The effect of extended laundering on cotton fabric treated with Dimethylol dihydroxyethyleneurea (DMDHEU) easy care finish was investigated and the fabric characterised by crease recovery performance and the Kawabata Evaluation System for Fabrics (KES-F). The KES-F results indicated that the mechanical handle properties of the DMDHEU treated cotton fabrics were affected by both the levels of ap...

This article considers recent literature on contemporary urbanization in Africa that is united in its 'post-normative' orientation, firmly discarding the 'expectations' of modernization that so deeply shaped twentieth-century research on African cities. Best typified by the work of urban anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone, this scholarship instead focuses on the 'vernacularization' of ur...

Qatar, a Gulf country highly dependent on its oil and gas revenues – is looking to innovate, diversify, and ultimately reach its aim of creating a knowledge economy to prepare for its post-oil era. One area that the country is investing in is Contemporary Art, and world renowned artists such as Damien Hirst and Richard Serra – have been commissioned to design site-specific art for the public sp...

Toward an Urban Design Manifesto”, co-authored by Donald Appleyard and Allan Jacobs in the early 1980s, was highly influential in how we understand urbanism in the XXI century. Like other seminal documents, it represented the paradigm shift from modernism to contemporary planning and urban design. Professor Ivor Samuels, an international expert on urban morphology and urban design who often con...

Understanding temporal urban growth is very crucial to the interpretation of urban morphology and a key challenge for the study of rapid urbanization in contemporary China. Previous land use change modelling approaches only consider the spatial complexity that may be indicated by spatial dependence and landscape fragmentation, ignoring the temporal complexity inherent in the process of urban gr...

Drawing from the experience in research and practice the paper tries to discuss the effectiveness of participatory approaches in dealing with the problem of the growing fragmentation of contemporary urban societies. It is divided into three parts. In the first part there is a description of how “fragmentation” can be a key concept to interpret very different phenomena in contemporary urban soci...

The effect of UV/Ozone irradiation together with the pretreatments using distilled water, hydrogen peroxide, and hydrogen peroxide/sodium silicate solutions on the dyeing depth of the poly(lactic acid), PLA, and poly(ethylene terephthalate), PET, fabrics by the application of disperse dyes were investigated and the results were compared with that of untreated fabrics. The results showed that th...

This paper examines the relationship between urbanisation and globalisation beyond the so-called global cities that have been the focus of so much contemporary urban research. The paper argues that there is a problematic polarisation in urban studies between research on ‘global’ cities and work on presumably ‘non-global’ cities. The existing geographical literature on scale, place and uneven de...

Polyester (P), cotton (C) and Polyester-Cotton (PC) blended fabrics were treated with 350gpl of phosphorous containing flame retardant (FR) chemical. Oxidative thermal degradation of these fabrics before and after the treatment was studied using Thermogravimerty (TG) Differential Thermal Analysis (DTA). From TG output, quantitative mass loss of samples was calculated at definite temperature int...