"No single element in urban planning outweighs in importance that of housing for the well being of the individual, the family and the community. Yet few questions in urban planning are as little understood, as subject to varying standards and as open to emotionally charged argument as that of what constitutes 'adequate' and 'inadequate' urban residential environments". Whilst housing presents a universal problem, it assumes special importance and significance for South Africa. In this country, Non-Whites constitute 81 per cent of the total population and the large majority of them, who fall within the lowest income groups, are unable to provide themselves with adequate housing. In Cape Town, the Non-White population consists largely of the Coloured group. Although Westernised and becoming increasingly urbanised, this group occupies a differentiated position, in the economic, social and political structure of Cape Town's society

The Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, within the remote Sub-Antarctic ecoregion is a reservoir of expressions of biological and cultural diversity. Although it is considered one of 24 wilderness areas remaining in the world, it is not free from local and global threats, such as invasive species, and climate change. Field biologists and philosophers associated to the Sub-Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Program and the Omora Ethnobotanical Park, have worked to describe the region’s biocultural diversity, linking ecological and philosophical research into education, ecotourism, and conservation, through a methodology called field environmental philosophy (FEP), which integrates ecological sciences and environmental ethics through a 4-step cycle consisting of: 1) interdisciplinary research; 2) composition of metaphors; 3) design of field activities with an ecological and ethical orientation; and 4) implementation of in situ conservation areas. In this context, the purposes of this dissertation were to: 1) provide a comprehensive review of publications regarding the conservation status of aquatic and terrestrial insects at a global scale and with an emphasis in southern South America; 2) study the distribution of benthic macroinvertebrates through the sharp altitudinal gradient of the Róbalo River watershed; 3) describe the life histories of Gigantodax sp (Simuliidae: Diptera) and Meridialaris chiloeense (Leptophlebiidae: Ephemeroptera) in the Róbalo River and to assess the potential effects of climate change on their phenology; and 4) to apply FEP methodology in order to better understand and communicate the intrinsic and instrumental values of freshwater invertebrates in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve.

Magister Scientiae Dentium - MSc(Dent) / Aangesien 'n nasionale register vir maligniteit nie bestaan waarin informasie ten opsigte van kanker onder die verskillende bevolkings groepe van Suid-Afrika nagegaan kan word nie, kan die verspreidings patroon alleenlik bepaal word deur spesifieke projekte. Die resultaat is dat daar nog nie 'n geheelbeeld vir kanker in Suid-Afrika bestaan nie. Wat mondkanker betref, is kennis fragmentaries. Inligting oor die ver spreiding daarvan onder die Kaapse Kleurlingbevolkingsgroep is beperk en net sekere aspekte daarvan is tot hede uitgelig. Die doel van hierdie studie is om mondkanker na te gaan in die Kaapse Kleurlingbevolkingsgroep wat woonagtig is in die Skiereiland van die Kaap die Goeie Hoop. Met hierdie oogmerk, is alle mondkankergevalle wat in die Groote Schuur- en Tygerberg-hospitale behandel is, van 1970 tot 1975, nagegaan. Bewys wyse van vergelyking en ook om die invloed van eie kultuur en akkulturasie na te gaan, is aandag gegee aan ondkankergevalle van Kleurlinge woonagtig in die Skiereiland en dié in die platteland wat in die Skiereiland behandeling ondergaan het. Verder is vergelykings ook getref tussen die,Kaapse Maleier wat die Moslem-geloof aanhang en die Kaapse Kleurling wat nie hierdie geloof aanhang nie. Die mondkankerpatroon van die Indiërs wat in die Skiereiland woonagtig is, is ook nagegaan. Bewys wyse van vergelyking en ook om die invloed van eie kultuur en akkulturasie na te gaan, is aandag gegee aan mondkankergevalle van Kleurlinge woonagtig in die Skiereiland en dié in die platteland wat in die Skiereiland behandeling ondergaan het. Verder is vergelykings ook getref tussen die,Kaapse Maleier wat die Moslem-geloof aanhang en die Kaapse Kleurling wat nie hierdie geloof aanhang nie. Die mondkankerpatroon van die Indiërs wat in die Skiereiland woonagtig is, is ook nagegaan. Ten slotte is die genoemde groepe se mondkankerpatroon vergelyk met dié gevind onder die ander groepe wat in Suid-Afrika bestudeer is, dié in die res van Afrika en ook met dié in die ander kontinente.

Bibliography: pages 258-271. / The history of long distance immigrant communities, particularly those with few or no written documentary records, is often cited as an obvious example for oral historical enquiry. Such groupings would be represented by the Greek, Portuguese and Jewish as well as the Italian population in South Africa, and by similar settler communities in Great Britain and the USA. The advantages of an orally-derived community history is surely shown by the potential richness of information found in interviews where people's history is offered in their own words, in which migrants consider the life they have lived as basically their own formations. The Italian community was selected because there are only very thin and fragmentary records of its local history and because of the author's own origins. Through interviews, one has been able to expand on the existing sparse historical picture and to gather fresh material concerning a range of active individuals who, through their business lives and practices, established successful new industries and other local economic enterprises. Sample interviews have been transcribed and edited, to illustrate the range of oral testimony. Through them one hears something of the history of men such as Oreste Nannucci who started a laundry business, Giuseppe Rubbi, who was one of the most prominent builders in Cape Town before the Second World War, and Amedeo Traverso who, with his partners, developed the sea front in Sea Point, among many other speculative ventures. Through the examples of Mrs Ida Peroni's and Antonio Introna's testimony we move away from the historical voice of male petty entrepreneurs to obtain a new insight into the fortunes of the Sicilian fishing community. Wherever possible, attempts have been made to check the information generated by oral testimony by consulting census reports, migration figures, consular and parliamentary reports, books, documents, newspapers and personal correspondence both in South Africa and Italy. Written documentary sources are utilised in relevant chapters. By piecing together this disparate range of source material, the present study shows the dimensions of Italian migrant economic and social experience not simply as generalities but as something to be glimpsed in the uniqueness inherent in every life history.

After the end of legislated apartheid, the South African government changed old policies that had been driven by segregation against the black majority. Black small-scale farmers in rural areas were encouraged to join commercial agriculture to capitalise on state subsidies and support. Municipalities including Buffalo City Metropolitan, Great Kei, Amathole and others in the Eastern Cape, in collaboration with the Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture and agro industry, introduced programmes such as the Massive Food Production Programme and the current Cropping Project to support rural farmers and to reduce poverty in the province. The initiatives included the introduction of genetically modified maize seeds, chemical fertilisers, chemical herbicides, and pesticides, as well as herbicide-resistant and pest-resistant crops. However, joining state-funded initiatives meant farmers had to give up the farming practices and knowledge systems that had sustained them for years, and they lost the kinship they had built with the local soil and its organisms. By kinship I am referring to a symbiotic relationship that does not separate nature from society, a relationship that is mutualistic and in which there is no mastery of one party over the other. Working with rural Eastern Cape small-scale farmers who participated in these programmes, this study employs a multidisciplinary approach to understand the changing agricultural landscape in rural South Africa, focusing on the consequences of state-funded programmes on local soil knowledge in the context of current Eastern Cape industrial agrarian policies. Navigating from small-scale farmers' voices, remote sensing technology, history, African environmentalism, soil science and the human psyche, the study examines what happens when corporations and the government encroach on traditional and small-scale agriculture. This integrative research methodology of the Environmental Humanities, framed from the Global South, compels us to reconceptualise our relationship with nature. The study argues that while agro-industrial technologies can be used with existing local practices to assist farmers, they should never be introduced as a replacement for existing local knowledge of soil fertility. Moreover, where policies focus on the financialisation of the agrarian economy, such policies risk benefitting agrobusinesses instead of poor, small-scale farmers. If policies intended to stimulate rural development are to be effective, the needs of rural small-scale farmers must be taken into consideration when such policies are initiated.

Thesis (DPhil (Sociology and Social Anthropology))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / Identity reflects and aims to control one’s experience. It is an act of consciousness which is neither essential nor immutable but a social construct open to change as circumstances, strategies and interactions fluctuate. It needs therefore to be situated historically and relationally, as identity is a matter of social context. This thesis sets out to investigate processes of identity formation in post-apartheid South Africa, i.e. a context marked by deep changes at both symbolic/material structural levels, in particular within the urban setup. On the basis of focus group discussions with residents of Cape Town, various, and at times contradictory, strategies of identification are explored. Residents’ discourses are analysed on the basis of two entry points, that of the context or the ‘scale’ within which discourse occurs (from the local, to the urban, the national and the continental) and that of the traditional categories of class, race and culture. The narratives that urban citizens draw upon to make sense of their lives and environment illuminate the emergence of new social boundaries among citizens which, though volatile and situational, reveal a changing picture of South Africa as a nation.

Magister Artium - MA / This ethnographically-orientated intervention explored how members of a Cape Flats reading club “took hold” (Street, 2009) of digital literacy in their engagement with online fictional stories accessed by a mobile phone. The Masifunde reading club takes place inside the premises of a church located in one of the most impoverished and resource-constrained communities on the outskirts of Cape Town. The club is connected to a bigger sets of clubs under the Nal’ibali reading-for-enjoyment campaign seeking to create nurturing spaces for learning by introducing children to literacy through story-telling. I wanted to diversify and increase the literacy material available by introducing mobile phones to the club. This research paper is theoretically grounded in the New Literacy Studies (NLS) framework which argues that the social turn and digital turn to literacy have transformed literacy. I adopted an ethnographic approach to literacy in order to understand how mobile reading is ‘taken hold’ of within an already established activities of the club which are conceptualized using Goffman’s (1983) “interaction order”. Goffman’s (1983) “interaction order” was used to map the established print-based interaction order and then to examine the practices of reading online fiction and the materiality of the mobile phone as taken hold of within this interaction order. The notion of ‘taking hold’ of was further extended to reveal the ways in which mobile stories were resemiotized in the shared practices of the club members. The introduction of mobile phones is viewed within Prinsloo’s (2005) “placed resources” concept that pays attention to the specificity of the context in how the phone was taken hold of. What is more, through Goffman’s (1956) back stage and front stage concept, I was able to trace using Ker’s (2005) “text-chain” concept, how interactions in the back region WhatsApp group chat moved across space-time to the front stage interactions in the Saturday club event. This revealed the ways in which the uses and valuing of the phone changed across these spaces, with the phone being naturalised in the back stage, but being treated as a difficult object in the front stage sessions by the volunteers, while the children took up the phones in easy ways consistent with the existing interaction order and therefore as placed resources. The study reveals that triumphalist claims about uptake of digital technologies in resource-poor contexts and dismal internet connectivity need to be treated with caution.

This dissertation assesses the role of small-scale farming in reducing poverty in rural areas using household data collected from Kanyayo and interviews with Department of Agriculture, Bizana Local Municipality and other key community members. The reviewed literature confirmed that small-scale farming has a potential to reduce poverty if well supported. This support includes the eradication of problems facing small-scale farming, while at the same time empowering small-scale farmers through connecting them to reliable market outlets. The findings of the study indicated that small-scale farming in Kanyayo is faced by many problems. These problems include: labour shortage which is attributed to lack of youth involvement, laziness and sicknesses; insufficient rainfall; poor infrastructure and inadequate access to services; lack of connectedness to market outlets; lack of farming information. These obstacles to small-scale farming tend to constrain smallscale farming potential and thereby exacerbate poverty levels. Arising from the research several recommendations were put forward. These include: development of the labour force; irrigation schemes and construction of dams; delivering of services and infrastructure; market arrangements; accessible to farming information center. The study concludes that small-scale fanning has a power to reduce poverty in rural areas but that power is based on removal of barriers to small-scale farming. / Thesis (M.T.R.P.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

South Africa is not well endowed with indigenous forests which are now known to be degraded and declining at unknown rates. This constitutes a direct threat to quality of life of the resource-poor rural households who directly depend on them and to ecological integrity. It is also recognised that the declining tree resources, particularly the high value indigenous tree species, are increasingly threatened by a number of growing subsistence demands. This emphasised the need to cultivate and conserve high-value tree species such as Englerophytum natalense, Ptaeroxylon obliquum and Millettia grandis on-farm in Umzimvubu District. Agroforestry is recognised as a viable option for optimising land productivity, reducing pressure on the indigenous forests, ensuring a sustainable supply of desired tree products and services and improving the quality of life of the resource-poor rural households. This Thesis examines whether agroforestry in Umzimvubu District and similar areas of South Africa has the potential for addressing these needs. It recognises that for successful initiation, implementation and adoption, agroforestry should be considered at two levels, namely, household and institutional. Responses based on structured questionnaires were obtained at these levels. Questionnaires were used to determine whether the households and institutions were aware of, and responding to, the need to intensify and diversify on-farm production, ease pressure on indigenous forest, improve income opportunities and problem solving capacities to address agroforestry related issues. An ecological inventory of E. natalense, P. obliquum and M grandis was carried out to provide a sound basis for integrating high-value species into appropriate agroforestry systems and to facilitate the preparation of future management guidelines for these resources in Mt. Thesiger Forest Reserve. The study: i) confirms that most high value indigenous tree species merit integration into subsistence farming systems through agroforestry, ii) appreciates that some rural households have been unknowingly practising agroforestry, iii) recognises that agroforestry is implied in South Mrica's White Paper on Sustainable Forest Development of 1997, but notes that similar emphasis has not been adopted or incorporated in the National Forestry Action Programme of 1997, and iv) notes that challenges to promoting agroforestry research and development in the South Mrican context of the institutions and resource-poor rural households are many, but can be resolved. The study concludes that agroforestry stands to benefit many resource-poor rural households and enhance environmental resilience in South Africa in the next millennium. / Thesis (M.Sc.) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1999.

The patch structure of the grass sward at Kroomie (26°25'38"E 33°48'30"S) in a semi-arid savanna in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, was investigated. The study was conducted on long term grazing trials on five treatments varying in stocking rate (SR; recommended (low) and 1.5 x recommended (high), grazing system (continuous and rotational), and animal type (cattle and sheep). The treatments studied were CR (cattle, rotational stocking, low SR), CC (cattle, continuous stocking, low SR), CH (cattle, rotational stocking, high SR), SC (sheep, continuous stocking, low SR), and SR (sheep, rotational stocking, low SR). Rainfall during the two years of the study (1997/98 and 1998/99) was slightly below the mean average rainfall of the area (66 and 84% of the mean of 519 mm, respectively). Analysis of sward height data using Maximum Likelihood Estimation reflected a bimodal height structure in all treatments. Due to a high overlap of the two distributions in some cases, however, the height at which to separate patches (short grass) from non-patches (tall grass) could not be determined. Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) was used to relate species composition to sward height. It emerged that there are two distinct grass communities at Kroomie, and these are associated with sward height (i.e. patches and non-patches). The interface (in cm) between these two communities, as determined using Two Way Indicator Species Analysis (TWINS PAN) was 6 cm, and this value was subsequently used to discriminate between patches and non-patches. Sward structure was affected by treatments. Animals (cattle and sheep) stocked rotationally at low SR's grazed less than a third of the total area, and this grazing was concentrated primarily in small patches (< 6 m; length is used as a linear indicator of patch size). Animals stocked continuously at low SR's grazed approximately half the area, in small and large (up to 40 m) patches. Animals in the CH treatment grazed approximately two-thirds of the area, in both small and large patches. There was an inverse relation between the size of patches and the size of non-patches, as expected. Nine common grass species were related to sward height. Digiteria eriantha, Eragrostis racemosa, Eustachys paspaloides, and Microchloa caffra were associated with short swards, while Cymbopogon pluronodis, Eragrostis chloromelas, and Sporobolus fimbriatus were associated with tall swards. Themeda triandra (themeda), the most abundant grass at Kroomie, was principally associated with tall swards, but was present at all sward heights. Applying CCA demonstrated a considerable difference between the species composition of patches and of non-patches. There was also a difference in composition between treatments, although these were not as pronounced. Patches reflected a higher species diversity than non-patches. There was a significant (P<0.05) effect of treatment, and of an interaction of treatment by sward structure (i.e. patches and non-patches), on the density of themeda plants. The density of themeda plants was positively correlated with patch size, which suggested that themeda plants that have been grazed may suffer fatal competition from ungrazed neighbours. Anecdotal evidence suggested that patches are stable over the medium term, and that non-patches that are grazed during a drought return to a non-patch structure after rainfall. There was no evidence to support the contention that rotational stocking reduced patch-selective grazing, nor that the species composition of rotationally stocked treatments was better than continuously stocked treatments. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.