Chapters in Books (Geography and Environmental Studies)

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    Opening up to the World: An Exploration of Residents’ Opinions on and Perceptions of St Helena Island’s Tourism Development
    (2020-12) Donaldson, Ronnie; Forssman, Adrian
    St Helena Island, often regarded as one of the most remote places on earth, is an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom and generally considered geographically as ‘part’ of Africa. Economically, the island is wholly dependent on British aid. Once important as a stop for trading ships for some 400 years, the island has suffered the same problems faced by many other small island economies: a lack of natural resources, diseconomies of scale, net outmigration, and a dependence on aid and remittances. Tourism has been earmarked as an important sector which has the potential to contribute significantly to the economy of St Helena, especially after the completion of the St Helena Airport. The purpose of this research reported here was to determine the level of tourism development on St Helena since its ‘opening up’ to the world after the first passenger flight touched down in 2017, by applying Butler’s tourism area life cycle model and Doxey’s irridex model. These models provided the framework for qualitatively determining the level of tourism development. An e-survey was conducted among residents about their expectations of tourism development. St Helena has been trapped in the involvement stage for decades while being inhibited by its remoteness and accessibility issues. It is clear from the evidence that some of the island’s tourism characteristics relate to the involvement stage, whereas others are synonymous with the development stage. It is thus reasonable to argued that St Helena currently lies in a flux between the involvement and development stages of the Butler model. The opening of the airport is conceivably the springboard necessary for leaving behind all the impeding features of the involvement stage.
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    Breaking down the binary : meanings of informal settlement in southern African cities
    (HSRC Press, 2013) Groenewald, Liela; Huchzermeyer, Marie; Kornienko, Kristen; Tredoux, Marius J.; Rubin, Margot; Raposo, Isabel
    Informality is a ubiquitous characteristic of urban life in Africa and elsewhere. Although the phenomenon of informality is loosely understood as the strategies and institutions that develop beyond the regulatory framework of the state (Abdoul 2005), a rigid distinction between formal and informal sectors precludes the possibility that informal sectors could be complementary to, rather than incompatible with, the institutions and regulations of the state and the formal market (Roy 2005) takes issue with the way in which the dominant frames through which informality is studied equate informality with poverty. Reflections on the tendency to think in terms of a formal-informal binary emerged in the late 1970s, half a decade after the concept of the informal economy was coined (Dick & Rimmer 1980; McGee 1978). In today's urban climate, it may be more useful to think of different interests that shape strategies to compete for resources in cities (Roy 2004).