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The paper explores the results of a local level household survey in King Sabata Dalindyebo (KSD) using quantitative and qualitative data findings from an Integrated Rapid Transport Planning Household Survey (IRTP) household survey of 2012. Employing an integrated assessment approach the dimensions and magnitude of the local transportation issues in King Sabata Dalindyebo (KSD) are unpacked. The paper enumerates the challenges and opportunities in respect for local level transportation constraints and opportunities in the study area. Making use of place making integrated mobility and accessibility paradigm of analysis, the study advances ways of reducing the local level transportation travail challenges in King Sabata Dalindyebo (KSD). The result was the generation of an indicative transportation vision and framework for promoting sustainable development in Mthatha town and the surrounding environments.

This paper chronicles the process of developing a framework for measuring spatial planning outcomes in South Africa - defining and articulating the desired spatial planning outcomes as well as the mechanisms through which they can be measured. Given that the development of indicator sets and monitoring frameworks for spatial policy are considered as an ever-evolving iterative process as new agendas, challenges and opportunities emerge and others assume less importance, the paper proposes a suite of robust spatial development indicators which translate complex relationships involving a plurality of actors across different operationally independent policy sectors in a way that enables the tracking of spatial trends over time. It also enumerates the key success factors associated with implementing the proposed framework nestled on multiple spatial scales.

The mobile phone is transforming African mobile lives at a variety of scales, from the minutiae of individual spatial orientations to expansive global connectivities. Now-possible fluid interdependencies between corporeal mobility and virtual mobility have the potential to reframe and reshape lives, especially for young people, who typically have limited financial resources yet are often at the vanguard of mobile phone adoption. This chapter explores the intersection between physical and virtual mobilities among young people in two smaller South African urban centres, drawing on mixed-methods field research, the first study conducted with young people 9 to18 years, the second with a wider age group extending from 9 to 25 years. It focuses on the transport and related physical mobility challenges young people face in reaching locations (and people) important in their lives, and the role that access to mobile phones is now having in mediating those challenges and associated access patterns in these sites. Particular attention is given to the role of gender in the shaping and reshaping of mobility and access patterns: precarity, safety and security are significant themes.

This chapter introduces the field studies on which the book is based and traces the development of the mixed-method, child-centred approach to mobilities research, embedded in participant observation and culminating in the Child Mobility (CM) study in 24 sites. The incorporation of peer-investigation by young people themselves, working with academics as co-researchers, is discussed in some detail. A review of field methods, their benefits and disadvantages, follows: this includes experiments with a mobile interview method, focus groups, life histories and a substantial quantitative survey—all designed to elicit specific information, but set within an ongoing close engagement with the study communities concerned. Attention to the ethics of working with young people, both as co-investigators and respondents, is a linking theme. The chapter concludes with information about some of the individual field sites where research has been conducted and the logic behind their selection.

The concluding chapter reflects on the findings presented throughout the book. Mobilities as social constructs are experienced and imagined very differently, not least according to age, gender and family context. Most significant of all is the issue of gender equality, which permeates the material reality of so many mobilities stories. Attention is given to some of the practical mobility-related interventions which have potential to improve the course of young people’s lives in sub-Saharan Africa: these are not necessarily about improving mobility per se, of course, since in some contexts less, rather than more mobility could be beneficial. The final section of the chapter reflects on the influence of wider in-country policy decisions and practice and the international sphere, not least the issue of mobility targets in the MDGs and SDGs.

The focus of this chapter (and the next) is the felt, everyday experiences young people have of specific travel modes and their journeys using them, drawing on Cresswell’s (2010) disaggregation of mobility into constituent parts, each with a politics which can be used to differentiate people and things into hierarchies of mobility. Following a brief comparative review of young people’s overall transport and travel practices across Ghana, Malawi and South Africa, based on survey data, the discussion draws intensively on ethnographic data to interrogate identified patterns of walking and cycling, contrasting travel practices in diverse rural and urban locations and exploring the implications of travel mode for lifestyle and identities. Gender and age-related differences are highlighted wherever relevant, leading to wider reflections concerning young people’s embodied practices of travel and transport experiences.

This chapter follows on directly from Chap. 7, as the transport theme moves from walking and cycling to motor-mobility, but it brings to the fore a very different set of mobility experiences. Young people discuss their views and experiences of travelling in the shared space of the motor vehicle: motor-mobility not only enables an extended spatial reach but introduces an environment rich in potential for both welcome and abhorrent interactions (squeezed bodies and wandering hands, the heavy beat of the latest popular music, rude jokes, raucous laughter, sexual innuendo, etc.). Also, for many, the ever-present, nagging fear that forces—human or occult—may bring the journey, the vehicle and all its occupants to an untimely end. The threat of injury from traffic accidents is a significant risk factor in young lives; the final part of the chapter presents young people’s perceptions of risk and their experiences of traffic-related accidents (including as pedestrians).

For many young people across sub-Saharan Africa, work—whether paid or unpaid—is a fundamental element of everyday life. This chapter encompasses not only work activities that require mobility to reach or conduct work but also work activities that are specifically generated by Africa’s transport failures (the need to carry water in the absence of water pipes, fuel in the absence of electricity, food and other goods in the absence of cheap motorised transport). The costs and constraints of mobility, compliance and resistance are examined in rural and urban locations. This includes specific reflections on children’s bodily experiences of load carrying, drawing on the work of Goffman, Bourdieu and others, in order to examine the findings in terms of gender habitus, performance and institutional reflexivity—the way gender is embodied from an early age through reiterated practices.

This chapter focuses on young people’s access and travel to health services (for personal consultation and treatment) in rural and urban locations, situating the discussion, where feasible, with reference to the wider therapeutic landscapes (material, symbolic and virtual) within which these health-care practices and experiences are played out. Unlike the regular daily movements which characterise young people’s mobility for education and work purposes, health-seeking is usually a less frequent motivation for travel, but the felt everyday experiences of health-seeking are complex and challenging. The chapter demonstrates how widespread poverty and the state’s limited ability to provide adequate, effective health care are key contextual elements within which young people and/or their carers make decisions regarding whether, when and where to seek health advice and treatment. Gender and age factors also come into play. The narratives presented demonstrate the disturbing fragility of entanglements between physical movement, representation and practice.

This chapter explores the everyday mobility of pre-pubescent children and older teenagers outside of school and work arenas. Life beyond formal education and work is crucial not only to young people’s health, well-being and happiness of and in the moment, but will contribute to shaping their identity in the long term, not least through the construction of social networks (and associated creation of social capital). Rural and urban recreational activities are compared across diverse sites. Discussion then moves beyond physical mobility to the implications of increasing access to mobile phones as a new element that can leapfrog and thus mediate distance, with potentially significant impacts on social contact patterns. A final section reflects on mobility associated with participation in religious worship and related activities. Gender issues (and associated permissions and restrictions) form a persistent theme through the chapter.

This chapter is concerned with the intersections between children’s mobility and educational uptake and achievement. It introduces some important pupil experiences that have received little consideration in conventional academic debates about educational access issues and failures across Africa (which tend to focus on what happens in the classroom). Field data are used to illustrate the lived experience of children’s journeys to and from school—their experiential and sensory qualities—in diverse contexts. The mobile ethnography research brings a textured understanding of these journeys and the wider setting within which they take place: the way mobilities are performed, experienced through the body and embedded in social life, but also the significance of the ‘moorings’ (home and school) between which movements take place. The extent and ways in which cultural attitudes influence girls’ travel patterns and practices and the implications for gendered life trajectories is a recurrent theme, while age and prevailing patterns of transport provision interpose further complexity.