User requirements for domestic energy applications : households in informal urban settings

• Main Author: Van Gass, Maria Magdalena
• Other Authors: Eberhard, Anton
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2015
• Subjects: Power resources - South Africa - Cape Town; Squatter settlements - South Africa - Cape Town
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/14696

Bibliography: leaves 273-276. === The thematic focus of this dissertation is the specificity of user requirements for domestic energy applications in informal urban settlements and how these are fashioned by the contextual pre-conditions of poverty and instability. The fieldwork focused on a group of people who can be defined by the facts that they are people who house themselves, possibly fall into the lowest or no income sector of the population, are peripheral to the mainstream economic activity in the country and are temporary or permanent or roving urbanites. The research approach is done from the viewpoint that user requirements should inform the design of systems for domestic energy applications and that these subjective requirements constitute the correct point of departure from which to evaluate the efficacy of energy support services. The bulk of this dissertation consists of recounts of research interviews, illustrating some aspects of user requirements. These are presented as 'primary data' with the purpose of rendering the research more transparent and of feeing an information resource with the option of re-interpretation by the reader. The dissertation concludes that appropriate energy services will have to be characterised by adaptability and diversity as well as by sensitive responses to the micro networks of urban subsistence household economies.