Growing urban centres have been attracting ever higher numbers of rural migrants, including small-scale farmers, looking for better opportunities due to the rise of large-scale farming, loss of land and climate change. Consequently, there has been an increase in the number of spontaneous and informal settlements being constructed as cities do not keep up with the planning and infrastructure development for new arrivals. Urban dwellers in informal, unplanned settlements where issues of land tenure and access to services are prevalent have, consequently, been exposed to precarious living conditions with limited access to food and water scarcity. Urban agriculture (UA) strategies have been adopted by those residents to alleviate poverty and food insecurity, and have been seen to perform other functions, such as environmental, social, cultural and developmental. This study explores challenges and opportunities for sustainable urban farming as an integrated environmental management strategy for the upgrading of informal settlements in three case studies in Durban. This paper demonstrates the need for municipalities to support community driven processes to ensure sustainability of UA initiatives and sustained investment for maintenance. Policy makers need to create an enabling environment for academics, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector to co-develop water efficient solutions to manage the food-water nexus and capitalise on localised community structures and groups, such as co-operatives and women groups.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, 238 million people live in slums or informal settlements. Because of rapid urbanisation and population growth, informal settlements have become a major challenge in the urban landscape, exacerbating issues related to poverty, inadequate infrastructure, housing and poor living conditions. As part of a collaborative interdisciplinary project ISULABANTU, this paper provides an overview of toolkits focused on informal settlement upgrading (ISU) in South Africa and presents the process of an integrated toolkit development for sustainable human settlements in Durban, which was informed by participatory action research and co-production strategies. A toolkit can be a valuable and effective way of engaging communities in the process of ISU and for community members to take full ownership of the process, designing strategies that best respond to their needs. The review of existing toolkits has revealed several critical gaps related to community-led practices, integrated approaches to housing and environmental management, and gender. The integrated ISULABANTU toolkit aims to fill these gaps and complement the existing resources. It provides a framework for action research, active involvement of and partnership building with local communities in upgrading practices required to achieve sustainable human settlements.
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the intellectual structure shaping the circular economy (CE) discourse within the built environment in Africa.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopted a bibliometric analysis approach to explore the intellectual structure of CE in the built environment in Africa. The authors collected 31 papers published between 2005 and 2021 from the Scopus database and used VOSviewer for data analysis.
Findings
The findings show that there are six clusters shaping the intellectual structure: demolition, material recovery and reuse; waste as a resource; cellulose and agro-based materials; resilience and low-carbon footprint; recycling materials; and the fourth industrial revolution. The two most cited scholars had three publications each, while the top journal was Resources, Conservation and Recycling. The dominant concepts included CE, sustainability, alternative materials, waste management, lifecycle, demolition and climate change. The study concludes that there is low CE research output in Africa, which implies that the concept is either novel or facing resistance.
Research limitations/implications
The data were drawn from one database, Scopus; hence, adoption of alternative databases such as Web of Science, Google Scholar and Dimensions could potentially have yielded a higher number of articles for analysis which potentially would result in different conclusions on the subject understudy.
Originality/value
This study made a significant contribution by articulating the CE intellectual structure in the built environment, identified prominent scholars and academic platforms responsible for promoting circularity in Africa.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.