Henri Kampunzu （1952-2004）

Professor Ali Basira Henri Kampunzu passed away on Monday, 29 November 2004 at the Midland Park Hospital in Johannesburg(South Africa) and was laid down to eternal peace on Monday, 06 December 2004 in his home country in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC). He was a well-known and greatlya cknowledged trilingual African geoscientist. Some argue that he was the best-known and the greatest African geologist of our time.     

Urban land restitution in post-apartheid South Africa: Questions from the Johannesburg inner-city

In an attempt to address the racial injustices of the past,a Land Claims Court has been established in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper draws attention to the folly of compensating property owners tenants. It uses a case study of the Johannesburg inner-city suburb of Pageview to highlight the fact that Indian landlords, although forcibly segregated and themselves racially oppressed, profited from rack-renting to poor African, coloured and Indian people. Working class Indian organizations alleged that to protect this position of relative privilege, landlords opposed the provision of segregated public housing in the 1940s and 1950s. As the only individuals with legal title to Pageview property landlords now stand to gain from the land claims court while tenants are excluded from any restitution.This research is drawn from Beavon and Parnell (1991) which is a much extended unpublished version of this paper containing the full references to the primary material drawn from: Central Archive Depot (Cad); South African Transport Services Library Archive (Satsla): Intermediate Archive Depot Johannesburg (Iad), City Health Department Archive (Chda).     

The geography of property in inner-city Johannesburg

Questions surrounding property investment and the geography of property have been little researched in African cities. In this paper an examination is undertaken of the changing geography of property in the Johannesburg inner-city. Six distinct property districts in the inner-city are defined and their major property developments discerned. Ownership of the inner-city is narrowly focussed in the hands of 20 core institutional investors. Overall the problems of Johannesburg's economically declining inner-city property market are reflected in patterns of office rentals, vacancies and occupation.     

Changing patterns of ‘Black’ bus subsidies in the apartheid city, 1944–19861)

Bus fare subsidy, the difference between an economic fare charged by a bus operator and the amount paid by Black passengers, has played a vital role in the formation of the apartheid city in South Africa. Until 1986 employers paid transport levies on a weekly or monthly basis whilst the Government budgeted the contribution through Department of Transport vote. Transport subsidies reveals that subsidies were used to foster and facilitate the spatial organisation of urban areas. Subsidies were strongly associated with the geographical dislocation of Black communities from the centre of urban areas to the urban periphery. Subsidies first affected Black male workers in Johannesburg and a few geographical areas but were later extended to include African women, Coloureds and Indians. The theme that emerges from this paper is that the state used subsidies as one of the myriad strategies excluding Blacks politically, controlling them socially and making them dependent economically.     

Changing patterns of ‘Black’ bus subsidies in the apartheid city, 1944–19861)

Bus fare subsidy, the difference between an economic fare charged by a bus operator and the amount paid by Black passengers, has played a vital role in the formation of the apartheid city in South Africa. Until 1986 employers paid transport levies on a weekly or monthly basis whilst the Government budgeted the contribution through Department of Transport vote. Transport subsidies reveals that subsidies were used to foster and facilitate the spatial organisation of urban areas. Subsidies were strongly associated with the geographical dislocation of Black communities from the centre of urban areas to the urban periphery. Subsidies first affected Black male workers in Johannesburg and a few geographical areas but were later extended to include African women, Coloureds and Indians. The theme that emerges from this paper is that the state used subsidies as one of the myriad strategies excluding Blacks politically, controlling them socially and making them dependent economically.     

Transformative left-wing parties’ and grassroots organizations: Unpacking the politics of “top-down” and “bottom-up” development

Academic analyses of the potential for agents to transform development processes have been dominated by social movement theorists who focus on the prospects for creating an alternative to development that challenges the status quo. This has downplayed the role of political parties in the transformation process. This article takes the South African Communist Party (SACP) as a unit of analysis by drawing from a case study in Alexandra township, Johannesburg, where the local SACP has assisted with mobilizing a community-based organization in an informal settlement called S’swetla where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) purportedly imposed development onto residents. The local SACP viewed its intervention as pro-poor and bottom-up. It appeared initially to offer a transformative alternative to the official approach taken by the Alexandra Development Forum (ADF), an invited participatory space adopted by the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP) – a flagship project of the ANC. This paper uses this example to problematize the simplistic dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up development in the context of a political party that claims to be committed to pro-poor and people-driven development. In doing so, it argues that theorists must pay closer empirical attention to the politics of both invited and invented participatory spaces in order to understand the implications that this has for transforming development.     

Geography's role in general education in the United States

In the United States, geography is taught most frequently in the junior secondary schools, is somewhat more limited as a regular course in the senior secondary schools, and is a prominent discipline within many college and university programs of instruction. At the secondary school level, geography is usually integrated within the broader based social studies, while at the college and university level it has an important function both within general education as well as specialized training. At the pre-collegiate and collegiate levels geography has developed quite independently at times, and at other times there has been a close relationship that has benefitted both levels of education. At the end of the 1980s decade, considerable cooperation was underway in the United States between teachers of secondary school and tertiary level geography in order to upgrade and enhance the discipline. In the first part of this paper, a general history of geography within American education is presented. The second part of the paper discusses geography's role within general education at the secondary and tertiary levels, including the academic backgrounds for teachers. The way in which geographic education in the United States provides students with the opportunity to study holistic relationships between people and the environment and its importance to informed citizenship are discussed in the final section of the paper.     

Poverty tourism: theoretical reflections and empirical findings regarding an extraordinary form of tourism

During the mid-1990s, a new form of tourism was established in metropolises of several developing countries or emerging nations. This type of tourism consists in visits to the most disadvantaged parts of the respective city. Poverty tours or slum tours are offered on a relatively large scale in the South African cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, as well as in Indian metropolises, to name some important examples. The target group of these tours consists primarily of international tourists. It is estimated that 40,000 such tourists visit favelas in Rio de Janeiro each year, around 300,000 the townships in Cape Town. This contribution refers to and comments on these developments and insights regarding poverty tourism or slumming, based on empirical research and experiences in South Africa, Brazil, and India. It will be shed light on the phenomenon from an observational-theoretical perspective. It is aimed to open a discussion on the ways poverty tours or slumming observes and simultaneously programmatically charges poverty. And, it will be considered in which way poverty tourism is observed.     

An investigation of disaster education in elementary and secondary schools: evidence from China

The role of school-based disaster education in mitigating natural disaster has received extensive emphasis across the world. After the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, the elementary and secondary schools in China have attached more importance to disaster education. However, it is unclear about the outcome up to now. Therefore, we conduct a relatively extensive survey in Beijing, Hunan, Guangdong and Sichuan recently, based on the perspectives of both students and teachers, so as to explore their attitude, gains, and expectations. The findings indicate that, first, it is the consensus that school-based disaster education should be enhanced to raise the awareness and capability of students to address disasters. Second, school-based disaster education has received overall positive outcome in recent years, although there are also 18% students expressing that their schools have not opened disaster curricula or they are unclear about that. Third, almost all the teachers argue that schools should develop disaster-related curricula, incorporate disaster education curricula into the compulsory curricula, and design special textbooks for disaster education. Finally, most teachers insist that the school-based disaster education has limited effect on students to improve their disaster prevention awareness and capability; in particular, the disaster education tends to impart knowledge for the most part but lack attractiveness and local features.     

Mixed-race residential areas in South African cities — urban geographical developments in the late and post-apartheid phases

Even before the definite scrapping of the Group Areas Act in July 1991, mixed racial residential areas developed in South African cities. Against the Apartheid laws, this mainly occurred in central areas of the cities, which the white population had left during the process of suburbanization. Thus the moving of non-white, middle-class population groups into these areas became possible (so-called grey areas).The objective of this paper is to present and analyse one example for this development from the Johannesburg area. The following questions are examined by own investigations: the process of immigration and the succession of different groups of immigrants; the demographic and social characteristics of the inhabitants, esp. in comparison to the white population; small-scale concentration of different ethnic groups; conflicts between whites and non-whites; the consequences of the ethnic changes on neighbouring residential areas. The results lead to several hypotheses concerning the future development of South African cities.     

Sodium exchange in a NaCl waste disposal case (Lobatse,Botswana): Implications to mineral water studies

In the reconstruction of the chemical evolution of mineral waters, sodium exchange for calcium and magnesium, upon contact with soil and rocks, is often suggested. Such a process has been observed to take place on a large (and rapid) scale in NaCl waste disposal: that infiltrated to the local groundwater at Lobatse, Botswana. The process was repeated in laboratory experiments. Visiting Scientist at the Nuclear Physics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, during 1972.     

Post-Gondwana pedogenic ferromanganese deposits, ancient soil profiles, African land surfaces and palaeoclimatic change on the Highveld of South Africa

Several ferromanganese wad deposits are developed on the Archæan Malmani dolomite succession of the Transvaal Supergroup along the plateau forming the watershed between rivers draining to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans from the Highveld area between Johannesburg and Lichtenburg. The deposits were studied at the Wes Wits Gold Mine and the Ryedale, Houtkoppies and Klipkuil ferromanganese mines. The ferromanganese wad deposits are located in the Waterval saprolite, which formed by deep chemical weathering along the post-Gondwana African surface. The parent rocks for the wad are the Fe- and Mn-rich dolomites of the Malmani Subgroup of the Transvaal Supergroup at Wes Wits Mine and at Klipkuil, and Fe- and Mn-rich blackband Fe ores of the Ecca Group of the Karoo Supergroup at Ryedale and Houtkoppies. This saprolite is unconformably overlain by a ferruginous alluvial succession, informally defined as the Weswits formation. Diamondiferous gravel bars occur in the lower part of the fluvial succession. The unconformity at the base of the succession with incised valleys is thought to correspond to the post-African I event of uplift and erosion. Manganiferous soil nodules, derived from a lateritic weathering profile that originally covered the Waterval saprolite, are concentrated in the lower part of the Weswits formation. Climatic conditions became drier during the deposition of the Weswits formation, and plants with deep taproots vegetated the surface of the alluvium, giving rise to the formation of a ferric poclzol. Further aridification took place and eventually the plants with deep taproots died and a pediment developed along which a stone lag was concentrated. This pediment is thought to represent the post-African II surface of erosion. The pediment is overlain by the Hutton soil, representing Kalahari sand and dust that have been reworked by fluvial and peclogenic processes. Massive ferruginous soil nodules grew in situ in the Hutton soil, indicating more pluvial climatic conditions at times, most probably corresponding to the Quaternary ice age events in the Northern Hemisphere. A thin, modern orthic soil developed on top of the Hutton soil in the present day mild, subhumid climatic conditions.     

A literary geography of Soweto

Humanist inspired literary geography offers one avenue of enquiry into the study of place. Its prime intention is to untangle the subjective, personalised construction and connotations of place meaning. African literature offers a rich source of information into the black urban experience. The presentation focuses upon the literary interpretation of Soweto, South Africa's largest black township. The Sowetan environment emerges as a landscape of placelessness in which the overwhelming emphasis by white and black writers alike is upon relating appalling conditions in an austere and hostile environment.     

INTRODUCTION

<正>The International Council for Applied Mineralogy Congress(ICAM)is the most important regular gathering of applied mineralogists.The ICAM2013,to be held at Southwest University of Science and Technology (SWUST)in Mianyang,China,on07-10July,is our 11th meeting.It has been 32 years since the inaugural meeting in Johannesburg,South Africa in1981and this decenary event perhaps heralds a new era for Applied Mineralogy as we tackle a whole new set of challenges facing our world today.At our last meeting     

Social segregation and academic achievement in state-run elementary schools in the municipality of Campinas, Brazil

Space not only reflects social inequality, it also reinforces the advantages or disadvantages associated with social class. However, the study of how neighbourhoods affect their residents has only recently entered the debate on urban poverty in Latin America. We use 2000 data from the Brazilian population census, school census, and the state of São Paulo’s educational evaluation system to analyze the relationship between school infrastructure, school academic achievement, and the neighbourhoods in which these schools are located. Our analyses indicate that state-run elementary schools located in areas of concentrated poverty have lower academic achievement in mathematics tests and Portuguese than mixed and affluent areas of the city, even though these schools are all administered by the same government body. We end with a discussion of the relationship between Brazilian education policy and its influence on spatial differences in São Paulo State.     

Characterisation of groundwater recharge conditions and flow mechanisms in bedrock aquifers of the Johannesburg area,South Africa

Groundwater is the major source of water and a critical resource for socioeconomic development in semi-arid environments like the Johannesburg area. Environmental isotopes are employed in this study to characterise groundwater recharge and flow mechanisms in the bedrock aquifers of Johannesburg, which is known for polluted surface water. With the exception of boreholes near the Hartbeespoort Dam, groundwater in the study area was derived from meteoric water that has undergone some degree of evaporation before recharge, possibly via diffuse mechanisms. Boreholes that tap groundwater from the Transvaal Supergroup Formation show depletion in δ¹⁸O and δ²H values. This is attributed to diffuse recharge through weathering fractures at high elevation that are undergoing deep circulation or recharge from depleted rainfall from the high-latitude moisture sources. The influence of focused recharge from the Hartbeespoort Dam was observed in the boreholes north of the dam, possibly as a result of the north–south trending fault lines and the north-dipping fractures in the bedding planes of quartzites. This is also supported by a reservoir water budget method which indicated a mean annual net flux of 2,084,131 m³ from Hartbeespoort Dam recharging groundwater per annum. Using tritium in the dam and boreholes located at 750 m and 5400 m downstream, average groundwater flow velocity was estimated as 202 m/year. An open system was observed in shale, andesite and granitic-gneiss aquifers indicating soil CO₂ as a dominant source of carbon (δ¹³C) in groundwater. A closed system was also observed in dolomitic aquifers indicating carbonate dissolution as the predominant source of carbon.     

Locational Decisions and Residential Preferences of Taiwanese Immigrants in Australia

Since the 1980s, the increase of Asian migrants in large cities has contributed significantly to the cultural landscape of Australia, especially in the city suburbs. Based on the Census and in-depth interviews of 103 Taiwanese migrants, this research examines the location decisions and residential preferences of Taiwanese migrants in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. The reasons for choosing the state, the particular city, and specific area of residence are probed into. The survey shows that migrants moved to Australia mainly for children’s education, lifestyle and political instability reasons. The main reasons for choosing to settle in Sydney were favourable business opportunities, and the northern part of Sydney was preferred. Those who chose Brisbane are attracted by the good climate there, and the residents preferred the Sunnybank area. Melbourne was chosen for the good education it offers, and areas on transportation lines near good schools are selected. Choice of residence was based mainly on their needs and their resources which may change over time. In general, they always choose to locate in close proximity to their family, friends and Taiwanese communities. Their locational choice depends on income and housing budget, proximity to good schools and shopping centers, and information from friends or earlier migrants. Based on such factors, this study clearly demonstrates that the Taiwanese immigrants are fundamentally different from early Chinese settlers who once aimed to settle at Chinatown locations.     

Classroom responses of New Zealand school teachers following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake

Following a damaging magnitude 6.3 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand on February 22, 2011, an unprecedented number of displaced school children were enrolled temporarily or permanently in new schools throughout New Zealand. This study utilized accounts from primary school teachers in New Zealand, derived from focus groups scheduled in March and April 2011 for an evaluation of a disaster preparedness teaching resource, to examine how these disasters impacted individuals and schools outside of Christchurch. The educators’ focus group accounts provide an illustration of classroom responses including providing emotional support to displaced children, informal classroom discussions, curricular responses, addressing disaster rumors, and information seeking through peers. Some recommendations are provided on ways to support teachers’ important roles in disaster recovery, including targeting evidence-based guidance and teaching resources to schools enrolling displaced children, dispelling disaster rumors through schools and facilitating peer mentoring among teachers. An overarching lesson is that communities would benefit from teachers being better equipped to provide emotional support and responsive disaster education to children after disasters.     

Sustainable urban environments: The case of Alexandra

The long-term benefits of reconstruction and development in South Africa can succeed only if the environmental considerations are integrated into policy decisions. The proper management of the country's valuable renewable and non-renewable resources is essential for future prosperity. The environments of urban renewal projects need to be effectively managed. A case study of urban upgrading in Alexandra, Johannesburg illustrates the vital importance of integrating environmental components into reconstruction and development programmes in South Africa.     

The role of geography in education in England and Wales

Geography within England and Wales has undergone several important changes since its development as a school and university subject during the 19th century. The 1960s were an especially important period of major change with the introduction of scientific, conceptual elements to the field. Those changes were accompanied by several curriculum projects of national scope that brought the new geography to the classroom. In the 1980s, geography was recognized as a foundation subject, giving it renewed importance within the curriculum of the secondary schools. Government intervention has increased within most aspects of education, especially with regard to examinations and training for employment, thus placing greater strains upon the teaching force. Within the general framework of education, geography provides a unique perspective. As a discipline, it infuses a global dimension at the macro-level and a sense of place at the micro-level. That perspective is important since it bridges general knowledge of the discipline to social and environmental issues at various scales.