Inclusive Urban Campus Development: A Case for Okahandja, Namibia

As a result of the high rate of urbanization and the attendant growth in housing demand and proliferation of informal settlements in sub-Saharan African countries such as Namibia, the development of cities has become a priority concern of the governments given the obvious socio-economic and environmental challenges that impact sustainable infrastructure/services, quality of life, health and well-being of the citizenry as referenced in the United Nation Sustainable Development Goal (UN SDG) Number 11. Whereas the governments are conscious of these daunting challenges, they remain unable to decipher sustainable solutions to them. The consequence is the perennial proliferation of informal settlements, housing shortages, and urban poverty, pressure on infrastructure and services, and unemployment. Although dubbed a “Garden Town” Okahandja does not have an urban structure plan of development. This study aims to investigate the feasibility of socially inclusive urban infrastructure campus development using Okahandja as a platform. Recent research has revealed such trends as the smart city concept which embodies a sustainable approach to Inclusive Urban Campus (IUC) development towards a holistic community planning in third world countries. Dololo site in the south of Okahandja stands out as an opportune urban campus platform for diverse mixed-use including residential, business-related (entrepreneurial), educational, recreational, and others. The research employed a novel multi-focused workshop methodology for data collection with community engagement and stakeholders’ interactive participation as a key strategy to enhance the bottom-up development approach. The objectives were to identify the town planning and integrated development dynamics of Okahandja, the policy bottlenecks, expose sustainable forms of socio-cultural integration and formal housing delivery. Ultimately, the feasibility of Dololo as a platform for the inclusive urban campus initiative was not in doubt. Infrastructural development and community need to accommodate education, Small and Medium Enterprise (SME), Vocational Training Center (VTC), informal trade, housing, health, youth centers, cooperatives, roads, and transport are identified as key to the IUC development.

An evaluation of inclusive capital stock for urban planning

Rapid urbanization has caused significant problems,and sustainable city design can play an important role in solving these problems under limited budgets and resources.Previous studies have proposed city evaluation indicators that can suggest appropriate urban designs.However,these indicators do not clearly consider economic theory,which is crucial for understanding accumulation of urban capital stock by the flows from daily urban activities.This study proposes a research framework based on economic theory for evaluating urban sustainability;this framework uses the inclusive wealth index(IWI)concept to examine inclusive urban capital stock.It examines the advantages of using the IWI as a city evaluation indicator along with data envelopment analysis and a decomposition analysis framework.We use data for 20 Japanese ordinance-designated cities for an empirical study to demonstrate a proposed approach for evaluating inclusive urban capital.The developed research application evaluates each city’s relative superiority in terms of capital accumulation and identifies those factors determining changes in capital flows via changes in efficiency,priority,and scale.The combination of these results can be helpful to decision makers seeking to increase urban capital by considering reference city information and relative superiority.

Urban Inclusiveness and Entrepreneurship:Evidence from Microdata on Migrants

With the progressive reforms of China’s household registration system,China has unleashed its demographic dividends over the time and promoted the economic growth.Guided by the new vision of development,urban inclusiveness,especially the urban inclusiveness to the migrant population,will become a force for driving economic growth.Using the 2016 China Migrants Dynamic Survey(CMDS)dataset,we measure urban inclusiveness with the level of migrants’access to same public services and social security as local residents and explore the effects of urban inclusiveness on migrants’entrepreneurship.The results show that urban inclusiveness encourages migrants to start businesses and has a positive effect on the level of entrepreneurship.The urban environmental conditions and heterogeneity of individual laborers have different regulating effects on the influence of urban inclusiveness on individual entrepreneurial choice.The findings offer important inspirations for policy making in reforming the Chinese urban systems and promoting migrants’entrepreneurship.