Includes bibliographical references / This dissertation is a speculation on the role of infrastructure in shaping the city. By reimagining infrastructure in terms of its social, economic and topographical effects rather than purely on functional terms, the project proposes a method of intervention that transforms the city by ameliorating the negative spaces of existing infrastructure, bridges spatial divisions, and provides physical and social services to underserved communities. The dissertation is founded on an understanding of Cape Town's twentieth-century planning and development as a modern, infrastructured city and simultaneously a segregated apartheid city. The modernist preoccupation with separation is demonstrated to have dovetailed with apartheid policy to produce a functionally, economically and racially segregated urban landscape, with infrastructural projects used to carve up these discrete land parcels. The proposal is a hybrid spatial intervention that simultaneously adopts and subverts infrastructural processes to produce a more holistic approach to structuring the city, dealing with the issue of infrastructure at three levels: re-imagining existing sites of infrastructure to mitigate their divisive spatial effects and turn them into an urban resource; providing infrastructure to communities in need of basic services; and broadening the scope of what constitutes 'infrastructure' to include not only mobility and services but also social and educational facilities, landscape, recreation and access to information. The result is a device for reconfiguring the urban landscape to encourage economic opportunity, social mobility and urban liveability, suggesting a route to a more integrated city.

Bibliography: leaves 177-187. / This dissertation presents a novel system for semi-automatic modeling of buildings in informal settlement areas from aerial photographs. The building extraction strategy is developed and implememed with the aim of generatinga a desk top Informal Settlement Geographic lnformation System (ISGIS) using felf developed and available PC-based GIS tools to serve novice users informal settlement areas.

Bibliography: leaves 117-125. / The task of recording our physical heritage is of significant importance: our past cannot be divorced from the present and it plays an integral part in the shaping of our future. This applies not only to structures that are hundreds of years old, but relatively more recent architectural structures also require adequate documentation if they are to be preserved for future generations. In recording such structures, the traditional 2D methods are proving inadequate. It will be beneficial to conservationists, archaeologists, researchers, historians and students alike if accurate and extensive digital 3D models of archaeological structures can be generated. This thesis investigates a method of creating such models, using digital photogrammetry. Three different types of model were generated: 1. the simple CAD (Computer Aided Design) model; 2. an amalgamation of 3D line drawings; and 3. an accurate surface model of the building using DSMs (Digital Surface Models) and orthophotos.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / One of my initial research questions was to answer how informal settlements can pioneer the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in Cape Town. The objectives included understanding energy usage in informal settlements, invetigating current energy technologies and innovating an architectural typology which can support multiple renewable fuel sources and create positive, urban space in these communities.

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Includes bibliographical references. / The thesis traces the development of universities, identifies their characteristics in terms of space, building and planning structures and explores the social background which gave rise to these features. The core chapters explore the emergence of university spatial development, first in the medieval colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, then in the renaissance and neoclassical European universities. These are followed by the exploration of the campus plans in the United States and finally, the postwar universities.

Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation explores therapeutic architecture and the integration of addiction rehabilitation into the Cape Flats, Mitchells Plain area. This project ultimately introduces the concept of an integrated community rehabilitation and wellness centre in one of the most notorious, unhealthy urban environments in the Western Cape, Mitchells Plain. This will demonstrate that a healing environment can be achieved in any context, urban or rural. A rehabilitation centre that engages with its surrounding community, fostering various levels of controlled interaction between patient and public. An integrated facility that gives back to its community through shared facilities. This investigation also unpacks the existing rehabilitation ecology and the gradual transition process in the formulation of a new hybrid system that combines the various stages of rehabilitation within a centralised facility. The project aims to deinstitutionalize the existing rehabilitation programme through the ‘simulation of a real life’ concept, where the facility will incorporate familiar elements, such as the house, neighbourhood and downtown to replicate the variety of environments in our everyday lives. The design uses ‘nature as therapy through architecture’ with the implementation of various concepts, which includes a raised therapeutic platform and a perimeter planter, serving as an urban filter that defuses the harsh urban context of Mitchells Plain. This project also explores the role of Architectural technology in therapy and ultimately introduces the concept of a highly localised adaptive façade system that allows for individual patient control and to filter the interactive visual relationship between patient and public. Our modern healing facilities have been designed to house apparatus for healing but not to be healing instruments in themselves. Architecture should be considered just as significant as the treatments that it houses.

. / This project is a synthesis of, on the one hand, the interventionist architect curiously and deliberately plotting form and visualising construction and, on the other hand, the human being often wilfully retreated and joyfully observing the uninterrupted and the conflicting. It is this dialectic - rather than immovable theoretical principles - that has informed not only my process, but also my design. In this sense this project represents what I believe to be the most important feature of my architectural education: the inexplicable joy in the constant re-evaluation of the imprecise nexus between the deliberately mediated and the uninterrupted. This impulse is also what (perhaps unknowingly at the time) attracted me to Three Anchor Bay - a site of untameable swells, impenetrable rhythms, ebb and flow. It is a site that necessitates decisiveness in a counterintuitive form; boundaries. Any frontier, however versatile and accommodating, requires commitment (few are capable of confidently kayaking beyond an otherwise parameter-defining promenade). Drawing a line is not only the problem of the architect, but the human being. Although this paper is largely a personal essay instead of a coherent treatise (I reserve the right to remain sceptical of every decision), it is important to make a few general observations. The first is supremely personal: I am decidedly fallible. Although harsh introspection is generally more valuable and courageous than the resolute defence of personal conviction, I often found myself passionately defending lines I have drawn (especially ones that I have spent a lot of time re- drawing and erasing). Redrawing can be a counterintuitive struggle and it has often been difficult to regard it as a necessary and unpredictable process rather than as emblematic of some sort of failure. Although common sense urges us to "learn from our mistakes", it is never quite that simple. This project has, in short, caused me to constantly mediate between conviction and perpetual self-criticism. Secondly, these ideas are by no means new and have been repeated (and often ignored) in various contexts. Karl Popper, for instance, believed that "any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes on its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian” (Taleb, 2004, p.128-129). The same is true of architecture - particularly those projects that are resolutely planted in a pre-determined style, ideology or “balance”.

Includes bibliographical references. / The increasing need to develop fully integrated spatial information systems that help improve planning and decision making have led the countries to create partnerships as to facilitate the improved sharing of spatial data and to realise the full potential of spatial data infrastructure. In this process researchers and practitioners use appropriate methods, tools and frameworks to examine, analyse and evaluate the new implemented systems after its implementation. The attempt to find suitable methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of the system has led to extensive research to develop, identify and test suitable methods and frameworks and to apply these to case studies. This research investigates the methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of Integrated Spatial Information Systems (ISIS) implemented in the Valuation Department of the City of Cape Town. The spatial information systems of Valuation Department and the effectiveness of ISIS implementation in this Department are investigated.

Includes bibliographical references. / Laugier’s Primitive Hut from 1755 depicts reason as a muse enthroned upon the ruins of the classical orders, pointing towards nature as a way forward. Similarly, in 1841 Joseph Paxton designed a glass conservatory at Chatsworth for the tropical Victoria regia water lily, which literally referenced the lily pad veins as structural system. This preoccupation with nature as a design generator continues in the 20th century with digital tools that derive architectural form using biomimicry, in the work of R & Sie. All these projects are based on a dialectic relationship between architecture and nature, where the particular model of nature is translated into form. This relationship in landscape architecture is discussed through the idea of the biomorphic. Applied as a guiding principle to investigate vegetation and plant form in the 17th Century Company’s Gardens arguing that the generation of the biomorphic can be adjusted to serve as a mechanism to understand plant form in terms of effect.