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What is a home?

28 November 2018 | Story Charlene Stanley

Law home read more — Back row, from the left: Prof Danie Brand (Director of the Free State Centre for Human Rights), workshop co-organiser Helen Carr (Kent University), and Ellen Maphalane (home owner) with workshop participants during a visit to Ms Maphalane’s home, an example of alternatively constructed housing in Bloemfontein.

The body of a sixty-year-old homeless man is discovered in a tent on the outskirts of Canterbury, Kent, UK. Cursory research reveals that he had been refused a place on the council’s housing register and that he was a former member of the British armed forces – a group that makes up close to a quarter of the ‘rough sleepers’ in London. This raises questions about the complex relationship of politics, campaigning, gender, and welfare in homelessness law, policy, and practice.

Jump across the Atlantic Ocean to Klapmuts, Western Cape, South Africa, where beneficiaries of an RDP housing project are benefiting from the shelter provided in the form of private home ownership. Yet, they are not using these assets to its full potential, e.g. as security for credit to start or expand a business. This raises questions about whether the less expensive route of providing public housing with tenure security would not be a better option.

International workshop on housing

Diverse issues such as these came up for discussion as planners, geographers, architects, art historians, social activists, and lawyers recently met during a workshop at the University of the Free State to discuss what a home constitutes, and how best to provide and protect homes in a sustainable and inclusive manner in 21^st century cities. The workshop was hosted by the Free State Centre for Human Rights on the Bloemfontein Campus.

Participants presented papers and engaged in discussions on home-related topics as diverse as Hannah Arendt’s conception of the intimate and political spheres; Henri Lefebvre’s notion of a right to the city; alternative, environmentally conscious building methods; court cases dealing with the concept of home; the right to a domestic garden as a component of the right to a home; and constructing the home as a subversive and empowering alternative when it comes to giving birth.

Going forward

The same group of participants will meet for a follow-up workshop at Kent University in the UK in February 2019, and a third workshop in Belo Horizonte in Brazil in June 2019, with the project culminating in the publication of an inter-disciplinary book containing the papers workshopped at the three events.

News Archive

Death may come in adorable little packages

2015-03-23

The main host of the Lassa virus is the Natal Mulimammate mouse.

Photo: Supplied

Postdoctoral researcher, Abdon Atangana, of the Institute for Groundwater Studies at the university recently published an article online about the Lassa Haemorrhagic fever in the Natural Computing Applications Forum. In addition to the terminal transmissible sickness recognised as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, there is another strain called Lassa haemorrhagic fever.

The disease is classified under the arenaviridae virus family. The first outbreaks of the disease were observed in Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic. However, it was first described in 1969 in the town of Lassa, in Borno State, Nigeria.

The main host of the Lassa virus is the Natal Mulimammate mouse, an animal indigenous to most of Sub-Saharan Africa. The contamination in humans characteristically takes place through exposure to animal excrement through the respiratory or gastrointestinal tracts.

Mouthfuls of air containing tiny particle of infective material are understood to be the most noteworthy way of exposure. It is also possible to acquire the infection through broken skin or mucous membranes that are directly exposed to the infective material.

“The aim of my research was to propose a novel mathematical equation used to describe the spread of the illness amongst pregnant women in West Africa. To achieve this, I used my newly-proposed derivative with fractional order called beta-derivative. Since none of the commonly used integral transform could be used to derive the solution of the proposed model, I proposed a new integral transform called Atangana-Transform, and used it, together with some iterative technique, to derive the solution of the model.

“My numerical simulations show that the disease is as deadly amongst pregnant women as Ebola,” Abdon said.

Abdon’s research was submitted to one of Springer’s top-tier journals with an impact factor 1.78. The paper was accepted and published February 2015.