic urban landscape’ has replaced such older expressions as ‘monuments’, ‘historic area’, and ‘old town’, and the term ‘conservation’ has been reinterpreted as a sustainable basis for development. Despite these more flexible meanings the spatial boundaries of ‘heritage’ often remain tightly restricted to ancient monuments and sites, and nowhere is this more evident than in Iran where the preservation of outstanding monuments is constantly in tension with the spatial demand of the modern cities. Maibud provides the basis from which a new methodological approach to conservation is developed. It is a city that has a history of several millennia yet has a scale that renders it manageable as a case study with archaeological remains that range across several phases of building development. It is, arguably, an archetypal example of middle-sized Iranian cities, and affords the possibility to study the entire urban landscape and its spatial, functional and morphological iterations. Within this overall picture a methodology was developed to explore and analyse various typological elements of the city, the three key components of which are the town plan, the building type, and construction materials. The analysis combines a rigorous survey and observation of the standing structures with scarce archaeological and written sources that shed light on an interpretation of the urban fabric. The methodologies developed as the basis for a study of Maibud provide new perspectives on Islamic urbanism in general, and Islamic urbanism in Iran particularly. An analysis of the town plan illustrated a slow process of change over many centuries that contributed to the permanence of street systems and property boundaries. This durability of the town plan explains how the inherited urban nucleus of late antiquity mutated gradually in the early Islamic period and how there was concentration of development around the early mosque. The building fabric demonstrated that there existed not only commonalities between buildings of the same period, but between buildings of different periods in the same region. A gradual mutation of building form and its synchronic and diachronic progression was noted, through the identification of building typologies as characterised in the urban fabric of Maibud. Consequently, it has been hypothesised that the pre-Islamic matrix of char-suffa, a small courtyard house, gradually developed into medieval and late-medieval houses, and that this incremental development of traditional houses of the region ultimately reached its latest transformation in its modern form. A study of earthen construction and the inherent feature of mud brick has been advanced, featuring its availability, flexibility, homogeneity, sustainability, as well as its vulnerability. A detailed study of these characteristics, coupled with an ability to date the different types and sizes of mud bricks has facilitated an understanding of construction and allows researchers to meet the challenge of dating and interpreting buildings. By concentrating on the ‘laboratory’ city of Maibud and the specificities of its earthen construction, a chronological table of mud brick has been developed. A synthesis has been advanced, based on archaeological, architectural, epigraphic and textual evidence, that the streets of the town plan are the most durable feature of urban landscapes and once laid out, they change very little. Consequently, property boundaries have essentially remained fixed with most dating back to the medieval period. By contrast, buildings and particularly residential buildings were the least durable element of the urban fabric, and changed faster based still on earlier designs. It is imperative that these interrelationships − of town plan, buildings and materials – must be understood in order to formulate an approach for the management and conservation of historic urban landscapes.