African Urbanism

Speaker: Edgar Pieterse
Chair: Philipp Rode
This event was recorded on 26 January 2011 in U8, Tower One
Africa is the fastest urbanising region in the world, and has become the focus of increasing attention from architects and planners, academics, development agencies and urban think-tanks. Professor Edgar Pieterse argues for a new way of thinking about African cities to accompany this surge of interest and to replace traditional views of African cities as sites of absence and neglect. Rapid urbanisation along with impressive economic growth rates for much of the Continent represents an interesting moment to take stock of how academic discourses capture and animate African urbanism. Edgar Pieterse is holder of the NRF South African Research Chair in Urban Policy. He directs the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Philipp Rode is executive director of LSE Cities.

Affordable Housing In South Africa With Prof. Francois Viruly

The housing subsidies announced in the President’s State of the Nation Address and the Finance Minister’s budget speech may well represent arguably the single biggest policy change to date. Joining ABN’s Godfrey Mutizwa in studio to discuss the social impact of affordable housing in South Africa is Prof. Francois Viruly, a property economist and professor at the University of Cape Town.

Sanitation Challenges In Urban Slums – SCUSA Part 1

Integrated approaches and strategies to address the Sanitation Crisis in Unsewered Slum Areas in African mega-cities

Bwaise III Parish, Kampala, Uganda
Africa, though reported to be the least urbanized continent, is recognized as one where the rate of urbanization is highest. To house all these new city dwellers, informal settlements in the peri-urban areas continue to development and expand.
It is not only housing that the urban population requires: clean drinking water and hygienic sanitary conditions are also essential. Providing water and sanitation in these peri-urban areas is however very difficult, for technical, financial, institutional and spatial reasons.

Lack of proper sanitation not only leads to undignified and unhealthy conditions; stagnant water causes breeding pools for malaria, plus the streams entering and leaving the slum catchment, either as surface water or groundwater, form a significant pollutant load.
This water is polluting drinking water and, due to extremely high phosphorus fluxes from the slum catchments, eutrophying surface water. Therefore, the main research question of this project is: How to improve sanitation in urban slums, with emphasis on reducing the output of nutrients leaving the slum?

Scusa
Objectives: to identify and implement low cost integrated sustainable sanitation solutions to provide excreta and greywater management in a typical slum area. To determine the financial, institutional, and sociological mechanisms or boundary conditions for successful implementation of sustainable sanitation solutions in this urban slum and to use the lessons learned in other slum areas. To determine the effect of slums and of environmentally sustainable sanitation in slums on groundwater and surface water quantity and quality. In answering to these research objectives, UNESCO-IHE is joining forces with Makarere University from Kampala Uganda.

Citizen Journalists Give a New Face to Nairobi’s Slums

thinkafricapress.com – Nairobi, Kenya. December, 6, 2012. Through journalism, residents of Nairobi’s slums are taking it upon themselves to highlight injustices and create a balanced image of slum life.

Ghetto Mirror – Photo by Jason Patinkin.

Newspaper editor Vincent Achuka was behind schedule. The November issue of his Ghetto Mirror newspaper had arrived a week late from the printer, and he had an hour to finalise story assignments for the next. Then, he and his reporters had to distribute hundreds of papers by hand across Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. It was a typical Saturday morning in the life of a slum journalist.

Read more: http://thinkafricapress.com

Nino Marchetti – The $200 Tiny “Pod” Home, Courtesy of Recycled Materials

Image via Jeffrey the Natural Builder

sustainablecitiescollective.com. December 1, 2012. Dream of building your own home, but lacking both cash and time? A natural builder raised a tiny home in rural Oregon over the course of just two months, at a total cost of just $200 — the cost of  screws, nails, tarpaper and sand.

The builder is Jeffrey the Natural Builder, and the “tiny dome home” (which comes to us via Treehugger) was constructed on land provided by Aprovecho, a sustainable education and research center located near Cottage Grove. His aim in constructing this little cabin was to source as many building materials as possible from the local waste stream, to familiarize himself with new techniques and to test out the possibilities of such structures in “pod living.”

Read more: Nino Marchetti – The $ 200 Tiny Pod Home, Courtesy of Recycled Materials

Shipping Containers Converted to Vancouver Social Housing

Read more: Shipping Containers Converted to Vancouver Social Housing