The rapid increase in volume and variety of solid waste as a result of continuous economic growth, urbanization, and industrialization has become an intractable problem for the public and private sectors, making it difficult to ensure effective and sustainable waste management. The study sought to understand the perspective of Nelson Mandela Bay Municipal residents on their perceived influence of municipal waste management on economic development. The study used a quantitative techniques approach, with a structured questionnaire. Data was collected from 255 respondents. The quantitative question aimed to determine if the influence was positive or negative, and the Likert scale question had a scale of 1 to 5. This research identified various types of waste, assessed challenges, and evaluated waste's potential for resource creation. The study concluded that municipal waste includes organic, paper, plastic, metal, glass, food, garden, hazardous, construction, demolition, and non-recyclable waste. Environmental pollution is a major challenge, and 26 factors positively influence waste to wealth. Waste to wealth can be achieved through social behavior, education/knowledge, MSWM governance, and economic feasibility for MSWM. The research also highlighted the importance of land attributes, budget allocation, trained personnel, and government regulations. The framework proposed aims to minimize urban poverty while preserving the environment and supporting the present urban economy. Urban communities can utilize solid waste management as a mechanism to foster economic development. The fundamental question is whether stakeholders will continue to ignore waste's potential demands and benefits for urban economic growth.

Neurological constructs are being applied in various fields; within urban studies and built environments, neurourbanism stands out. To understand this concept, this study seeks to conduct a scientometric analysis of the concept of neurourbanism. To do so, we gauged the intellectual structure and clarified the influencers and emerging themes while seeking to identify essential gaps in neurourbanism research in urban studies and the built environment. Data were sorted from Dimensions Artificial Intelligence platform because of its reliability in providing the needed dataset accurately, and the Citespace software was used to analyze the data. Our results suggest plurality in explaining the risk factors in urbanicity research, particularly regarding prevalence, incidence, and the general cause of psychosis in urban living. The study also shows that players in the construction sector, such as engineers, town planners, and developers, have not fully grasped how the built environment assists in improving well-being, reducing stress levels of urbanists, assisting migrants in settling into the community, and the general mental wellness of those who live in the city. The study also identified a correlation between urbanization and mental health and added that the main recipient of rapid urban transformation countries does not show leadership in neurourbanism studies.

The year 1994 marked the dawn of the new, democratic South Africa. It also brought its own sets of challenges to the country. One such challenge was urban space. Regrettably, the new dispensation inherited still very much race-based urban areas. The distinguishing feature of urban space in South Africa is the phenomenon of exclusion, which causes deformity, and disappearance of urban structure. Exclusion has become a permanent visual reality in cities in which walled and gated communities divide the urban tissue and take up a large part of the urban space. The aim of this paper is to present results of a study that sought to examine the factors that influence urban space production, and with particular focus on the roles of the state, private sector, and community. Participation by all of them is essential to enhance inclusive urban space production for sustainability. The study demonstrated a concurrent mixed method design (case study and survey questionnaire). Results from these two concurrent approaches were merged to yield the final model. Both sets of results indicated that the intention to promote inclusive developments is predicted by seventeen dependent variables categorically presented under urban development characteristics, exclusive development enablers, inclusive development barriers, and sustainability criteria. The results of this inquiry are significant because they bring together the interdisciplinary perspectives to discern comprehensively the idea of inclusivity and sustainability in urban space production. The responsive model developed as a key product of this study aims to assist policymakers, planners, designers, landscapers, and developers as a guideline for facilitating inclusive and sustainable urban development.

In the South African government sector, public procurement is a strategic mechanism through which the government could be able to achieve the mandatory socioeconomic objectives. To this extent, the government procures goods and services from the private sector which can be estimated around eight hundred billion rand annually. Although there are numerous policy frameworks and systems to ensure that the management of the public procurement processes are fair, equitable, transparent, and cost-effective; the public procurement management practice, particularly in the delivery of construction goods and services, remains vulnerable to mismanagement and irregularities. To this extent, the nature of the irregularities and the stages at which they occur in the public procurement system remains unclear. To address this gap of knowledge, a content analysis method and the associated techniques of in-Vivo coding and word frequency analysis were used for the analysis of the secondary data. The study revealed that poor and or non-performance were the most frequent irregularities in the procurement of public construction services. The principal theoretical implication of this study is that rigorous proficiency measures should be applied to scrutinize and evaluate the potential of the contractors in terms of capacity to deliver in accordance with the contractual agreements prior to the awarding of contracts.

The introduction of the carbon tax by South Africa was primarily aimed at reducing pollution, and possibly improving the welfare of South African households. One of the ways of reducing pollution in the construction industry is to discourage the use of building materials that are high carbon emitters or have high energy intensities. This article used the Input-Output (IO) method and sensitivity analysis to study the effects of carbon tax on welfare distribution of South African households, using the 2014-2015 Living Conditions Survey (LCS). The study also set out to determine the relative sensitivity of price changes of some building materials after application of the 2019 carbon tax. Results showed that non-ferrous, ferrous, and prefabricated-based building materials had higher relative price sensitivities to carbon tax compared to other materials that were predominantly based on glass, cement, and treated metals. Increases in carbon tax may not discourage usage of relatively higher emissions-intensity materials like cement compared to wood. Operational building costs were dominated by electricity costs, with the burden being highest for lower income households. Any revenue-recycling efforts of the 2019 carbon tax for welfare purposes were marginal. However, the tax can be used to subsidize energy for lower income households.

This article aims to assess the benefits of floor slab insulation measures using extruded polystyrene (XPS) and polyisocyanurate (also referred to as polyiso or PIR) insulation materials at various levels of insulation thicknesses for a detached residential building. An EnergyPlus simulation analysis was carried out within the seven energy zones (represented by eight locations) of South Africa in accordance with the South African national code for building energy efficiency (SANS10400-XA). The energy savings and payback periods related to the use of the insulation over a lifecycle period of 50 years were assessed. Cape Town (zone 4) behaved differently from other locations and hardly benefited from the application of floor slab insulation measures. Generally, polyiso (PIR) insulation performed better than XPS for vertical gap insulation, and lower insulation thicknesses required higher insulation depths to maximize energy savings. Similarly, lower insulation thicknesses (25 mm and 50 mm) required higher perimeter insulation widths to maximize energy savings for horizontal perimeter insulation, especially in Sutherland (zone 6) and Cape Town. The maximization of energy savings was also achieved at low insulation thickness for the full floor slab insulation method, except for Sutherland and Fraserburg (zone 7). The locations that benefitted most from the floor slab insulation methods were Pretoria (zone 5), Thohoyandou (zone 3), Sutherland (zone 6), Fraserburg (zone 7), Welkom (zone 1), Ixopo (zone 5H), Witbank (zone 2), and Cape Town (zone 4), in that order. Generally, higher net energy savings are achieved in areas with lower humidity levels and areas with greater annual sums of both cooling and heating degree days.