Search

In Dar es Salaam, an aesthetic politics of landscape shaped by the coloniality of space is central to middle‐class boundary work that drives the city's middle classes to congregate in the city's northern suburbs. The colonial city was divided into three racially marked zones that became known as uzunguni, uhindini, and uswahilini (the place of the European, Indian, and African, respectively). The coloniality of space remains as the spatial residue of this colonial enframing. It endures in an aesthetic politics of landscape in which ideas about what, and who, makes good urban space in terms of architecture, topography, and planning, and who deserves to live where. The paper examines how middle‐class suburban residents' mobilisation of the coloniality of space naturalises existing social and spatial hierarchies in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suburban space provides a useful window onto contemporary class practices in Africa, where it is difficult to identify social classes on the basis of income or occupation. In this article I argue that the middle classes and the suburbs are mutually constitutive in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam. Using interviews with residents and local government officials in the city's northern suburbs, I discuss the material and representational practices of middle‐class boundary work in relation to land and landscape. If the middle classes do not presently constitute a coherent political‐economic force, they are nevertheless transforming the city's former northern peri‐urban zones into desirable suburban residential neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African cities are becoming increasingly suburban, yet we know little about suburban spaces, how they are historically produced and by whom. This paper argues that African suburbs can be usefully understood as postcolonial suburbs. The postcolonial suburb de-centres the Anglo-American suburban model and pays attention to the historical co-constitution of suburban space across colony and metropole. It draws attention to the colonial and post-colonial policies on land and housing that make suburban development possible, but also attends to the everyday ways in which suburban spaces are built through the efforts of self-builders and their house-building projects. Using the case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the paper shows how these low-density residential spaces towards the edge of the city are being shaped by the new middle classes with their appetite for large houses and private cars. But these are not copies of suburban forms from elsewhere. Architecturally they are dominated by bungalows and villas, but these buildings are self-built rather than part of large planned housing schemes. Socially the suburbs are dominated by the middle classes, but these middle classes are oriented towards the countryside rather than towards the city. Drawing on interviews with suburban residents in Dar es Salaam, I show how self-build housing projects straddle the suburban and the rural in terms of economic investments, land security and social relations. The paper concludes by arguing that the colonial and postcolonial making of the suburbs produces landscapes of ruralisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]