Transformation of residential planning in Umtata during the post-apartheid transition era

The political changes in South Africa after 1994 necessitated that the Bantustans, the main servers of apartheid planning, be re-incorporated into the mainstream of South Africa, implying the transformation of apartheid residential planning. Since then there has been much speculation about the type of transformation that would be implemented in the Bantustans to effect change in a non-racial South Africa. The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of post-apartheid territorial restructuring in the former South African Bantustans. Examining and elucidating the manner in which the diverse social, economic and political factors have manifested themselves in the process of transformation of spatial residential planning in Umtata (the former capital city of the Transkei Bantustan) since 1994 is the central theme of this paper. Using property registers together with changes in legislative policies and land ownership, the transformation pattern was analysed in the former Bantustan capital city (Umtata). The findings indicate that the new South African policies and development strategies have been partially successful in eliminating the incongruencies of the past with regard to access to housing in Umtata. More critical is that this paper suggests that there still remains a greater challenge lingering from the influence of the Bantustan government in the city.     

The struggles for survival of street traders in Umtata,Transkei, 1980–89

Within the broad theoretical context provided by debates on the subordination of the informal sector to capital, the paper investigates the struggles between communities of street traders and the municipal authorities of Umtata, capital city of Transkei. The study spans the period 1980–89. Themes of concern in the paper are objections to street traders and the adoption of repressive policies towards them, the resistance of street traders and the changing attitudes of the Transkei government and Umtata local authorities towards the operations of hawkers.     

Employment in Cape Town’s lodging sector: opportunities, skills requirements, employee aspirations and transformation

Since the attainment of democracy in 1994 one of the major concerns of the South African government has been to address the social and economic injustices that characterised the apartheid regime. With tourism on the rise in South Africa and international arrivals growing at a rate almost triple the global rate, the tourism industry has been identified as one of the important industries to drive the transformation agenda. This study sought to assess the employment situation in Cape Town’s lodging sector, identify the existing types of jobs and skills requirements of the sector, determine career aspirations of and skills development needs for lodging sector employees as well as asses the state of transformation. Study findings showed that the lodging sector is labour intensive, requires low academic skill, and offers low paying employment following the findings that about a quarter of the respondents indicated that their jobs didn’t require any formal qualification, the average working day was 9.2 h and 52% earned below R3,500 a month. The study showed significant differences in income based on race. White employees earned significantly more than their black and coloured counterparts. However, white employees working as general labour were also significantly more qualified than their black and coloured counterparts. There was a significant positive relationship between income and length of service for white employees, but the same wasn’t true for black and coloured employees. There was a significant negative relationship between length of service and academic qualifications for black employees implying that black people’s length of service for one employer decreases as they become more academically qualified. Also significant was skills development opportunities based on gender. Significantly more females than males had attended on-the-job training programs.     

Institutional forces behind water conflict in the Ganga plains

With increased upstream withdrawal of Ganga waters for irrigation and urban industrial uses, Ganga's dry season flow is declining. The heavily populated but marginalised north Indian State of Bihar with its capital at Patna expects the Union government in Delhi to curb the appetite of upstream States; but Delhi's water bureaucracy, having grown within a culture of ‘construction’ rather than ‘water management’, is reluctant to do so. Adding to Patna's anxiety is a new fear in the form of the 1996 Farakka Treaty between India and Bangladesh, an international obligation that Patna fears will further curtail its water rights. Delhi, however, is able to placate Patna with promises of a Kosi High Dam in Nepal on the major tributary of the Ganga closest to Bihar. Because both bureaucracies belong to a social solidarity of hierarchic procedures that would make similar technological choices, Patna is pacified. On the other hand, activist groups in Bihar belonging to a different solidarity, that of egalitarian equity, point to the dismal consequences of past technological choices (embankments) on the land and its poor and continue to oppose this new choice as well. The hierarchic discourse between Patna and Delhi, however, filters out this activist critique and pursues a business-as-usual program of new high dam construction. The purpose of this paper is to examine the institutional background behind such rigid, single-mission policies and the costly surprises and impasse they are prone to. The paper argues that sagaciously providing space for constructive engagement among differing perspectives of the state, market and civil society on Bihar's water problems may minimize this risk. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Contesting Chinatown: Place-making and the Emergence of ‘Ethnoburbia’ in Brisbane,Australia

This paper juxtaposes the actual areas of settlement and settlement activities of Chinese migrants in Brisbane’s southern suburbs since the mid-1980s, with the concomitant, ‘government planned’ construction of the city’s Chinatown as an ‘exotic,’ ‘ethnic,’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ landmark. It argues that while the latter, as with Chinatowns in other Australian and world cities, has continued to appropriate the symbols of so-called ‘Chineseness’ to sell the locale to non-Chinese, the former, in recalling the notion of ‘ethnoburbia,’ significantly evinces actual Chinese migrants’ agency and role in place-making. In the process, these migrants have not only established a local, ethnically meaningful environment, but also challenged the still current metonymic Western image of the Chinese as preferring life in ‘ethnic’ urban enclaves that had its origin from early Chinese settlement and fundamentally detached from the lives of other ethnic groups per se. Indeed greater recognition and comprehension of such locales may go a long way to illustrate that many Chinese living in Australia today do not fit the territorial, place-based identity often associated with them in the imagination of mainstream society.     

Analytic hierarchy models for regional groundwater monitoring well allocation in Southeast Asian countries and South Korea

Groundwater has played an important role in economic development in Southeast Asian countries, but some problems caused by nature or human actions such as contamination, over pumping, and land subsidence bring the necessity of more systematic groundwater monitoring wells. The analytical hierarchy process with pairwise comparison was used to allocate and organize the regional groundwater monitoring wells in five regions, Thailand, Cambodia, East/West Malaysia, and South Korea. Five different multi criteria decision models, which were composed of three primary criteria and eight secondary criteria, were developed based on the answers of the questionnaire from 76 groundwater experts in Thailand, 100 in Cambodia, 101 in East Malaysia, 87 in West Malaysia, and 93 in South Korea. It was revealed that the weights of model criteria for each country, which also represent relative importance on groundwater monitoring, were different according to the diverse groundwater situation. The most important factor to determine the number of monitoring well was ‘number of households using only groundwater as a water source’ for Thailand and South Korea, ‘number of contamination sources’ for Cambodia, ‘amount of groundwater use for drinking-water supply’ for East Malaysia, and ‘number of wells with contaminated water’ for West Malaysia.     

Capitalism, masculinity and whiteness in the dialectical landscape: The case of Tarzan and the Tycoon

The intent of this paper is to explore how ‘reel’ and ‘real’ landscapes can be rendered dialectic. The analysis focuses on the filming of Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941) at the wildlife preserve of Wakulla Springs in Florida, which was administered by the financial tycoon Ed Ball. Using Mitchell's recent commentaries on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dialectics as our entry point, we offer two readings of this cinematic process. The first renders the on and off screen Wakulla Springs as ideological fodder, serving to valorise capital, masculinity and whiteness. The second reading addresses how this place has been actively constructed from discourses pertaining to class, gender and race, such that Wakulla exists as a series of fully relational spaces within diverse contexts, both ‘real’ and ‘reel’. In structuring our analysis in this manner, we hope to make clear why it does indeed matter for film geographers to acknowledge the conceptual presumptions brought to bear in the framing of the real and the reel as objects of analysis. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

New political violence in Africa – Secular sectarianism in Sierra Leone

Mary Douglas (1993) has indicated some of the shared concerns that keep voluntary enclaves together as ‘social movements’. The present paper describes a rather different kind of enclave politics, being concerned with the ‘new violence’ of groups enclaved by social exclusion and force. The paper focuses on the emergence and subsequent development of dissidents in the civil war in Sierra Leone. The RUF was at the outset a tiny but conventional guerrilla force, modelled on one of the militias in the Liberian civil war, and seeking to overthrow a decayed neo-patrimonial ‘one-party’ regime. Gaining little popular support, its members became marooned in forested isolation on the Liberia-Sierra Leone border. Recruits were mainly school children seized by force and ‘converted’ through having to take part in atrocities against rural civilians. Unable to return to the larger society on pain of summary execution, captives have had little option but to adjust to the political fantasies of a violent and unstable leadership. They were enclaved by force. Indicating the predictive strength of Douglas' arguments about the cultural dynamics of the enclave, the subsequent atrocity-drenched story of the RUF suggests that it is not the content of belief that determines institutional culture but vice versa. To survive, the enforced enclave develops the concerns of the classic ‘sect’ - a doctrinaire ‘rationality’ (expressed in crude acts of ‘subtractive’ violence), rejection of magic, decision making by lots, preoccupation with defection, otiose leadership style. If the rest of the world is to come to terms with violent enclave organizations such as the RUF and Algerian GIA it may have to pay more careful attention to the way enclave institutions think. They may not respond ‘rationally’ to the kinds of incentives offered by mainstream groups organised around hierarchical and/or individualist systems of social accountability. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

War on Terror,work in progress: security,surveillance and the configuration of the US workfare state

This paper evaluates the impact of recent shifts in the geopolitical outlook of the United States—specifically the ‘Global War on Terror’ and its domestic ramifications—on the prior project of reconfiguring the US state to an after-Fordist ‘workfare’ paradigm. In particular, the paper attempts to situate recent developments in the reconfiguration of the American welfare state within the context of debates over the ‘exceptional’ nature of US politics post-9/11. The extent to which this has had a bearing on work practices, welfare provision and workfarism is investigated, citing examples from the post-9/11 era. On the basis of such examples it has been suggested that the project of reconfiguring the US welfare state and labour relations does overlap and intersect with the emergency practices that the US state has instituted domestically as part of the War on Terror. However, the reconfiguration of the US welfare state towards a neoliberal or workfarist paradigm is, we argue, largely part of the ‘normal’ (as opposed to exceptional) fabric of US politics. The project of reconfiguring the US welfare state is ongoing and largely autonomous (although not entirely removed) from the use of exceptional practices in relation to the US security state. Investigation of this relationship, we assert, provides a potentially fruitful ‘new direction’ for both critical geopolitics and political economic geography, and grounds for interaction between the two.     

Creating sustainable communities through tenure-mix: the responsibilisation of marginal homeowners in Scotland

The idea that the deprived communities of the UK’s towns and cities are ‘unsustainable’ has been a central theme of government housing policy since New Labour came into power in 1997. The creation of ‘mixed-tenure communities’ has been heralded by some policy makers as a key component of creating sustainable communities by overcoming concentrations of deprivation as well as creating responsible citizens who make few demands on the state. Since devolution, support for owner-occupation has been promoted by both Scottish Labour and SNP regimes as a regeneration tool, and has been included in the Local Housing Strategy of many local authorities in Scotland. Drawing on research in Glasgow, this paper achieves three things. First, it highlights the ethopolitics associated with the identities of owner-occupiers and social rented tenants as skilled or flawed consumers; second, it explores the tools used in recent years to create mixed communities through encouraging owner-occupation; and third, it questions the continued uncritical support of the insertion of owner-occupiers into deprived areas as a regeneration and responsiblisation tool.     

Economic restructuring, social re-composition and recent urban changes in Portugal

The productive restructuring process has affected more than just the economic field, because its effects have been felt on urbanisation processes, on social relations, and on the spatial organisation of society. Starting from the ‘metapolis’ concept, developed by Ascher (1995), we analyse the evolution of new forms of urban space in Portugal, arguing that new urban forms generate new social inequalities and, in extreme cases, social exclusion. Portugal is a semi-peripheral country that combines certain of the trends in social and economic organisation common to core countries, with certain trends more common in the developing world. Thus the understanding of urban change in Portugal is a complex task, made more difficult by the rapidity of processes since the mid 1970s. The Lisbon Metropolitan Area has been deeply affected by the productive restructuring process. The role of economic and urban policies in the Lisbon region is discussed, and an assessment is made of certain measures aimed at solving economic and social problems. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Experimental determination of the reaction dolomite + 2 coesite = diopside + 2 CO2 to 6 GPa

 The carbonation reaction CaMg(CO₃)₂ (dolomite)+2SiO₂ (coesite)=CaMgSi₂O₆ (diopside)+2 CO₂ (vapor) has been determined experimentally between 3.5 and 6 GPa in a multiple-anvil, solid-media apparatus. This reaction, a candidate for carbonation of eclogites (garnet+clinopyroxene) in the Earth’s mantle, lies at higher pressure for a given temperature than do the carbonation reactions for peridotites (olivine+orthopyroxene±clinopyroxene). A depth interval may exist within the Earth’s mantle under either ‘normal’ or ‘subduction’ thermal regimes where carbonated peridotite could coexist with carbonate-free, CO₂-bearing eclogite. Received: 25 May 1994/Accepted: 13 June 1995     

The local politics of the global countryside: boosterism,aspirational ruralism and the contested reconstitution of Queenstown,New Zealand

This paper examines the local politics through which the reconstitution of rural localities under globalization is advanced and contested, with particular reference to the impact of international amenity migration. It contends that as globalization proceeds not by domination but by hybridization and negotiation, local politics is critical as the sphere in which the outcomes of globalization processes are interpreted and contested. The paper examines the case study of Queenstown Lakes district in South Island, New Zealand, as a locality that has experienced significant transformation through engagement with globalization processes. These include high levels of international amenity in-migration, substantial overseas investment in property, commerce and construction projects, and an increasing volume of international tourists. Collectively, these processes have contributed to rapid population growth and intensive pressure for the development of rural land in the area. As detailed in the paper, land use planning became the dominant issue in local politics, with conflict between groups informed by ‘boosterist’ and ‘environmentalist’ stand-points, as well as the ‘aspirational ruralism’ of amenity in-migrants. Although locally-grounded, the conflict engaged trans-local actors and networks and transgressed space and scale, thus becoming itself an expression of globalization.     

The non-agricultural economy in post-socialist rural Romania: The insights and perceptions of national, regional and local institutions

This study evaluates some aspects of the socio-economic transformation of rural Romania with reference to the views of representative organisations (at national, regional and local levels) and other experts. Interviews conducted in ten communes of nine Romanian counties (‘judete’) focus attention on the advantages and disadvantages of system change experienced since 1989; the most important problems and constraints for future socio-economic change; and appropriate policies and perspectives for development in the immediate future. Wherever appropriate the claims of interviewees are substantiated through reference to statistics, drawn in many cases from Chambers of Commerce & Industry (CCI). Local level representatives presented much more negative views on recent change than their national and regional level counterparts, but all agreed on the crucial problem of capital shortage. Thus while specific programmes to assist rural areas are justified, they cannot fully succeed until the national economy is able to grow more rapidly and attract greater foreign investment. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

(Mis)adventures in Rumsfeld space

Ewald’s recent genealogy of constructions of risk in Western societies argues that the 1980s saw an important paradigm shift to the “precautionary principle”. Critical scholars have taken up this idea as a lens through which to interpret the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’. I argue that 11 September 2001 actually brought about qualitative changes to this paradigm. Bush’s pre-emptive doctrine is driven, and perhaps even more importantly, continually justified to the US population, by what might be called the “trans-precautionary principle”, a move from “decisionism” to “actionism”, and a new radicalization of the way fear is produced and managed. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous typology of different articulations of knowledge and ignorance offers an excellent analytical window onto the connections between ignorance, fear and geopolitical action in this new regime. In the latter part of the essay, his four modes of knowledge/ignorance are arrayed, for heuristic purposes, in an abstract spatial grid organized along dimensions of the specificity and possession of knowledge. This allows a ‘mapping’ of some of the Bush administration’s more controversial strategies in the ‘war on terror’, as a set of different pathways through Rumsfeld Space.     

Defense economic restructuring and conversion in South Africa

The aim is to examine issues of defence economic restructuring and conversion in South Africa. Under the new government, overall restructuring of the South African defence sector is occuring. With diminished defence expenditure, the military industry is encouraged to convert production capability to non-military products. The geographical implications of defence economic restructuring and conversion in South Africa are analysed in the context of international experience and debates. The Gauteng region emerges as the national gunbelt of South Africa and contains an incipient military industrial district. In this particular region, the question of defence conversion is critically important for local policy makers and should be linked to new local economic development initiatives.     

Re-viewing the Entrapment controversy: Megaprojection, (mis)representation and postcolonial performance

Becoming the tallest building in the world in the mid-1990s, the Petronas Towers was the centre piece of an image of national progress and development that Malaysian authorities sought to project internationally. The release of Fox Movies' Entrapment in Malaysia in May 1999 provoked political outrage and popular disappointment at the way in which the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur had been spliced alongside riverside ‘slums’ filmed in the town of Malacca some 150 km away. This paper provides a critical reading of the spliced scene in the movie. At one level, the angry response of the Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to the scene diagnoses a geopolitics of asymmetrical representational power. However, I show how Mahathir's criticism of Entrapment in Malaysia was as much a defence of domestic political legitimacy (and national economic investibility) as it was ‘opposition’ or ‘resistance’ to hegemonic ‘Western’ (mis)representation. In addition, while the material and symbolic work of reimaging Kuala Lumpur had sought to negate (neo)orientalist imaginings of ‘Asian’ cities, the controversial scene rendered visible environmental ‘underdevelopment’ that has no place in a modern (vision of) Malaysia. Entrapment thus performed something in inducing Malaysian cities and citizens to ‘clean up’ their act, to practice ‘fully developed’ ways of seeing, being and being seen. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A model for multiphase flow and transport in porous media including a phenomenological approach to account for deformation—a model concept and its validation within a code intercomparison study

Multiphase flow processes in unsaturated cohesive soils are often affected by deformation due to swelling and shrinking as a result of varying water contents. This paper presents a model concept which is denoted ‘phenomenological’ in terms of the processes responsible for soil deformation, since the effects of deformation on flow and transport are only considered by constitutive relations that allow an adaptation of the hydraulic properties. This new model is validated in a detailed intercomparison study with two state-of-the-art models that are capable of explicitly describing the processes relevant for the deformation. A ‘numerical experiment’ with a state-of-the-art reference model is used to produce ‘measurement data’ for an inverse-modelling-based estimation of the model input parameters for the phenomenological concept.     

Surviving in the periphery of the town — the living conditions of sahelian drought refugees in Mopti (Republic of Mali)

This article intends to describe the social situation and living conditions of the drought refugees living in the periphery of Mopti. The complex phenomenon of ‘poverty’ and of social discrimination is explained by different indicators (kind of ‘informal economy’, kind of dwelling, composition of food, hygienic situation). In contemporary Africa hunger has become a problem of those people who have lost their original social and economic roots. This holds expecially true for the drought refugees. The transformation of nomads and peasants into proletarian and dependent outcasts will be demonstrated.     

Cultural industries, information technology and the regeneration of post-industrial urban landscapes. Poblenou in Barcelona - a virtual city?

In a former industrial part of Barcelona, as in the de-industrialising neighbourhoods of many big cities, the ‘new’ economy and the ‘cultural’ economy have started to replace the ‘old’ economy, bringing new life into a declining district but also causing conflicts of land use, housing or the preservation of architectural heritage. The latter is an important part of regeneration and marketing policies of city governments, whereby the ‘new’ economy not only emerges from the old but the physical space of the old industrial quarter becomes the tool and setting in which the city can re-present itself and its success story of transformation and regeneration. Through the increasing use of information and communication technologies, which are at the same time driving this transformation - an industry as such as well as business-aid in various sectors, cultural industries in particular - the city has acquired a second, virtual presence. The city exists and ‘lives’ on numerous websites. Those by city government and city organisations often have the express purpose of marketing and presenting the city, while those by (cultural) businesses and other organisations in the district add to the mosaic of the virtual city. As a result, the old industrial space continues to live and be productive, its economic value having changed largely into a cultural value. This coexistence of the real and the virtual, old and new, also meets with a conflict at certain junctures. There is the positive representation of plans and events on the city's websites on the one hand, and the undercurrent of protest and disenchantment among the local population who find themselves marginalised from the profits and success of development, on the other. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.