مطالب

An efficient road network remains among the topical issues in the international urban development forum. This is because roads link interrelated land uses in addition to connecting them with the contiguous metropolitan areas, thus a key contributing factor for an accelerated socio-economic uplift. To sus tain this, planning s tandards that delimit urban road reserves are usually prepared and enforced through development control to ensure that roads are exclusively maintained for their intended purpose.  This s tudy, therefore, through a case s tudy was undertaken in Kisii Town, Kenya inves tigates the extent to which the unauthorized developments on urban road reserves are regulated. It was s teered by the public interes t theory of regulation by targeting residential developments which were proportionately and randomly drawn from the seven residential neighbourhoods. Data were collected using a high-resolution satellite image and a ques tionnaire. Data analysis relied on GIS, t-tes t, logis tic regression, and linear regression. Research findings demons trated a s tatis tically significant difference between the approved physical planning s tandards that are used in regulating road reserves and the extent of compliance by developers. Compliance generally declined by a mean of four metres, signifying that the County Government of Kisii did not undertake adequate development control. Non-compliance was mos tly heightened by the developers’ unawareness of the building plan approval process and that the buildings needed to be inspected during cons truction. This s tudy deepens the international debate on development control by spatially and s tatis tically illuminating how the extent of compliance with the planning s tandards that regulate road reserves may be empirically analyzed.

 The present s tudy aimed to discover the memorabilia aspects and evaluate the effectiveness level on promoting the feeling of intimacy of inhabitants in localities to their biological scopes. The feeling of intimacy is a multidimensional issue for which various aspects are compelling. Based on the recent s tudies, memory as one of the criteria examines the feeling of intimacy toward their habitats. To assess the theoretical patterns, three locations were chosen as a case s tudy among old localities, including Ishaq Beyg, Blacks tone, and chicken market and three areas of irrigation, Havabord, and Eslahnezhad among new localities of Shiraz. A consis tent ques tionnaire was dis tributed among them. This s tudy includes a practical method is and developed based on correlation and descriptive-analytical technique. The ques tionnaires data were assessed by SPSS software and Spearman Correlation Coefficient tes ts, ANOVA, Tukey, Samples, and Paired Tes t Samples T and Pearson Correlation Coefficient. Our results indicated the homogeneity of particular localities in old and new contexture based on the individual feature's similarities and importance of memory aspect on the promotion of intimacy in all localities. Thus, social memories are more effective than skeletal ones in promoting the inhabitant's intimacy in localities.

The consumer culture of late capitalism is more than ever associated with the concept of urban space. Prevalent in the late capitalist society is abstract space that homogenizes and flattens out the differences, conflicts and contradictions on the social scene. This process of homogenization acts as a mechanism of control to preserve the current status quo. In Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, abstract space, by homogenizing and fragmenting the body and lived experience, makes the characters comply with the consumer culture and suppresses the potentials for the difference and the emergence of alternative spaces. In this paper, the role abstract space plays in Ellis's novel is analyzed in the light of Henri Lefebvre's theory of space. The present study argues that abstract space numbs the potentials for difference and heterogeneity in Ellis's novel. Instead, it imposes homogeneity on social relations, pushing the characters to the brink of invisibility and nothingness.