On handling urban informality in southern Africa

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio-economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible

Multi agent systems for agricultural stakeholders

Nowadays, agricultural researches have won a remarkable recognition all over the world. Agriculture is a complex system that involves so many stakeholders who are geographically distributed and connected in various ways. As such, it is inevitable to maintain timely information flow among stakeholders and the change of global behaviour of the system due to slight variation of an entity. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a multi agent system solution to integrate stakeholders in the process of agriculture. The system has been structured with five agents, namely, Message Agent, Interface Agent, User Profile Agent, Crop Management Agent, and Selling Agent. The Message Agent plays a key role in guiding and passing messages to other agents and Interface Agent displays and distributes the information in a suitable form for the user whereas User Profiler Agent creates individual user profiles according to individual preferences. Crop Management agent and Selling Agent are the two main agents who make decisions using external and internal information. The system has been developed on JADE environment and can connect via web access

Data for Arylboronic Acid-Catalyzed C-Alkylation and Allylation Reactions Using Benzylic Alcohols

Original, unprocessed data for all novel compounds in the associated paper. Data available includes 1H, 13C, 19F, and 11B Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data, copies of mass spectrometry data, and copies of infra-red (IR) spectra