Doctoral Degrees (Geography and Environmental Studies)
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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Geography and Environmental Studies) by browse.metadata.advisor "Donaldson, S. E."
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- ItemAn analysis of an urban edge as urban growth management instrument : Cape Town, South Africa(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Horn, Anele; Donaldson, S. E.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Geography & Environmental Studies.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The City of Cape Town (CoCT) has since the 1990s employed an urban edge line and development edges policy as growth management instruments in its spatial development framework (SDF) (CoCT 2011). However, in the most recent Cape Town Spatial Development Framework (CTSDF) of 2017 they no longer make use of an urban edge line or policy as an instrument to contain horizontal urban spatial growth. Instead, the latest CTSDF champions development that will support transit‐oriented development in the urban core and notes the city’s intention not to extend services towards the urban periphery in the short‐term (CoCT 2017). This sees a considerable turn‐around from the stated historic apprehension to persistent growth pressure to the northern and eastern urban extremities of the metropolitan area by using an urban edge, and seems to suggest that the former urban edge policy was considered inappropriate or problematic to the CoCTs objectives for spatial development in the latest SDF. Reasons for the termination of this policy‐approach formed the basis of this research in which, firstly, the spatial outcomes of the urban edge line and policy in Cape Town since 2001 was evaluated by using an urban sprawl index (USI); and secondly, the decision‐making processes associated with urban development proposals contravening the urban edge line and leading to the ultimate termination of the urban edge policy instrument were analysed by applying a five‐stream confluence model. The research results revealed disproportionate population growth compared to urban expansion over a comparable time period, suggesting that the urban edge line and policy, during its time of acting as an urban growth management instrument was successful. Evaluation of decision‐making processes revealed consistent poorly motivated political decisions contravening the urban edge line and development edges policy, in favour of a neoliberal growth agenda, thereby strongly suggesting a neoliberal capture of the decision‐making authority.
- ItemA chaos theory approach to understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism businesses in Plateau State, Nigeria(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-12) Iirmdu, Tina Odinakachi; Donaldson, S. E.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Geography and Environmental Studies.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Nations worldwide are grappling with the challenges of crises and disasters affecting the tourism industry. The coronavirus (COVID-19) which unexpectedly broke out in 2019 in Wuhan, China spread around the world in 2020, paralyzing tourism businesses. Previous crisis impact management strategies in tourism have relied heavily on linear deterministic models, which are incapable of considering the complex and chaotic nature of the tourism system. The use of chaos theory for crisis management in the tourism industry during the pandemic is still an emerging field that is yet to be fully explored. This study helps bridge this knowledge gap by using chaos theory to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism businesses in the Plateau State of Nigeria. A pragmatic mixed-method inductive research approach was followed in this study. This approach made it possible to obtain valid and reliable data by conducting semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire survey as the primary data collection techniques. A total of 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted with the managers and owners of tourism businesses to gather information on the business management practices and risk management strategies they used during the health crisis. In addition, tourism business managers completed a total of 227 questionnaires on the impact of the pandemic on their businesses, while 408 tourists completed the questionnaire on their experiences during the pandemic. The information from the semi-structured interviews was thematically analyzed and descriptive statistics were used to examine questionnaire survey data. Findings about the tourists’ experiences during the pandemic show that non-pharmaceutical interventions have changed tourism practices and tourist behaviour. The pandemic has boosted self-organization among tourists, they have become more aware of the pandemic and they are wary of protecting themselves when travelling, instead of avoiding travel altogether. Moreover, the pandemic has significantly affected the economy of tourism businesses. Due to lockdowns and restrictions, business managers increased product prices because of sharp rises in food prices, witnessed reduced demand and cutbacks in staff wages. Other tourism businesses were able to retain their workers and maintain staff salaries because they were profiting by raising prices of products and providing essential services to customers which they considered a blessing in disguise. The study also identified business management practices and risk management strategies used by the managers of tourism businesses during the pandemic. Businesses suddenly found themselves on the edge of chaos. As a result, managers had to self-organize and invest in new markets while creating unusual attractions as a lock-in effect to reward and retain existing customers and, perhaps, add new ones. The study also provided empirical evidence confirming the futility of the one-size-fits-all approach of deterministic linear models in crisis management. It is recommended that further Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za iv investigation be done into the socio-economic impact of the pandemic on other components of the versatile tourism industry in Nigeria and the rest of Africa. The research results contribute to a better understanding and management of crisis from the point of view of chaos theory, with particular emphasis on the tourism sector of Plateau State.
- ItemContesting space in urban Malawi : a lefebvrian analysis(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Mwathunga, Evance Evan; Donaldson, S. E.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Geography and Environmental Studies.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Cities in Malawi continue to be sites and spaces of resistance, struggle and contest over urban spaces. Since the introduction of colonial modernist planning with its adherence to segregation through functional zoning, homogenisation, and fragmentation of urban areas, squatting and land invasions on urban land have remained one of the widespread struggles for space in urban Malawi. Continued occurrence of squatting, land invasions, and encroachments on urban land reflect the inability of urban planning and its attendant land policies to provide land and housing to the majority of urban dwellers mainly the middle income as well as the marginalised urban poor. Over the years, government efforts have not decisively addressed the issue of land contestations in urban areas in spite of numerous reports of increasing cases of conflicts and competing claims over urban land in Malawi including land dispossessions, conflicts over land uses in urban and peri-urban areas and most significantly contestations manifested in squatting and land invasions on state land leading to growth of spontaneous settlements. In urban areas, efforts to address these competitions have included relocation; titling programmes, sites-and-services schemes, land reform programmes, and forced evictions, but struggles such as squatting and land invasions persist. In urban Malawi, the question is: why is urban planning, as it is conceived and acted upon (i.e. as mode of thought and spatial practice), a creator and not a mediator of urban land conflicts? The study aimed to answer this question, by using Lefebvre’s conceptual triad of social production of space, to gain an in-depth understanding of how the contradictions between people’s perceptions and daily life practices in relation to space, on one hand, and planner’s conceptions of space as informed by colonial, post-colonial, and neoliberal perceptions of space, generate perpetual struggle for urban space in Malawi. The study also investigated spatial strategies and tactics which urban residents employ to shape, produce and defend urban spaces from possible repossession by the state. Finally, the study explored lived experiences and the multiple meanings that urban residents attach to spaces they inhabit and these are used to contest imposition of space by state authorities while at the same time to produce their own spaces. Mixed method approaches were used to gather geodata, quantitative and qualitative data in the two neighbourhoods of Soche West (Blantyre city) and Area 49 (Lilongwe city) where there are on-going tensions over land between state authorities and urban residents. Primary sources of data included household surveys, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, documentary sources, observations, and electronic and print media. In view of the magnitude of the data, three software were used namely, SPSS, ATLAS.ti, and ArcGIS 9.3TM GIS for quantitative, qualitative, and spatial data respectively. Content and discourse analysis were also used to analyse government documents and newspapers. The research found that although planning thought and practice is dominated by imported modernist conceptions of space, planning authorities in Malawi are unable to impose this space on urban residents. Specifically, the research identified a number of constraints faced by planning authorities ranging from human and technical capacity, corruption, cumbersome and bureaucratic procedures, archaic, rigid and contradictory in laws and policies, complexity of land rights, poor enforcement, political influence and emergence of democracy, incomplete reclassification of rural authority into urban authority and shortage of financing mechanisms. In view of these state incapacities coupled with peoples’s perception of the illegitimacy of the state to control urban land, the study found that ‘dobadobas’ (that is middlemen, conmen and tricksters) have taken over to contest planning practices of the state by employing both violent and non-violent spatial tactics to appropriate, and defend their claim for urban spaces, thereby generating conflicts between the state and users of space. Consistent with our argument regarding representations of spaces and representational spaces, the research found that in both Lilongwe and Blantyre cities, the multiple meanings attached to spaces represent divergent but true lived experiences that involve different core values that may or may not be recognised by those residents who do not share them. Finally, planners, therefore, have to reconcile the contradictions between planners’ visions and the experiences of those who experience the city in their everyday life. By way of recommendation, planners, therefore, have to reconcile the contradictions between planners’ visions and the experiences of those who live in the city. Planners’ emphasis on abstract spaces and their modernist images of order imply that viable alternative place-making processes are not well understood, partially because formal discourse in planning and place-making revolves around largely iterative representations of space and the persuasive capacities of one or another representation. Rather, this researcher recommends continued use of the conceptual triad to enable researchers to become more fully aware of complexity in the human dimensions of space before planning. In the same way, by focusing on the two neighbourhoods, the researcher recommends that planning requires considerable time and effort and that it should priotise the human or the micro scale. Planning ought to bring on board the multiple meanings of space as discussed in the study as these are the multiple dimensions that planning has to grapple with in its quest to organise and produce urban space. Since space is never empty as it always embodies meaning, it is imperative to understand various meanings that people attach to the spaces they inhabit and their attachment to these spaces. In the study the fact that spaces carry multiple meanings encompassing exchange value, use value, emotional value, historical value, and sacred values among others, has been explored. Continued advancement of colonial modernist conceptions of orderliness, segregation, functional zoning and commodification which are constructed largely, by dominant economic and political elites, provokes resistance by groups who defend and seek to reconstruct lived space. Also, in view of the incapacity of the state to impose its conceptions of urban space through spatial practice of planning, urban residents continue to devise their own spatial strategies and tactics violent and nonviolent, to shape their own space. In conclusion, the paper stresses that spaces are not exclusively shaped or moulded by planners and planning practices of the state only, but also by spatial practices of everyday life albeit clandestine and unofficial. In this regard, in Malawi, cities including the post-colonial city of Lilongwe should not be understood as being shaped by planners’ space only but also the changing experiences of the city and everyday life and ambiguities of the users of urban space. Thus plans and documents as conceived spaces should not be understood as the only mechanism to shape and organise urban space but also the changing experiences of the city and everyday life and ambiguities of the users of urban space.
- ItemNon-metropolitan gated developments in the Western Cape : patterns, processes and purpose(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Spocter, Manfred; Donaldson, S. E.; Landman, K.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Geography and Environmental Studies.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Gated developments, also known as gated communities, have become a feature of urban living throughout the world and have been the subject of intensive research. Gated developments in South African cities are a ubiquitous feature of the post-apartheid urban landscape with many new housing developments in the form of secure estates or fortified townhouse complexes. Almost all the international literature on gated developments has focused on them as a metropolitan phenomenon. Very few international studies have investigated gated developments in non-metropolitan locales and this topic is unexplored in the South African context. This dissertation addresses this research gap. The study area is the entire non-metropolitan area of the Western Cape province. The politicoadministrative concept of non-metropolitan is used rather than the descriptor rural because the latter implies an area of primary production with no diversification of productive activities. The study area excludes the metropolitan area of Cape Town but includes the rest of the province within which there are settlements of varying sizes having a diverse range of economic activities. It is in these places that gated developments were investigated to cover and discover particular aspects of the hitherto unexplored non-metropolitan gated developments of South Africa. The specific objectives were to place the research in the theoretical and conceptual debates of gated developments; map the occurrence of the phenomenon; and spatially analyse the location and security aspects of the developments at a macro scale. Two towns, Swellendam and Ceres, were selected as case studies as their gated developments present a host of significant features warranting further micro-scale analysis. The spatial and locational analyses yielded other researchable themes specific to certain types of developments, namely retirement gated developments in Oudtshoorn and Swellendam and gated developments outside the urban edge. A comprehensive spatially-linked database of gated developments in the study area was compiled from numerous sources, culminating in a process of groundtruthing that resulted in the collection of data on the physical features of each development. Qualitative data was collected from respondents through interviews, electronic communications and a questionnaire survey. Distribution patterns of gated developments were determined from spatial data and data on physical features was used to calculate security level index values for the gated developments. These data sets enabled spatial and typological comparisons to be made. Qualitative data added a ‘voice’ to the quantitative data and provided insights into social, economic and planning aspects of gated developments. The location of gated developments in the province is largely determined by proximity to metropolitan Cape Town and areas with high occurrences of amenities. The spatio-temporal patterns and typological distinctions of gated developments are influenced by location-specific factors. In some towns the gated developments typify a living space and in others a living and lifestyle space. The security features of gated developments also vary typologically and spatially. Crime data was used to show that the distribution of non-metropolitan gated developments is not necessarily associated with towns with high levels of criminal activity. Security in these developments is not a response to rampant crime, rather a strategy brought into play in case something happens – preparedness in the unlikely event of a breach of security. The gated developments in the two case-study towns are strongly influenced by locationspecific needs, the purposes of residents and the processes of municipalities. Niche market gated developments, as represented in the thematic case studies of retirement gated developments and gated developments outside the urban edge are promoted by pull factors within towns and by the allure of an exclusive rural residential lifestyle of living in areas with high amenity offerings. The latter is linked to the transformation of agricultural land into gated developments, which signals a shift to postproductivist change in the study area. The results of this seminal investigation into non-metropolitan gated developments suggest avenues for further research endeavour. These include the need for greater understanding of the changing nature of social relations between gated and the non-gated inhabitants of non-metropolitan locales; investigation of the potential for increased topophobia within towns; and examinations of the functions of the various stakeholders and role players in establishing non-metropolitan gated developments.