School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering

The availability of large scale land holdings for low-cost and affordable housing developments for new township establishments in Zimbabwean cities is a great challenge. Despite a rigorous and comparatively successful land reform exercise which to a degree afforded land ownership to a section of the population that had historically been disadvantaged. Land at the scale that was availed through land reforms is of a tenure that presents major challenges to its usefulness as a major contributory factor in "effective" housing provision. This article explores the actual availability, access and bankability of public/state owned land as a key resource in large-scale low cost and affordable housing provision. It asserts that scaling up land availability has the potential to contribute to the national housing stock and other related spin offs. It provides a background and history to land availability through the land reform process and other private means, discusses current housing needs, tenure modalities and postulates policy reviews and approaches to increasing the availability and accessibility of land and overall housing supply. Political will is the critical component that drives the success of any housing provision initiative and the general policy consensus should be that all levels of government must be active and willing if affordable land and housing provision should be achieved for development at sufficient scales that allow for massive large-scale land holdings provision.

The provision of large scale low-cost and affordable housing in Zimbabwean cities has in the post-independence period been largely based on incremental self-help housing models that emphasize on public housing provision through self-funding housing provision models as evolved and directly spearheaded by private citizens. The state effectively providing only a facilitatory role. This article explores the actual availability, access and bankability of public/state owned land as a key resource in large-scale low cost and affordable housing provision. It asserts that scaling up land availability has the potential to contribute to the national housing stock and other related spin offs by introducing new housing finance typologies into the Zimbabwean housing like Low Income Subsidised Housing,

The decline of the Zimbabwean economy since the early 2000s has been extensively documented, however, it is the efforts of the urban poor to adapt to these debilitating macroeconomic deterrents by evolving alternative livelihood options and organizational models to enhance resilience in housing provision and economic survival. Using the case of Domboshawa, this research will show, that a section of urban dwellers who work in Harare but previously rented accommodation in the townships in and around Harare have now resorted to move to Domboshawa, a rural village located about 27 km north of Harare in search of cheaper land for purchase and rental accommodation which not only solves their housing needs but also affords them the opportunity to create both urban and rural resilience conditions to combat the negative effects of the underperforming economy and also solving the problem of housing shortage in greater Harare. Through engaging in small scale but intensive agricultural activities like animal husbandry and horticulture at their place of residence in Domboshawa and during the week still commute to their day job in the city of Harare, the nouveau residents have therefore diversified their alternative livelihood options and organizational models and bolstered their resilience through the experience of a combined subsistence-based rural lifestyle and an urban working and commuting lifestyle. The research will investigate the land acquisition process by the new residents of Domboshawa and the resultant tenure systems. It will be both qualitative and quantitative and will entail the use of a case study, a household socioeconomic survey and observation techniques and the administration of questionnaires and interviews. The population for this study will include households, state, non-state and cultural institutions and other stakeholders. The research asserts that resilience in both urban and rural areas can be a product of actions in either of these settings. In this case the ability of Domboshawa to manage and adapt to change, the village's robustness and adjustment at all levels of the community has a 'ripple effect' particularly in helping to solve the housing and related economic problems experienced in Harare, increasing the bouquet of livelihood survival strategies in the Domboshawa economy. The research above describing, explaining and critiquing the ongoing situation in Domboshawa will also postulate policy interventions to cement the resilience of the new residents in creating a sustainable human settlement

The UK has a problem, not insurmountable, but needs a 180 degree shift of policy, future long term goals and a different attitude towards its population as they journey through the ‘seven ages of man’. ‌

So what is the problem then?

Debt, the servicing of debt, accrued by market forces taking the maximum from average incomes, noting the battle for peoples income that the free market profiteers chase knowing the hierarchy of need ie; water, food, shelter, heat, clothing etc, leaving little or no surplus for childcare, education, unemployment and elderly care, when these matters arise through the life of a citizen, there is often no money to spare in a household. (Ryan-Collins)
Over the past 50 years we have seen the consequences of a policy dogma of de-regulation. (Dorling)
Is there a way to reverse this and de-commodify land as a speculative tool, and still finance of big ticket items such as, childcare, education and elderly care? Let alone families helping thier children with house deposits.

Multiprotocol label switched (MPLS) networks were introduced to enhance the network’s service provisioning and optimize its performance using multiple protocols along with label switched based networking technique. With the addition of traffic engineering entity in MPLS domain, there is a massive increase in the networks resource management capability with better quality of services (QoS) provisioning for end users. Routing protocols play an important role in MPLS networks for network traffic management, which uses exact and approximate algorithms. There are number of artificial intelligence-based optimization algorithms which can be used for the optimization of traffic engineering in MPLS networks. The paper presents an optimization model for MPLS networks and proposed dolphin-echolocation algorithm (DEA) for optimal path computation. For Network with different nodes, both algorithms performance has been investigated to study their convergence towards the production of optimal solu...

In today's world, social media provides a valuable platform for conveying expressions, thoughts, point-of-views, and communication between people, from diverse walks of life. There are currently approximately 2.62 billion active users' social networks, and this is expected to exceed 3 billion users by 2021. Social networks used to share ideas and information, allowing interaction across communities, organizations, and so forth. Recent studies have found that the typical individual uses these platforms between 2 and 3 h a day. This creates a vast and rich source of data that can play a critical role in decisionmaking for companies, political campaigns, and administrative management and welfare. Twitter is one of the important players in the social network arena. Every scale of companies, celebrities, different types of organizations, and leaders use Twitter as an instrument for communicating and engaging with their followers. In this paper, we build upon the idea that Twitter data can be analyzed for crowd source sensing and decision-making. In this paper, a new framework is presented that uses Twitter data and performs crowd source sensing. For the proposed framework, real-time data are obtained and then analyzed for emotion classification using a lexicon-based approach. Previous work has found that weather, understandably, has an impact on mood, and we consider these effects on crowd mood. For the experiments, weather data are collected through an application-programming-interface in R and the impact of weather on human sentiments is analyzed. Visualizations of the data are presented and their usefulness for policy/ decision makers in different applications is discussed.

The real-time properties and operational constraints of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged the need for designing energy efficient routing protocols. Recently, software defined network based WSN (SDN-WSN) emerging technology has offered a significant development by untying control logic plane from the low power sensor nodes. This centralized programmable control still suffers from several configuration challenges in distributed sensors environment. Meta-heuristic based SDN approaches had been proposed for the efficient path selection in WSN but they still suffer from both, exploration and exploitation problems. Therefore, this paper addresses these shortcomings by proposing a meta-heuristic based dolphin echolocation algorithm (DEA) for optimizing route selection in WSNs. Objective function of the DEA algorithm is to consider the residual energy of the nodes for selecting energy efficient routes. The proposed algorithm performance is compared with several meta-heuristic algorithms in terms of energy-consumption, and network throughput parameters.

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a swarm-based optimization technique capable of solving different categories of optimization problems. Nevertheless, PSO has a serious exploration issue that makes it a difficult choice for multi-objectives constrained optimization problems (MCOP). At the same time, Multi-Protocol Label Switched (MPLS) and its extended version Generalized MPLS, has become an emerging network technology for modern and diverse applications. Therefore, as per MPLS and Generalized MPLS MCOP needs, it is important to find the Pareto based optimal solutions that guarantee the optimal resource utilization without compromising the quality of services (QoS) within the networks. The paper proposes a novel version of PSO, which includes a modified version of the Elitist learning Strategy (ELS) in PSO that not only solves the existing exploration problem in PSO, but also produces optimal solutions with efficient convergence rates for different MPLS/ GMPLS network scales. The proposed approach has also been applied with two objective functions; the resource provisioning and the traffic load balancing costs. Our simulations and comparative study showed improved results of the proposed algorithm over the well-known optimization algorithms such as standard PSO, Adaptive PSO, Bat and Dolphin algorithm.

In the modern communication networks, where increasing user demands and advance applications become a challenging task for handling user traffic. Routing protocols have got a significant role not only to route user data across the network but also to reduce congestion with less complexity. Dynamic routing protocols such as OSPF, RIP and EIGRP were introduced to handle different networks with various traffic environments. Each of these protocols has its own routing process which makes it different and versatile from the other. The paper will focus on presenting the routing process of each protocol and will compare its performance with the other. Experiments are conducted, using network topology with topological changes in order to analyze the protocols convergence activity and how it affects the overall performance of the network. The simulated results are analyzed to understand the function of the routing protocols in various network scenarios.

Modern communication networks offer advance and diverse applications, which require huge usage of network resources while providing quality of services to the users. Advance communication is based on multiple switched networks that cannot be handle by traditional IP (internet protocol) networks. GMPLS (Generalized multiprotocol label switched) networks, an advance version of MPLS (multiprotocol label switched networks), are introduced for multiple switched networks. Traffic engineering in GMPLS networks ensures traffic movement on multiple paths. Optimal path(s) computation can be dependent on multiple objectives with multiple constraints. From optimization prospective, it is an NP (non-deterministic polynomial-time) hard optimization problem, to compute optimal paths based on multiple objectives having multiple constraints. The paper proposed a metaheuristic Pareto based Bat algorithm, which uses two objective functions; routing costs and load balancing costs to compute the optimal...

Introduction of modern and diverse applications in telecommunication field has raised challenges in networking area regarding efficient use of network resources and with optimizing performance. Therefore MPLS/GMPLS (Generalized multiprotocol label switching) networks were introduced to provide a better quality of service to meet users' requirements as well as to optimize network resources. GMPLS networks use traffic engineering techniques for more efficient communication within the network and help to optimize network resources. This paper proposes BAT inspired metaheuristic algorithm for selecting an efficient route in MPLS/ GMPLS networks. In our investigation we considered routing costs as an objective function with goal to minimize it. The paper uses BAT algorithm with various levels of loudness parameter. The simulation results show performance improvements in MPLS/GMPLS networks of different size.

In the modern communication networks, where increasing user demands and advance applications become a challenging task for handling user traffic. Routing protocols have got a significant role not only to route user data across the network but also to reduce congestion with less complexity. Dynamic routing protocols such as OSPF, RIP and EIGRP were introduced to handle different networks with various traffic environments. Each of these protocols has its own routing process which makes it different and versatile from the other. The paper will focus on presenting the routing process of each protocol and will compare its performance with the other. Experiments are conducted, usingnetwork topology with topological changes in order to analyze the protocols convergence activity and how it affects the overall performance of the network. The simulated results are analyzed to understand the function of the routing protocols in various network scenarios.

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are dependent on various operators and parameters. The most common evolutionary operators are parent selection, crossover, and mutation. Each operator has broad implementations with its pros and cons. A successful GA is highly dependent on genetic diversity which is the main driving force that steers a GA towards an optimal solution. Mutation operator implements the idea of exploration to search for uncharted areas and introduces diversity in a population. Thus, increasing the probability of GA to converge to a globally optimum solution. In this paper, a new variant of mutation operator is proposed, and its functions are studied and compared with the existing operators. The proposed mutation operator as well as others such as m-mutation, shuffle, swap, and inverse are tested for their ability to introduce diversity in population and hence, their effects on the performance of GA. All these operators are applied to Max one problem. The results concluded that t...

A programme to abstractly represent the reproduction, symbiosis and migratory process of the Palauan golden jellyfish.

This programme could be developed into relationship laws which similar to Brownian motion and Voronoi tassellation, can be an important architectural resource especially in the fields of architectural symbiosis and biomimicry.

A programme to abstractly represent the reproduction, symbiosis and migratory process of the Palauan golden jellyfish.

This programme could be developed into relationship laws which similar to Brownian motion and Voronoi tassellation, can be an important architectural resource especially in the fields of architectural symbiosis and biomimicry.

The Downtown Athletic Club was private social club which occupied its own skyscraper on Wall Street, New York. Completed in 1930, the building was designed as a representation of upward social mobility. Of evolution. Of the American way. Each Floor of its 38 floors narrates  is allocated a progressively purifying function from the athletic spaces on the lower floors to the socialising and lodging spaces on the floors above.

Koolhaas described it as "a Constructivist Social Condenser . . . a machine to generate and intensify desirable forms of human intercourse."

The aim of this project is to hack the Downtown Athletic Club and redesign the rules using a model based on Cellular Automata. To do this, I have employed a business incubator as a collectivist social metaphor wherein the objective is not for any party to fail but for all to thrive. If one party is found unable to compete then he is able to transform into a new business model that would be successful.