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This paper offers an exploration of urban expansion from the point of view of the individual residents buying land, settling and living in new, rapidly growing peripheral settlements of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The findings suggest that the demand for affordable housing is the primary motivation for residents moving to the periphery. The demand for self-built, owner-occupier housing is especially significant initially, while the demand for non-ownership housing increases in importance later in the process. Income-related motives, on the other hand, are strikingly absent from settlement considerations. Urban residents settle in the periphery, even though income-generation is often tied to working somewhere else, namely in the central parts of the city. The paper proposes that the processes of urban expansion depicted in this study are usefully conceptualized as suburbanization processes, though it is a type of suburbanization that has some peculiarities given the particular context, where expansion happens informally and largely unguided by planners.

After decades of academic and policy scepticism on the role of urbanisation in economic, social and cultural change, the issue is attracting renewed academic focus and political attention. Such interest was also evident during the 1990s, and in this paper the authors revisit the debate with specific attention to Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper discusses the continuing challenges on classifications, and suggests that small towns should be considered on the basis of their functions and in the context of rural-urban transformations. Turning to the current debates, it is highlighted how small town development has attracted renewed interest not only in development economics, but also research into the rush for land, mining, conflict and climate change. These trends are fleshed out in a focussed presentation of the six papers on small town development in Sub-Saharan Africa that make up this special issue of the European Journal of Development Research. Based on the arguments and findings of the papers, it is recommended that small towns are best seen as organic parts of the rural region where they are located, albeit not necessarily as 'outcomes' of rural economic development. Accordingly, the renewed interest in * Jytte Agergaard

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