Year: 2021
Type: dissertation
Abstract: ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Earth has a finite amount of resources; non-renewable materials like coal and oil are being depleted without any regard for their presence in the future. The human populace does not have a sustainable lifestyle. As of December 2020, there are an estimated 7.8 billion human beings on the planet, and by 2050, it is estimated to increase by 2.5 billion inhabitants; 90% of this growth will occur in Asia and Africa. Initially a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to uncover the prominent challenges that urban planners face when tackling sustainable practices in developing countries. The starting point of the time frame was set to after the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development’s 2012 Rio+20 global summit. Therefore, only articles that were produced from 1 January 2013 until 31 March 2019 were included, as these would have adhered to the contributions and protocols set forth at this conference, viz., the largest UN Earth Summit, which was held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, in June 2012. In this study, therefore, a review was conducted of urban planning challenges and sustainable solutions or responses to these. The challenges were then grouped into topics that align with particular types of challenge. Then, the challenges were analysed to identify the well-known and disruptive challenges that restrict urban planners in developing countries. The top three unbiased urban planning challenges found from the SLR were urbanisation, urban sprawl and population growth. Additionally, from the SLR, the tools and techniques that assist urban planners were identified and extensively categorised to differentiate among them. Consequently, 70 solution-specific tools and techniques, which contribute to the analysis and implementation of a sustainable context were determined to identify the best practices for sustainable urban planning. Thereafter, a multi-criteria decision analysis used an analytical hierarchy process to quantify the differences of the tools and techniques with regard to urban system elements and the sustainable development goals. Evolving from the insights gained from the identification of the challenges and the tools and techniques, as well as the multi-criteria decision analysis, a requirements specification was established for a research product to achieve the aim of the study. This led to a functional analysis of the requirements specification to develop a decision support framework (DSF) that would achieve the aim of the research study. Based on this, the Sustainable Urban Planning Assistant Decision Support Framework (SUPA DSF) was designed. Finally, the SUPA DSF was evaluated, which consisted of verification and validation. The verification was made up of two steps, i.e., evaluating the requirements specification, and conducting theoretical verification interviews with subject matter experts. The feedback from the interviews were refined into the SUPA DSF. Lastly, a validation of the SUPA DSF was performed by means of three case studies, one for each of the sustainable urban planning challenges identified in the SLR. These three challenges were urbanisation, urban sprawl and population growth. The SUPA DSF was validated for its relevancy and practicability.
Author: Jooste, Andre Franz
Institution: Stellenbosch University
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7065168619