Translating Ethekwini's vision of compact city into reality through integrated transportation and land use planning

Paper presented at the 30th Annual Southern African Transport Conference 11-14 July 2011 "Africa on the Move", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.Municipalities across South Africa are challenged by the need to develop more sustainable cities and one of the means for doing this is to encourage, and plan for, the development of "compact cities" (i.e. higher density, diverse and public transport oriented and pedestrian oriented cities). All this is in the interests of achieving more efficient, more sustainable and more convenient living environments and more economically productive communities. The Ethekwini Municipality has recently explored an integrated approach to planning for the "compact city" through an urban development corridor project located in its northern metropolitan area called the Northern Urban Development Corridor (NUDC). The project was co-funded by the KwaZulu-Natal Corridor Development Programme and seeks to consolidate the infrastructure and other features of the emerging logistics platform of the City and the country which are located in this area, as well as, to redress the economic and social imbalances of historic settlement in this part of the municipal area. This paper outlines the project process that was followed, sketches the regional development context and highlights the integrated nature of the planning process. It describes the approach taken and strategies introduced by the project team to translate strategic level policy, aimed at achieving more sustainable settlement structure and form (i.e. "compact city"), into more realistic and achievable local level implementation plans. In so doing it outlines the various development and management strategies employed in the NUDC plan to achieve "compact city" objectives whilst focussing on the transportation planning techniques that were employed in the preparation of the plan.This paper was transferred from the original CD ROM created for this conference. The material was published using Adobe Acrobat 10.1.0 Technology. The original CD ROM was produced by Document Transformation Technologies Postal Address: PO Box 560 Irene 0062 South Africa. Tel.: +27 12 667 2074 Fax: +27 12 667 2766 E-mail: nigel@doctech URL: http://www.doctech.co.zaCD sponsored by TRANSNE

Leptin responsiveness of juvenile rats: proof of leptin function within the physiological range

To bridge the gap between studies demonstrating leptin’s role in protecting fat stores when food is scarce and other studies demonstrating the effects of treatment with leptin at doses that increase plasma levels to values found in overfed animals, we investigated whether leptin serves an adipostatic function within the normal range of free-feeding lean animals, i.e. within the very small range of endogenous plasma levels at which no leptin resistance occurs.For this purpose we applied recombinant leptin via mini-osmotic pumps to rats between 15 and 24 days of age and between 25 and 34 days of age and studied its dose-dependent effects on body mass and fat mass at plasma leptin concentrations extending down to the normal levels in lean animals.Using percentage change of fat mass (relative to that of saline-treated littermates) as the measure, a linear dose-response curve was found up to doses of 2 μg g−1 day−1, corresponding to plasma leptin concentrations between the normal physiological range and 50 ng ml−1. In 15- to 24-day-old animals, analysis of the correlation (r = -0.89) between individual plasma concentrations and the corresponding leptin-induced changes of body fat content for a range extending down towards zero (i.e. towards the average fat content of the controls) yielded a zero value of 3.1 ng ml−1, which was within the 2-4 ng ml−1 range of plasma leptin concentrations found in the control pups. Likewise, regression analysis for the data from the 25- to 34-day-old pups (r = -0.88), for which the control range was 1-3 ng ml−1, yielded a zero value of 1.9 ng ml−1.We conclude that normal plasma leptin levels represent an adipostatic signal. Steady-state levels of plasma leptin in free-feeding lean animals thus provide a signal not only for protecting sufficiency but also for limiting increases of body fat stores