No abstract

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.

This paper offers insights from comprehensive case studies of rapidly growing peripheral settlements of Dar es Salaam. The paper explores how a broad range of services and infrastructures have developed and improved over time, and how residents have been engaged in this in various ways. The gradual improvements in services and infrastructure are to some extent created, organized and financed by residents through informal self-help solutions, which are often costly and place huge strains on residents' time and resources. Alongside this, residents are also involved in attracting formal service providers through applications, co-financing of network extensions as well as lobbying efforts towards urban authorities and service providers. The formal service providers primarily take a reactive role, responding to demand, requests and political pressure from residents. Post-settlement network extensions are often complicated and impeded by costly and cumbersome land-acquisition processes, and because of the reactive and often piecemeal approach to network extensions, society may be missing out on potential benefits of scale. The way urban services work also means that the provision of services and infrastructure is extremely differentiated and fragmented across the urban territory, creating and reinforcing major inequalities in access to services.