Strategies for the Regeneration of Degraded Rural Landscapes: The Design of a “Padstal” on the Crossing of Route 62 and the Seweweekspoort Pass, Klein Karoo
- Authors: Conradie, Inge
- Date: 2020-09
- Subjects: Historic rural landscapes -- Klein Karoo , Landscape architecture
- Language: English
- Type: Master's theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/58994 , vital:60254
- Description: The livelihood of subsistence farmers of the Little Karoo sister towns, Zoar and Amalienstein, face many challenges such as the lack of economic opportunity, unemployment and drought that ultimately leads to poverty. This dissertation investigates the potential of a collective tourism and agricultural cooperative programme, which regenerates the rural landscape into a productive one through an architectural intervention. By developing a productive landscape that ignites rural livelihoods, the challenges can be transformed into opportunities for these impoverished communities. Research into agave-based agroforestry as a driver to combat global warming will aim to establish staple household security. It will be a means of inserting informal farm production into the tourism market through the built environment. The productive landscape, driven from an agave-based agroforestry and livestock feeding model, utilises the living and natural systems existing on the site. Together with regenerative architecture, it will structure the “building blocks” of the Agave-‘padstal’. The strategic position of this ‘padstal’, on the crossing of the Cape Route 62 and the SeweweekspoortPass, would create a node of destination. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment, and Technology, 2020
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- Date Issued: 2020-09
The re-settlement of a ruined earth: Investigating the notion of “dwelling” through The design of a settlement in a post apocalyptic landscape
- Authors: Holdstock, Miranda
- Date: 2020-01
- Subjects: Landscape architecture , Restoration ecology
- Language: English
- Type: Master's theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/59051 , vital:60259
- Description: It is 2100 and anthropogenic climate change is well underway. Human civilisation has collapsed and those who survived the apocalypse are condemned to a life of wandering along a ruined earth; placeless; hopeless; searching for sanctuary. Our most elemental instincts will find this place, and build on it, as we always have. There, we will construct an order in the chaos of the apocalypse, by building dwelling. In an apocalyptic landscape our dependence on dwelling is only amplified. This dwelling, an evolved shelter, the beginnings of settlement, is the manifestation of its dweller’s psyche: the totality of the human mind; the conscious and unconscious; the seen and unseen. It is a chronicle of their dreamworld, memories and experiences. And, when the dweller is also the builder, the dwelling is crafted as an intricate memory-scape - which, in the climate apocalypse, is easily desecrated by the horrors of the end of the known world. Because, at our most vulnerable, when our mortality is confronted, a crisis of being occurs. Those who cannot withstand the physical and psychological suffering that the apocalypse inspires, will become non-beings: those who unconsciously long for death. To portray this, a climate refugee becomes the project’s protagonist. Through her psychological evolution, a dwelling will be built at a site to which she wandered, that represents a ruined earth, where the remains of human civilisation are left behind. Her architecture will embody principles that might facilitate survival in a hyper-harsh environment and safeguard her fragile psychology through bio-inspired and phenomenological design. The final product of this thesis will be a symbolic representation of human wandering, settling and dwelling - the origin of civilisation within chaos. Which, despite the denial of climate change, might be sooner than we think. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment, and Technology, 2020
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- Date Issued: 2020-01