RESOURCE PRODUCED BY CSIR BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY & CSIR ROADS AND TRANSPORT TECHNOLOGY
RESOURCE PRODUCED BY CSIR BUILDING AND CONSTRUCTION TECHNOLOGY & CSIR ROADS AND TRANSPORT TECHNOLOGY |
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Improving transport accessibility for people with disabilities A cost-benefit approach to the identification of well-located land for low-income housing developmentWater services: is franchising feasible? Improvement of the aggregate interlock equation used in the cncPave software package Building quality index for houses CSIR's fire investigation team in demand SB'04 Africa - Regional Conference on Building and Construction Sustainable building workshops CSIR's Dr Sharon Biermann nominated for prestigious national award E N Q U I R I E S |
The CSIR's Dr Sharon Biermann delivered a paper, 'The sustainable location of low-income housing development in South African urban areas', at the Third International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability in June 2004 in Siena, Italy. The paper describes a sustainable housing development cost-benefit model, developed for measuring and comparing the costs and benefits of alternative low-income settlement locations. This model was tested for a number of subsidised housing locations to enable the empirical comparison of locations in terms of the identified sustainability cost-benefit criteria and also to enable the further refinement of the model. It was found that there is significant diversity in low income households and it is not simply a case of "one size fits all". Different needs and priorities exist which translate into different criteria and levels of importance for different profiles of low-income household. Furthermore, access to formal employment nodes are less important for low-income households than access to informal opportunities, predominantly in the informal service industry within or near the low-income settlement itself, and access to middle to high-income residential areas where unskilled, semi-skilled and domestic occupations are in high demand. In measuring the sustainable of a location it is thus necessary to extend the measure of access to work to include these findings. A further paper, which won an award for the best paper presented by an under-35-year old, was presented by Dr Christo Venter of the CSIR at the South African Transport Conference in Pretoria in July 2004. This paper focuses on the transportation cost results and observes that variations occur across areas in terms of travel distances and expenditures which are not related to the locality of the settlement in any simple way. The study concludes that historical land use policy and lack of integrated planning have distorted the urban form to such an extent that theoretical cost differentials between sprawling and denser development do not necessarily materialise. It is suggested that simplistic dichotomies such as 'central" and "peripheral" are less useful in the context of the multi-nodal South African city, and that planners should employ a more nuanced set of measures to assess the costs and benefits associated with any particular housing development and its associated transport implications. Download the following papers in pdf format:
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E M A I L
During the past two years, the Housing Finance Resource Programme, on behalf of USAID, funded an investigation by the CSIR into the infrastructural and energy consumption implications of alternative locations for low-income housing development in South African urban areas. During the first stage of the study, which focussed on Johannesburg, a comparative development cost-benefit assessment of a central location (Alexandra) versus a more peripheral location (Diepsloot) was undertaken. The second phase of the study involved an expansion of the research into Ethekwini, where six low-income housing settlements were analysed. A number of papers with different perspectives have emanated from this empirical, multi-disciplinary research and have been presented at conferences both locally and abroad.
