Suchergebnisse

Chapter 1: Reflecting on the housing lens and urban governance -- Section A: STATE AND COUNTER-STATE: DOMINANCE AND CONTESTATION -- Chapter 2: The quest to develop affordable housing: How Good Urban Governance depoliticizes the debate on housing affordability in Kigali, Rwanda -- Chapter 3: Interests and Contestation in Nairobi City Redevelopment and Housing Schemes -- Chapter 4: Are Social Movements achieving the Right to Adequate Housing in Lagos, Nigeria? -- Chapter 5: Becoming 'Unlawful': Homeownership, housing bureaucracy, and the production of precarity in Eastridge, Cape Town -- Chapter 6: Forced Evictions and the creation of the Lagos Mega-city -- SECTION B: STAKEHOLDER INTERFACES AND HYBRID ARRANGEMENTS -- Chapter 7: Navigating the ideological nexus between political and private interests: experiences on Inclusionary Housing from Cape Town -- Chapter 8: From Resistance to Reclamation: Insurgency in Khartoum's housing governance post the Sudanese revolution -- Chapter 9: Urban governance, authority and citizenship: the dynamics of local formal and informal governance of housing in Delft and Alexandra -- Chapter 10: Intermediation by necessity: The case of uMastand -- Section C: UNRESOLVED RESPONSIBILITIES -- Chapter 11: Housing delivery, local governance and co-operative government in Mangaung -- Chapter 12: Housing Governance in the Gauteng City-Region -- Chapter 13: 'Complicit or collusion' – Politics of Access to Land and Space in the Urban Housing sector in Harare City, Zimbabwe -- Chapter 14: Urban governance: balancing strong institutions and powerful actors in the provision of affordable housing in Lagos, Nigeria -- Chapter 15: A state of inconsistency: SA's urban housing policy and practice -- Section D: OUTSIDE THE STATE: PRIVATE SECTOR AND NON-STATE ACTIONS AND THEIR OUTCOMES -- Chapter 16: Afterlives of Housing Cooperatives -- Chapter 17: What lies in between: self-built housing and the struggle to remain in place in Dar es Salaam -- Chapter 18: Emergence of Large-Scale Private Housing Estates and their Impact on Urban Governance and Morphology in Windhoek, Namibia -- Chapter 19: Social integration in the private sector driven housing developments in South Africa -- Chapter 20: Housing settlements in selected rural towns and townships in KwaZulu-Natal and their capacity to enhance the production activity of the economy -- Chapter 21: Turning Land into Stand: negotiating land transformations in developer-driven 'affordable' suburbs, Gauteng, South Africa.

AbstractRecent years have seen a rising interest in peri‐urban spaces, urban frontiers and new suburbanisms, including in African contexts. However, given the scale of urban growth and the extreme diversity of formations emerging on the geographical edges of African city‐regions, a deeper understanding is needed of the drivers of peripheral urbanisms and the lived experiences of urban change in these spaces. Based on a comparative research project in South Africa and Ethiopia, this article draws out the epistemologies of researching African urban peripheries and presents a new conceptual framework. It offers a language for interpreting processes of peripheral development and change, highlighting five distinct but overlapping logics which we term speculative, vanguard, auto‐constructed, transitioning and inherited. Rather than describing bounded peripheral spaces, we argue that these logics can co‐exist, hybridize and bleed into each other in different ways in specific places and at different temporal junctures. Centring our methodological practices of comparative analysis, and privileging the voices of those living in urban peripheries, the article employs critical readings of urban scholarship before exploring how these five logics illuminate the complex processes of urban peripheral evolution and transformation. Formulating these logics helps to fill a lacuna in urban conceptualization with potential relevance beyond African contexts.

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg provides a textured analysis of a contested urban space that will resonate with other contested urban spaces around the world and challenges researchers involved in such spaces to work in creative and politicised ways. This edited collection is built around the experiences of Yeoville Studio, a research initiative based at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Through themed, illustrated stories of the people and places of Yeoville, the book presents a nuanced portrait of the vibrance and complexity of a post-apartheid, peri-central neighbourhood that has often been characterised as a 'slum' in Johannesburg. These narratives are interwoven with theoretical chapters by scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, reflecting on the empirical experiences of the Studio and examining academic research processes. These chapters unpack the engagement of the Studio in Yeoville, including issues of trust, the need to align policy with lived realities and social needs, the political dimensions of the knowledge produced and the ways in which this knowledge was, and could be used.

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg provides a textured analysis of a contested urban space that will resonate with other contested urban spaces around the world and challenges researchers involved in such spaces to work in creative and politicised ways. This edited collection is built around the experiences of Yeoville Studio, a research initiative based at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Through themed, illustrated stories of the people and places of Yeoville, the book presents a nuanced portrait of the vibrance and complexity of a post-apartheid, peri-central neighbourhood that has often been characterised as a 'slum' in Johannesburg. These narratives are interwoven with theoretical chapters by scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, reflecting on the empirical experiences of the Studio and examining academic research processes. These chapters unpack the engagement of the Studio in Yeoville, including issues of trust, the need to align policy with lived realities and social needs, the political dimensions of the knowledge produced and the ways in which this knowledge was, and could be used.

It is often reported that young people in Africa, the Middle East and North African regions are stuck in situations of 'waithood', unable to progress to full adulthood. Utilising a series of innovative research methodologies that included life history interviews, surveys, media training and qualitative interviews, the research project's aim was the co-production of data, in order to delve into the housing and work nexus in two non-central locations in Ethiopia and South Africa. The variety of mixed methods that were used yielded a depth of engagement and allowed the researchers to deepen and nuance ideas of waithood and stuckness. The rich and varied data showed how young people move through moments of stuckness and moments of movement, and that some movement is possible even when faced with difficult and sometimes overwhelming structural challenges. It also demonstrated how co-produced research can assist young people in moving forward and countering the experience of stuckness and waithood.

States in the Global South have consistently invested in large-scale, vanity infrastructure projects, which are often not used by the majority of their residents. Using a mixed-method and comparative approach with findings from Greater Maputo, Mozambique, and the Gauteng City-Region exposes how internationally-supported and expensive transport projects do not meet the needs of lower-income urban residents, and meanwhile, widespread, everyday modes of commuting such as trains, paratransit, and pathways for walking deteriorate. State-led development thus often generates an infrastructural landscape characterised by "ruin" and "indifference." These choices are anachronistic, steeped in a desire for a modernist-inspired future and in establishing narratives of control. In the cases of Gauteng and Maputo, whether or not the infrastructure is "successfully" implemented, these choices have resulted in a distancing of the state from the majority of urban residents.

Background & Aims: Serum microRNA (miRNA) levels are known to change in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and may serve as useful biomarkers. This study aimed to profile miRNAs comprehensively at all NAFLD stages. Methods: We profiled 2,083 serum miRNAs in a discovery cohort (183 cases with NAFLD representing the complete NAFLD spectrum and 10 population controls). miRNA libraries generated by HTG EdgeSeq were sequenced by Illumina NextSeq. Selected serum miRNAs were profiled in 372 additional cases with NAFLD and 15 population controls by quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR. Results: Levels of 275 miRNAs differed between cases and population controls. Fewer differences were seen within individual NAFLD stages, but miR-193a-5p consistently showed increased levels in all comparisons. Relative to NAFL/non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) with mild fibrosis (stage 0/1), 3 miRNAs (miR-193a-5p, miR-378d, and miR378d) were increased in cases with NASH and clinically significant fibrosis (stages 2-4), 7 (miR193a-5p, miR-378d, miR-378e, miR-320b, miR-320c, miR-320d, and miR-320e) increased in cases with NAFLD activity score (NAS) 5-8 compared with lower NAS, and 3 (miR-193a-5p, miR-378d, and miR-378e) increased but 1 (miR-19b-3p) decreased in steatosis, activity, and fibrosis (SAF) activity score 2-4 compared with lower SAF activity. The significant findings for miR-193a-5p were replicated in the additional cohort with NAFLD. Studies in Hep G2 cells showed that following palmitic acid treatment, miR-193a-5p expression decreased significantly. Gene targets for miR-193a-5p were investigated in liver RNAseq data for a case subgroup (n = 80); liver GPX8 levels correlated positively with serum miR-193a-5p. Conclusions: Serum miR-193a-5p levels correlate strongly with NAFLD activity grade and fibrosis stage. MiR-193a-5p may have a role in the hepatic response to oxidative stress and is a potential clinically tractable circulating biomarker for progressive NAFLD. Lay summary: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small pieces of nucleic acid that may turn expression of genes on or off. These molecules can be detected in the blood circulation, and their levels in blood may change in liver disease including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). To see if we could detect specific miRNA associated with advanced stages of NAFLD, we carried out miRNA sequencing in a group of 183 patients with NAFLD of varying severity together with 10 population controls. We found that a number of miRNAs showed changes, mainly increases, in serum levels but that 1 particular miRNA miR-193a-5p consistently increased. We confirmed this increase in a second group of cases with NAFLD. Measuring this miRNA in a blood sample may be a useful way to determine whether a patient has advanced NAFLD without an invasive liver biopsy. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL). ; Funding Agencies|Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI2) Program of the European Union [777377]; European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme; EFPIA; Newcastle NIHR Biomedical Research Centre; European NAFLD Registry