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Showing posts from October, 2010

Food for thought

On Monday and Tuesday I attended a Food Security workshop at Wits University. The intention of this workshop was to explore the issue of urban food security. In most cases when food security is mentioned people tend to think rural livelihoods and agriculture. This time we were looking at, inter alia, what people in Johannesburg eat, where and how do they prepare their food? Is this food nutritious? The bias was towards those people living in the margins of the mainstream economy,i.e., street vendors. The most interesting part of this workshop was a learning visit to Bree Street taxi rank. Before we went there, we were asked to say whatever assumptions we may have about the place. I assumed that the place will be dirty; that there will be so many people milling about; clutter of taxis, etc. Contrary to all of this, the place was clean, and well organized. It is not clear to me how the Bree Taxi rank is run, but it appears the place is co-owned by the City of JHB and taxi associations. ...

Uhambo lo mhambi...to Rotterdam and back

We arrived at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam around 10:30am on Tuesday 28 September. It was a drizzly morning, but not quite as cold as we had been warned. From the airport we were meant to get a shuttle to Rotterdam, a city about 45 km south of Amsterdam. Alas, our shuttle driver did not bother to arrive. We tried frantically to search for him, but at 3pm we decided to board a train. It was a swift ride from Schiphol with respites at Leiden then de Haag and finally Rotterdam, all in about 45 minutes. The train itself was destined for Dordrecht! Our next worry upon disembarking was to find our hotel (Manhattan), but luckily it was situated right across the station. To the shuttle driver who did not pick us up: thanks for nothing! The purpose of our visit to Holland was to attend “Deltas in the times of Climate Change” Conference. I was with Lebo, one of the Directors in Environmental Department of the City of JHB. The conference was attended by 1200 delegates from mainly deltas cities, eg...