From Dar es Salaam to Bongoland: Urban Mutations in Tanzania

Public Housing Policies: Decentralization, government policies and the people’s solutions

Public Housing Policies: Decentralization, government policies and the people’s solutions Marie Ange Goux For the past forty years, accelerating urban growth has been a common phenomenon in all of Africa’s big cities. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam have not escaped this continental tendency and have recorded huge population increases. However, the duration and scope of the phenomenon differ noticeably between these two cities. The population of Nairobi, a city that sprang up in 1898 around a new railway station on the Mombasa-Kisumu line, increased relatively quickly due to the labour needs of British colonization. The city’s appeal was coupled with rural ‘abhorrence’ as the monopolization of real estate progressed and colonists appropriated the best land. In addition, in the central and western parts of the country’s rural areas, already affected by this excessive appropriation of property, the available land was gradually divided into smaller units according to an inheritance system based on the principle of sharing out. Consequently, residents from these areas moved to Nairobi to look for employment, the only urban centre which really appealed to them. After Independence, migrant waves increased with the lifting of controls on the movement of Africans. In Dar es Salaam, capital of a mandate relinquished by the Crown, the pace of development was slower; German occupation and English trusteeship did not fit the community population model, land requisitions were not such a common occurrence and the industrial and commercial outlay was more limited. However, since the early seventies, there has been an increase in the migration to Dar es Salaam of country people looking for salaried employment. The urban population of these two cities has thus increased dramatically, particularly in the course of the past twenty years. From 1978 to 1988, Dar es Salaam’s population went from 270,000 to close on 1,400,000, and now stands at about 2,000,000 people.1 As for Nairobi, its population had already reached 834,000 in 1979; this number went up to 1,342,570 in 1989,2 and is now situated somewhere between 2 and 3 million.3 1 Kironde (J.M.L.), Land policy options for urban Tanzania, Land Use Policy, Vol. 14, No2, 1997, London. 2 Kenya Population Census 1979, 1989. 3 Taking a census of the urban populations has become an eminently political issue, particularly when it comes to residents from the informal settlements. Many researchers are asking us to consider official statistics as being greatly under-estimated and to use this wide margin when characterizing Nairobi’s current population. 100 FROM DAR ES SALAAM TO BONGOLAND Figure 7: The population in 1988 PUBLIC HOUSING POLICIES 101 Figure 8: The population in 2001 102 FROM DAR ES SALAAM TO BONGOLAND Accommodating and integrating such a mass of new arrivals in the city poses many problems, one of the most sensitive being that of housing. The contradiction between growth in demand and the stagnation of offers has led to an increase in (illegal or unauthorized) informal settlement zones. These zones are home to between 40 and 60% of Nairobi’s population and more than 75% of that of Dar es Salaam. From a sociological point of view, the population living in this type of settlement is quite heterogeneous, with middle class and very poor people living right next to each other. It should also be remembered that poverty is not the only explanation for existing informal settlements. Legal access to urban land is obviously a serious problem when the middle class starts participating in building unplanned houses. However, the vast majority of people living in these settlements are poor; any kind of legal housing would be inaccessible to them; they congregate on vast, densely populated sites, devoid of the most basic structures (water or electricity conveyance, tarred roads, schools or sanitation). In both these cities, the sites are referred to as “slums”. The aim of this article will be to examine how the housing problem that emerged from this real urban explosion has been managed. The comparative approach enables the researcher to observe certain subtle distinctions resulting from different political and economic orientations. However, it has to be noted as a preliminary that the main orientations followed in the housing domain apply to all developing countries. Policies pursued by the Kenyan and Tanzanian governments are akin to a gradual disengagement on the part of the State. Although the colonial period and more...