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Translation of urban planning models: Planning principles, procedural elements and institutional settings
Habitat International 48 (2015) 140e148
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Translation of urban planning models: Planning principles, procedural elements and institutional settings Shahadat Hossain*, Wolfgang Scholz, Sabine Baumgart Faculty of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund, August-Schmidt-Str. 10, 44227 Dortmund, Germany
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 15 September 2014 Received in revised form 27 January 2015 Accepted 13 March 2015 Available online
This paper presents the process of the translation and instrumentalisation of colonial urban planning principles into contemporary urban planning laws and instruments in Dar es Salaam. Based on a historical reading of the urban planning institutions and empirical references about current urban planning practices in this city it develops three main claims. First, there is a continuation of colonial planning institutions in the post-colonial Dar es Salaam. The shift of power from the colonial authority to the national state of Tanzania did not greatly impact on the planning institutions and practices in this city. Second, colonial urban planning legacies still dominate the planning institutions and practices in the post-colonial Dar es Salaam, however in different forms. They are now shaped by different sets of actors, follow economic logics, benefit only small groups of the economically privileged at the cost of the majority, and support the accumulation of power of the nation-state authorities. Third, the urban consequences and the urban planning institutions and practices of Dar es Salaam are interrelated; each is a result of the process of translation and instrumentalisation of colonial urban planning principles in the post-colonial setting accompanied by poor management and governance processes as well as the contradictions in the land tenure system that characterise this city. Acknowledging the urban consequences as being conditioned by the intense interplay between planning institutions and practice, and urban management and governance, this paper shows how the continued presence of colonial planning principles in the shaping of post-colonial planning practices may contribute to present-day urban consequences in Dar es Salaam. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Translation Urban planning practices Planning institutions Segregation Dar es Salaam
1. Introduction The urban planning ideals and the corresponding organisational and planning models of African cities are inherited from the Western countries that colonised them. The zoning concept with separated land-use categories used in the former British colonies is the basis of most planning legislation in many African countries (Watson, 2009), while euro-centric colonial-type master planning systems inform planning education in Africa (AAPS, 2010). Improvement in sanitary conditions for the white population (Mabogunje, 1990: 137) and racial segregation (Alexander, 1983) were the key elements of colonial urban planning principles. The need for sanitary improvement and consequent racial segregation also provided a necessary reason for the translation of colonial planning principles into contemporary urban planning laws and
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Hossain). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.03.006 0197-3975/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
instruments. While there are literature that have examined the colonial legacies of planning in Africa including planning legislation, spatial planning systems and planning education, there has been little study of the process of the translation and instrumentalisation of colonial planning principles in contemporary urban planning laws and instruments. Only recently have the dynamics and outcome of the translation of paradigms, processes and instruments of urban planning from Europe to African cities been put on the agenda in urban planning studies (Odendaal, 2012; Silva, 2012; Watson, 2009). Based on critiques of the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of persistent planning approaches, in particular the supremacy of the rational planning model and its master planning concept (Myers, 2011) and Western approaches to comprehensive planning (Porter, 2010), these studies argue that African cities are largely developed outside the scope of public planning and landuse regulations (Harrison, 2006; Watson, 2003) and that they are thus not shaped by the inherited ideals and concepts of urban planning. Acknowledging the above argument, we frame our study
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around the assumption that persistent approaches to urban planning in African cities have their roots in Western urban contexts which do not hold in African cities (e.g. ideals of comprehensive planning approaches). Although these models and ideals are dominantly persistent in urban planning, they have in fact been appropriated, adapted, hybridised or refused depending on very place-specific and spatially diverse conditions and needs, and also framed by arrangements of actors. We accordingly argue that the reality of urban planning in African cities is characterised by hybrid arrangements and their constant reproduction and translation, acting partially within and partially outside of state regulations. In this article we understand translation as the process of appropriation, adaptation, hybridisation, and refusal and their interplay in the rationalisation of dominating circulating models and planning ideals and thus context-specific urban planning practices. Following Dewey (1986), we define the key terms as follows. Adaptation relates to adjustment to a changing environment by changing one's internal structures and one's normative and epistemological orders. It accommodates strategies that are necessary to address circumstances that are beyond control, close to adherence, resignation and submission, and also includes tactics that preserve internal structures for the continuation of a prevailing benefit structure, despite changes. Appropriation relates to something being changed in relation to a given context, however in such a way that the receiving context remains basically unchanged, while the integrated element is reproduced in order for its adjustment to the receiving context. Hybridisation refers to the situation where adaptation and appropriation are simultaneously at work, however at varying degrees and levels of influence and without allowing a distinct separation between the two processes. Refusal presents the process of rejection of a new feature or a part of it at a given moment in time. It refers to those that have to date failed to get an acceptable status. Understanding the process of refusal is important as it indicates the struggles and contestations that the successful have already experienced and the fact that the successful achieve their comprehensive meaning only in the presence of the refusal. This article is based on our historical reading of urban development and planning practices in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and its mapping on our empirical experience gathered within the framework of an on-going research project started in the first half of 2013. In our analysis we thus link the planning documents and literature with our knowledge gathered from interviews of local practitioners and professionals. We start with a historical reading of the development process of planning institutions and planning practices in Tanzania, dividing its past into two main periods regarding the development of planning legislation: the top-down period with a master plan approach including the colonial time and post-colonial socialist period following ujamaa,1 and the contemporary more market-led period characterised by
1 After independence with the turn towards nationalism under the guiding vision of ujamaa in the period between 1967 and the mid-1980s, Tanzania developed an “impressive planning infrastructure” consisting of e.g. economic development plans and urban master plans (Armstrong, 1986; Rugumamu, 1997:142). With the end of urban racial segregation there was insufficient infrastructure to provide economic plans to guide national development. There was massive population growth in the city after independence and this caused the post-colonial government to introduce a comprehensive programme to decrease the urban primacy of Dar es Salaam. Attention was given to regional development and the capital city of the country was also shifted from Dar es Salaam to a centrally located part of the country, Dodoma, in 1973. Concerning the administrative structure, urban authorities, responsible e.g. for providing sanitation and water supply, were abolished in 1972. Instead, regional and district authorities were put in place with responsibility for all public services in rural and urban areas.
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international pressure from globalisation but also by the demand for participation from civil society. This division into these two periods is shaped by the analysis of planning documents and planning legislation. From early colonial times up to the 1990s (or 2007 when the new General Planning Scheme was officially introduced), urban planning displayed a topdown attitude derived from the various governments (German, British and independent Tanzanian) and the master planning approach in keeping with centrally made decisions. Furthermore, the colonial racial division of planned areas which created three zones of different plot size for Europeans, Asians and Africans continued in post-colonial times with zones of high, medium and low density that used the same size standards as before. Only the racial division was replaced by segregation along income groups, continuing to shape the city with neighbourhoods defined along sharp lines. Concerning informal settlements, an important phenomenon from colonial times up to today, the policies remained hostile to poor settlers both in earlier times and throughout the ujamaa period, and have only recently moved towards recognition and regularisation (Brennan, Burton, & Lawi, 2007). Therefore, from colonial times up to the 1990s a continuum in planning legislation and approaches can be observed and forms the basis of the periodical division of this article. From the 1990s onwards internal and external factors like the introduction of a multi-party system, a market-led economy and pressure from civil society towards participation has somewhat changed urban planning. Nevertheless, the sharp segregations remain an important feature of Dar es Salaam. This article intends to overcome the common colonial and post-colonial divide and focus rather on the outcomes of urban planning legislation and power relations, which are shaped by strong social segregation in favour of dominant groups. In the following sections we discuss the characteristics, underlying normative ideals and assumptions of the dominant urban planning models that have shaped urban planning reality in Dar es Salaam in the periods under consideration; how their involvements in planning practice have changed the urban morphologies and the planning procedural elements in this city; how these changes are related to the expression of power relations of the individual time periods; and how in each period urban planning in Dar es Salaam has dealt with the issue of appropriation, adaptation, hybridisation, and refusal. We thus claim that the translation of planning models and ideals in Dar es Salaam has historically benefitted the powerful or at least those with the capacity to influence planning institutions and practices. This translation process followed a path that largely excluded the ordinary from planning benefits, instead deepening the very discrimination on which the planning process in Dar es Salaam is historically grounded. This is true for planning institutions and practice in the Dar es Salaam of both colonial and independent Tanzania. Spatial segregation is still in place in this city e the race-based planning practice of colonial times has simply been replaced by the urban planning practices of independent Tanzania that consider populations differently according to their different economic statuses. Despite efforts to overcome the colonial legacy, the planning practice, institutions, administrative system and planning consequences continue to resonate with the colonial past. A reason for such continuation of colonial planning practice, albeit in different forms, is planning's differential relations with different sections of the population. 2. Dar es Salaam: a brief introduction Dar es Salaam was unoccupied land near a small coastal village with a handful of fishermen until it was converted into a small harbour and trading centre in 1867 by the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar, Sayid Majid. After the death of Sultan Majid in 1870, it experienced
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continuous decline and decay until 1887 when the German East African Company took control over the coastal strip in Tanganyika [present mainland Tanzania] and subsequently converted Dar es Salaam into the new capital of German colonial rule in East Africa. After it became the administrative and commercial centre of the German East Africa Company in 1891, the settlement started growing significantly. At the end of the 19th century, the city had about 4000 inhabitants in an area extending about 2 kms from the coast into the hinterland (UN-Habitat, 2008). This city experienced continuous urban growth from colonial times up to today with several intermediate ups and downs, as evident from the recent population census and several other publications (e.g. Brennan et al., 2007; National Bureau of Statistics, 2013). In 1913 it had a population of 22,500 on a land area of approximately 500 ha extending up to 2½ kms along the coastline. The First World War and the transfer of colonial power from the German to the British resulted in a decline in the city's population at a rate of 3.5% annually in the period between 1913 and 1921. The city expanded to 4 kms in 1945, covering an area of about 1200 ha and accommodating a population of 93,363 in 1957. Tanzania's independence in 1961 (Zanzibar in 1963) and the withdrawal of colonial migration restrictions after independence resulted in massive immigration into Dar es Salaam, as evident from its very high population growth of 11.3% for the period 1957e1967 and 7.8% for 1967e1978 e a late effect of the rather anti-urban policy of ujamaa. In the period 1978e2002 the city experienced somewhat lower population growth due to the economic crisis, felt especially in urban areas. Economic liberalisation in the mid-1980s and subsequent economic growth led to an ongoing higher annual population growth of 5.8% that has continued until the present day. Today, being a dominant economic, political and administrative centre, Dar es Salaam continues to attract migrants from all over Tanzania. Its 4.36 million population now constitutes one third of the country's urban population, accommodated on an area of about 1350 km2 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2013). Its present high population growth (about 5.8%) has led to massive physical expansion, the uncontrolled growth of informal settlements and an absence of municipal services for the majority of the population. The physical growth pattern of the city along the coastline and the four arterial roads resulted in the development of linear service structures with few pronounced hierarchies. The linear development of Dar es Salaam that dominated in the 1980s has now been supplemented by extensive urban sprawl in the hinterland of the major trunk roads, covering up to 40 kms to the west and the north. Large settlement areas, mostly unplanned and without basic infrastructure, have developed between the arterial roads, transforming agricultural land informally into building plots, especially for residential uses (Basteck et al., 2007). The high population increases, massive physical expansion, uncontrolled growth of informal settlements, informal peripheral expansion and absence of municipal services for a majority of its population are a few of the issues that render today's Dar es Salaam a city with severe government and management challenges. Despite expansion in terms of space and population, segregation has remained similar throughout, with planned serviced settlements for the European and/or well-off Africans, and unplanned areas for the African poor having emerged during colonial times and been characterised by similar features until the present day. 3. The colonial urban planning of the German and the British: spatial traces of political dominance The colonial Dar es Salaam presents a race-based spatial segregation. In its three-decade rule in Tanganyika, the German colonial power adapted a new institutional and organisational
setup to organise urban space in Dar es Salaam based on race. It started this process first by occupying the eastern part of Dar es Salaam, displacing the native African from this coastal area, and then regularised this appropriation of the coastal and core area of Dar es Salaam by enacting the Building Ordinance of 1891. It tactically employed the ordinance, which was based on the German Bauordnung, to divide Dar es Salaam into 46 separate lots and then to allocate the lots facing the harbour to Europeans. In order to preserve this spatial privilege exclusively for the Europeans, the ordinance allowed only high building standards and Europeanstyle constructions in this area, which was thus affordable only to the Europeans. The backward-facing lots were then allocated to the rich Arabs who could afford the high building standards prescribed. The settlements for Africans in African-style huts were situated outside these 46 lots and separated from the European settlements by Arabs' farmhouses. In 1914, the colonial government amended the ordinance to create three zones: Zone 1 for European-style and standard construction, Zone 2 for mixed construction using only sturdy materials designated for Asians, and Zone 3 for native-style constructions (see Fig. 1). It not only prohibited the construction of African-style huts in Zone 1 and Zone 2, but by imposing high building standards and detailing every specification for buildings, it simply made these areas (Zone 1 and Zone 2) unreachable to the African. The German colonial power thus successfully adapted a colonial planning principle in Dar es Salaam and instrumentalised it carefully to appropriate urban space and to administer racial segregation in the city. Adaptation and appropriation were the major strategies applied to translate colonial fear about the native Africans into a spatially segregated city that offered spatial privileges primarily to the Europeans (and to some extent to the Arabs), however at the cost of the natives. An important urban planning step was the creation of Kariakoo as an African neighbourhood with a chessboard layout, separated from the city centre of Zones 1 and 2 by a cordon sanitaire created in 1913 by demolishing African huts (Brennan et al., 2007: 29). Fig. 1 displays the zoning concept with Zone 1 for Europeans along the seashore with large plots in favourable locations, Zone 2 as a buffer zone and Zone 3 with Kariakoo and other settlements closer to the location of industry. This overall spatial organisation has continued up to today (see also Fig. 2). The Germans introduced race-based spatial segregation in Dar es Salaam, but during the British colonial period (1916e1961) it was heightened through the 1933 British modification of the German building ordinance. The amendment redefined the description of Zone 3 as an area for any type of building construction subject to approval from the government authority. It thus opened up Zone 3 for appropriation by Asians, who took this opportunity to access cheap housing and business opportunities there. The requirements for European styles and sturdy materials remained intact in Zone 1 and Zone 2, respectively. An administrative structure for urban and infrastructure planning was created for Dar es Salaam in 1931 when the Township Authority was established under the Township Ordinance of 1920. The authority consisted of Europeans and Indians who were responsible for town planning and building permits including infrastructure provision, urban sanitation and trade (Brennan et al., 2007). In this administrative setup, the necessity for government approval for building in Zone 3 put construction by Africans at the mercy of the Europeans and Indians. While the Native Authority Ordinance of 1926 (Ch. 72) empowered native chiefs to exercise some administrative, executive and judicial power, these chieftaincies functioned in such a way as to support the colonial government. This building ordinance based segregation practice continued until 1940 and functioned as a central consideration in government activities concerning the allocation of public resources, urban
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Fig. 1. Urban Development of Dar es Salaam, 1925 to 2012.
amenities, opportunities and perspectives. Public provisions were largely restricted to European areas, while African settlements e planned or unplanned e were without any services (Brennan et al., 2007). The later part of British colonial rule experienced rapid population growth, increasing poverty among the African populations and their worsening living conditions due to overcrowding and a lack of infrastructures (Brennan et al., 2007: 38ff). Attempts to tackle this situation were made by adapting a number of legislations and institutions like the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940, the Town Planning Department in 1947, the first master plan for Dar es Salaam in 1948, and the institutionalisation of the Town and Country Planning Ordinance in 1956 (revised in 1961).2 These steps failed to bring much improvement however,
2 Some other influential plans for urban development were the ‘Outline of post war development’ developed in 1944 and the ‘Ten Year Development Plan for Tanganyika’ established in 1946.
especially because the government's broad approach towards the three zones and thus statutory planning practices remained unchanged. While the government administration paid more attention to quality and standards for the European Zone, it only attempted to control the quantity of housing construction in Zone 3 without any serious consideration of quality or standards. As the Act came into being in reaction to the poor conditions experienced by the native African, Zone 2 with its Asian population was largely ignored in the government's considerations. While the 1946 Ten Year Development Plan for Tanganyika provided for investment into urban infrastructures such as roads, water, sanitation, electricity and sewerage networks, the initiative was too little to make a major change in the African areas that had already experienced decades of negligence and discrimination by the colonial powers. These first urban legislations clearly display the translation of Western planning concepts in Africa, with some appropriations to achieve the goal of racial segregation by applying different building and infrastructure standards. The outcome is rather the same as
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Fig. 2. Urban Morphology of Dar es Salaam, 2012.
using land-use categories for different ethnic groups but is more politically hidden. The hiding of the principle of racial segregation by using three zones was so successful that it is still in place in postcolonial Tanzania as zones for high, medium and low density. Many of the institutions, after minor changes, are also in place in presentday Tanzania. Dar es Salaam has three master plans for its land-use regulation and guided urban development: the 1949 Master Plan of colonial Dar es Salaam and two posteindependence Master Plans drawn up in 1968 and 1979.3 The plans integrated Western planning ideas, health and safety concerns, and the issue of aesthetic visualisation; however in such a way that they actually supported the continuation of the earlier race-based segregation practice. While the British Garden City idea, the North American self-contained neighbourhood unit concept and the creation of breeze lanes and greenbelts were included on grounds of health considerations, they in fact addressed the safety concerns of the Europeans and the native elites who demanded the segregation of residential areas. By proposing separate densities, plot sizes, different building standards and quality of services for the three earlier segregated zones and deliberately proposing open spaces between zones in the form of ‘breeze lanes’, the 1949 plan clearly showed its close relation to the discriminatory colonial planning ideology. The breeze-lanes concept of the 1948 plan also re-emerged in the 1968 plan, however not based on aesthetic and health grounds but rather as a
3 The 1949 Master Plan was prepared by the colonial British government, while the two successive master plans were prepared by a Canadian and a Swedish company without a contractual agreement with the Government of Tanzania.
landscape corridor that derived its meaning in relation to the government complex as an impressive symbolic entity. Several other ‘breeze-zones’ still exist as open spaces for annual national events, but they also function as boundaries between segregated residential zones. Racial integration became an important consideration in the posteindependence Master Plan of 1968 and the Acquisition of Building Act in Tanzania of 1971. While the 1968 Master Plan proposed narrowing down disparities between zones by reducing density in the earlier high-density zones and at the same time infilling the low-density zones, the 1971 Building Acquisition Act allowed the President of Tanzania to acquire buildings valued over 100,000 Tanzania Shillings and the rentedout second homes of Tanzanian owners in order to create a pool of national housing to be distributed to non house owners. Neither effort brought about much change due to the fact that by then racebased spatial segregation had already resulted in a situation that could not be solved only by addressing density and redistribution issues. Many Africans allocated land in the European and Asian areas returned to the earlier African areas simply because the large homes and lot sizes of the European areas were unaffordable for them or because the distant location of these areas from the city centre and inconvenient road conditions make them less attractive than the centrally located African areas like Kariakoo (Smiley, 2013: 216). Such reallocation under the Building Acquisition Act of 1971 therefore benefited only those few Africans who were already socially and economically privileged. On the one hand the 1968 Plan relaxed building standards to encourage increased production of traditional dwellings, on the other hand it fulfilled the earlier objective of the healthy city not by improving services and amenities in the squatter settlements but by the removal and displacement of the residents of these areas without compensation or resettlement options. Government recognition of squatter settlements, only three years after the publication of the master plan, offered a form of security but most of the inhabitants of these settlements nonetheless experienced continued discrimination. This time it was based on their employment affiliation. The political vision of ujamaa supported the deportation to rural areas of inhabitants who were not employed in the formal sector in Dar es Salaam. As native Africans inhabited the squatter settlements and they have historically been dependent on informal-sector work, such displacement and deportation mainly affected the native population of the city. In line with the socialist orientation of the country, ujamaa focused on service provision in rural areas while living conditions in the urban areas, especially in the sprawling shanties, further deteriorated: they were prone to flooding, lacked access to water and generally lacked services and infrastructures (Brennan et al., 2007: 54ff). This led to increasing health problems and a “serious cholera outbreak” (Armstrong, 1986: 58). The 1979 Master Plan, which emerged as a revised version of the 1968 Master Plan and as a working management document, offered practical programmes considering the existing urban realities. It emphasised control and implementation with physical design based on Western grand concepts (e.g. Garden City, neighbourhood unit, corridors, greenbelts, sub-cities). However its proposed programmes never achieved implementation status due to the funding crisis of the time with Tanzania experiencing severe economic hardship and stringency. The plan therefore effected no changes in the already segregated Dar es Salaam, ‘The City of Three Colors’ (Smiley, 2009). While the ultimate direct impact of the master plans was quite limited, they nevertheless served to consolidate the urban structure with all the contradictions and inequalities of the colonial time. One of the reasons for this lies in the position of the planner who aimed to be an independent and objective technician designing a city controlled by planners (Alexander, 1983). Armstrong observed
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that “[T]he underlying virtually environmental determinist philosophy was translated into a characteristically physical planning approach, exemplified by its application of somewhat mechanistic Garden City principles, an overriding concern with layout and visual appearance, and its devotion to the arithmetic of prescribed standards and densities” (Armstrong, 1986: 45). This observation also applies to the two successive master plans of Dar es Salaam, at least in part. Doherty sees that plans in Tanzania “were not primarily motivated by a desire to house the growing African population, but rather fear of the possible consequences of an outbreak of contagious disease in severely overcrowded and inadequately serviced slum Settlements” (Doherty, 1976: 84). The physical segregation of different racial groups by plot sizes and building standards, introduced by the German authorities in 1914, remained (Armstrong, 1986: 46). Armstrong (1986: 52) concludes that “[T]he importation of fashionable contemporary Western planning ideas served to further enforce this elite bias. For example, no modification was proposed to the rigorous building code in operation which, by insisting on relatively high standards of space, materials and service provision, continued actively to discourage the extension of African owner-occupation.” The present planning administration resonates with its colonial past, the institutional environment has rarely changed or modified to seriously address the colonial logics that shaped it, the current governance logics continue to follow colonial exclusionary principles, and the planning ideals, models and concepts of its colonisers continue their primacy in the present planning institutions and practices of Dar es Salaam. The urban morphology of the city displays a wide range of imported planning schemes. Neighbourhoods following the Garden City style were mainly reserved for well-off residents and characterise areas in Zone 1. They were primarily implemented along the favourable coastline. This approach was discontinued in the 1980s due to high investment costs and low densities. The neighbourhood unit scheme, providing different plot sizes and areas reserved for public use (schools, open spaces) was introduced in the site-andservices schemes between Mwenge and Ubungo in the 1980s and is still the official planning approach of the Ministry of Lands, also forming a major part of the curriculum of the planning school. However due to its more advanced and costly planning and implementation process (public uses), it is not the only model in use. The grid or chess-board layout, introduced once for Kariakoo, is again the preferred model for quick land development especially at the periphery and in the 20,000 plot projects (described below). It has created plots of three different categories based on simple layouts without hierarchies.
4. Global impacts after the turn of the century Dar es Salaam experienced massive urban and economic growth and required investment in infrastructures at the end of the last century. From 1980 to 2007, Dar es Salaam's population “almost quadrupled” from 836,000 to more than 3 million and had reached 4.3 million by 2014. The radius of the city from the coast to the hinterland has expanded from 14 km in 1980 to a radius of 40 km today (UN-Habitat, 2008: 130). This urban growth is coupled with economic growth but decoupled from the planning system and its institutional set-up which was designed to manage a small colonial city with limited growth and restricted access. The environmental and living conditions in the city deteriorated considerably and the urban and institutional setting therefore seemed to require revision, allowing the emphasis of strategic elements reflecting the limited resources.
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4.1. From the master plan towards a General Planning Scheme The master planning concept was contested in the early 1990s when the Government of Tanzania sought financial and technical support from its international development partners to review the long-outdated Dar es Salaam Master Plan of 1979. Given the fact that the master planning approach had become obsolete even in the Western context where it originated, UN-Habitat instead offered the necessary financial and technical support to prepare a Strategic Urban Development Plan (SUDP) for Dar es Salaam within its Sustainable Cities Project (SCP), taking Dar es Salaam as a pilot study case (Dar es Salaam Sustainable Project, SDP 1992e2003). The SUDP considered the Environmental Planning and Management (EPM) approach recommended by the Rio conference as a suitable alternative to master planning for the planning and management of cities. Its main objective was to strengthen municipal planning and management capacities and improve the participation of stakeholders to fulfil the urban management needs of the city. Following a collaborative planning approach, it focused especially on planning as a process. In order to address the on-going complex urban development processes, SDP was claimed to have adopted a more dynamic, continuous and consensual visionbuilding and policy-making process. The output of the strategic planning process was not just a physical development plan for the city but a set of interrelated strategic projects aimed at enabling all public, private and community initiatives to promote economic growth, provide basic infrastructure services and enhance the quality of the environment. This new approach attempted to move away from the rigid formality of blueprint urban master plans. Rather than providing a top-down guideline for a certain period of time and for specific population predictions and instigating zoningbased plans (as in the master planning approach), EPM offered development conditions based on environmental considerations. The implementation of various development projects within the SDP improved the environmental conditions of Dar es Salaam considerably. The Tanzanian National Environmental Policy of 1997 also originated from this strategic urban development project. A draft SUDP report was prepared in early 1998. The SDP process and the SUDP as a planning document demonstrate a translation process in which modern Western planning concepts concerning sustainable cities were locally appropriated and hybridised. While the projects carried out within SDP improved the environmental conditions in Dar es Salaam (Kasala, 2013; Nnkya, 1999), the Ministry for Land, Housing and Human Settlement Development (MLHHSD) rejected the SUDP report mainly due to the absence of a comprehensive land-use plan. The Ministry expected a document with a comprehensive future land-use plan and was not prepared to leave decisions on future land uses open. The planning document of SUDP provided only options for future development and set preferences for land uses according to suitability criteria based on factors like accessibility, existing infrastructure, topography and surrounding land uses. The refusal of the Ministry to accept this new approach displayed the continued strength of the colonial influence on planning, whereby only master plans were seen as legal planning schemes. The conflict between process-orientated flexible planning and the demand of the authorities for a final land-use plan led to the development of new General Planning Schemes (GPS) “combining the advantages of both” (Lupala, 2013) in 2007 (Urban Planning Act, 2007). Today in Tanzania, a GPS has to follow documented stakeholder meetings on the one hand and produce comprehensive planning documents with defined future land uses on the other hand. Although the GPS aimed to include elements of both master planning and the SUDP and thus involved a process of
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hybridisation, it is no different from blueprint planning as stipulated by the traditional master planning approach. With the rejection of the SUDP, Dar es Salaam still lacked a new general planning document. Therefore, with the financial support of the World Bank, the MLHHSD assigned the planning task to a group of Italian consultancy companies (Moss, Happold, Arch & QConsult, 2012). The work was carried out by sub-contracting various responsibilities to several local planning firms and planning experts. While the idea of the hybrid planning concept GPS is to promote greater participation and thus to open up the planning process to a wider group of stakeholders, the current master planning process continued its earlier tradition and limited the planning process to include only a few planning experts. The lack of stakeholder participation is one of the criticisms of the review committee of the MLHHSD, which recently rejected the draft report of the on-going master plan. It seems as if the SUDP represented only a short period of discontinuation of the master planning approach, which with the GPS is again back on the agenda. GPS is a rather compromised product that supports the continuation of the MLHHSD's planning authority, neutralising any challenge by others,4 acknowledges the status quo of the local authoritative divisions that have been shaping urban planning in Tanzania, and accepts the shaping of the planning process by the budgetary conditions of the influential stakeholders.
4.2. New approaches: 20,000 plots and New Town development Kigamboni In cooperation with the three municipalities of Dar es Salaam, the MLHHSD introduced a so-called 20,000 plots project in 2002 with two linked aims. First, this project was to address the severe shortage of planned, surveyed and serviced plots through the development of self-sufficient, self-sustained satellite towns in the peri-urban areas of Dar es Salaam. It claimed, and this was the second aim, that the development of satellite towns at the urban fringe would act as a mechanism to control land speculation and the corruption of land officials. The project started with a 8.9 billion Tanzanian Shilling loan from the government treasury and a plan to repay the loan and also finance later project activities with earnings from the sale of plots developed in all the earlier phases. Although the project delivered more plots than expected (about 35,000) and in a timely fashion, it was subject to massive criticism on planning issues. Most of the plots were developed at a great distance from the town where land is affordable, but utility supplies to these remote and isolated locations are difficult. Given the fact that major economic activities are concentrated in the city centre of Dar es Salaam, the 20,000 plot areas provide settlement options only for those with their own transport facilities (like private cars). This has resulted in many of the plots remaining undeveloped and being obtained by landowners intending to benefit from land speculation. However, it can be seen as a project that picks up on the ideas of the satellite towns from the 1968 Master Plan combined with new financial tools in the form of a revolving fund, i.e. as appropriation. Furthermore, it represents a second attempt to address the shortage of building land after the site-and-service project of the 1980s.
4 SDP was implemented with the Ministry of Regional Administration and Local Government as the main implementing authority and thus without respecting the existing authoritative hierarchy. This new authoritative setup was claimed to have the potential to threaten the planning authority of the MLHHSD and to be one of the reasons why the MLHHSD rejected the SUDP report (see Burian & Kyariga, 2004; Kasala, 2013).
Following a call from the President of Tanzania, the MLHHSD initiated a New Town project in 2007/2008. The idea was to attract global investment and to promote international businesses, developing the Kigamboni area as an international business and recreational zone with very high standard business facilities, a convention centre, world-class tourism facilities and high-rise residential buildings (MLHHSD, 2010). Kigamboni is located very close to the CBD on the other side of the river that forms the harbour, but is accessible only by ferry. With the construction of a bridge, this area becomes a prime location. The project was justified by relating it to the recommendation to develop satellite towns in the more than 30 years old Dar es Salaam Master Plan and success stories of similar projects in cities like Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai. The place-specific complexities, organisational and institutional differences and socio-political context of Tanzania that speak against the project were, however, played down. The government issued a 'stay-order' in 2008, preventing any type of development in the Kigamboni project area, created new institutions in support of the project and setup a new planning authority, the Kigamboni Development Agency, under the MLHHSD to plan and implement the project. It has, however, made little progress to date due to severe local protests against the project, difficulties in land acquisition, and a lack of finance for this large project, especially as a consequence of the global financial crisis in 2008. The Kigamboni case demonstrates how the translation of a world-class planning vision necessitates the adaptation and creative articulation of many other imported concepts like the satellite city and competitive Singapore, Dubai and Shanghai models to give it a relational meaning. It also shows a form of hybridisation in the reference system for planning justification. In addition to its relations with earlier master plan traditions, planning references are now also derived from a broader global context that includes the South. While globalisation has opened the door for the circulation of both of Western and non-Western ideals and concepts, it has equally complicated their local level translation, informing local people and thus positioning them strongly in local level contestations and increasing the chances of local rejection. 5. Adaptation, appropriation, hybridisation and refusal in urban planning The above discussion reveals the processes of adaptation from European legislation by the German Building Ordinance (Bauordnung) of 1891 as the basis for urban planning (Kironde, 2007) and the 1914 Three Zone Ordinance that used plot sizes and building standards for the racial segregation of the urban area. The British 1933 modification of the Building Ordinance and the 1956 Town and Country Planning Ordinance are rather appropriations of existing legislation to the colonial context than newly developed legislation. The latter, the 1956 Town and Country Planning Ordinance, is still in place, albeit with minor changes, and represents the main planning law in current Tanzania. The later post-colonial 1971 Act that nationalised the building stock as part of the ujamaa policy can be seen as an adaptation, following the socialist agenda of the day. The same applies to the later 2000 National Human Settlement Development Policy, an adaptation which is in line with similar UN documents. Only the latest General Planning Scheme of 2007 developed an appropriation of participatory planning approaches with elements of the old master plan approach and can, therefore, be seen as a hybridisation of approaches from outside the country for the Tanzanian context. Nevertheless, the colonial approach of organising planning areas by plot size has continued from colonial times up to the present day, in this regard there is thus no difference between colonial and post-colonial times. Only the intended racial division has been replaced in favour of
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Fig. 3. Adaptation, appropriation, hybridisation and refusal of influencing factors on the urban development of Dar es Salaam.
segregation by income and political influence. Fig. 3 displays the key terms and key variables in a timeline of urban development in Dar es Salaam, divided into two periods as shown before: the colonial with the socialist period (ujamaa) and the current marketled period. A similar continuum of colonial and post-colonial approaches can be observed in relevant planning documents. During colonial times, planning instruments, methods and contents were imported from Europe. In the era of structural adjustment, a generally growing disillusionment concerning planning was felt in Tanzania in general and particularly in Dar es Salaam, with the 1979 Master Plan being the last legally approved city-wide plan (at least until 2009). The focus shifted towards practical and rather piecemeal interventions and urban management, away from the large-scale long-term planning of urban space and infrastructures (Armstrong, 1986). More surprisingly, the economic development plans were designed by British or French planning teams, also in the socialist period between the colonial phase and the phase of structural adjustment which was characterised by its striving towards self-reliance (Rugumamu, 1997). The master plan approach also continued to be the main planning tool until the 1990s. Master plans for Dar es Salaam were designed with the support of Britain (1949), Canada (1968) and Sweden (1979). According to Armstrong (1986: 63), it was the “application of fashionable western urban planning ideas” that rendered the three urban master plans of Dar es Salaam from 1949 to 1979 largely irrelevant for urban development. Similarly, the new master plan under preparation is funded by the World Bank and undertaken by an Italian consultancy. Only the Strategic Urban Development Plan (SUDP) of the 1990s was prepared with the collaboration of local planners and selected stakeholders and pursued a wider participatory approach. Although it allowed for more participation it did not mark a final shift from comprehensive planning to a strategic planning approach focused on a few implementable programmes and projects in line with available resources. The resulting SUDP was refused by the authorities as it did not strictly follow the inherited
master planning approach and did not produce a final land-use plan with only one fixed land use for each area. The resulting urban morphology of Dar es Salaam (Fig. 2) also shows a continuum. While the imported Garden City model, which was tailor-made for the settlements for European colonialists, was not implemented after independence, all other models and layouts have remained part of planning practice up to the present day. The grid pattern introduced by the Germans for Kariakoo and later applied by the British to African settlements in Ilala is still in use today in urban planning in Tanzania, as seen in the recent 20,000 plot projects. The neighbourhood model, imported from the US and applied in the site-and-service projects of the World Bank in Mwenge and Sinza, remains the main model for urban development and service distribution and is still the one preferred in education and planning practice by the Ministry (Scholz, Shedrack, Dayaram, & Robinson, 2013). The application of these Western models was always accompanied by their constant refusal by the majority of the local population who could not afford to comply with the prescribed rules and regulations. This resulted in the emergence of informal settlements in colonial times and their continuation today. Informal settlements are therefore not a phenomenon of post-colonial rapid urbanisation, but rather a continued phenomenon of the Tanzanian colonial past. Despite the expansion of Dar es Salaam in terms of space and population, segregation has remained similar throughout with planned serviced settlements for the European or well-off Africans and unplanned areas for the African poor, the latter having emerged during colonial times and preserved similar features up to today. Considering the role of actors in promoting the circulation of ideals and models of urban and infrastructure planning, as presented here, Tanzania relied strongly upon 'Western' experts in economic, urban and infrastructure planning. On the one hand, this is related to historical phases in which the economy of Tanzania was quite explicitly dependent on or oriented towards Europe or the 'West', i.e. the colonial period as well as the period of the adoption of the SAP from the mid-1980s on. However, even during the first decades
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of independence when self-reliance was the political goal, planning was also highly influenced by foreign actors. Each of the master plans of Dar es Salaam has coincided with important transitional phases in Tanzania's broader post-war development: 1949 marked the beginning of the final colonial period with a different constitutional basis when the first territorywide development programme was launched; 1968 immediately followed the major ambitious policy shift of the Arusha Declaration; and 1979 was in the post-villagisation phase of administrative decentralisation and in the midst of a steadily growing economic crisis (Armstrong, 1986: 44).The 1992 SUDP was also started at a point when comprehensive planning had failed to guide urban development and strategic planning appeared on the agenda. 6. Conclusions The analysis of the urban planning legislation, its underlying concepts and the resulting urban fabric clearly displays a continuum in urban planning principles from early colonial times until today. In none of the fields of planning legislation, planning documents, planning goals and the resulting urban morphology (Fig. 3) can a clear division between the colonial and post-colonial period be observed. Processes of adaptation, appropriation, hybridisation and refusal took place in planning, however not within clearly distinguishable periods. The top-down planning approach continued from the colonial to the post-colonial period, informal settlements already existed in the colonial period and the colonial principle of segregation as spatially expressed through the introduction of the three-zone model is still a main feature of the urban fabric of Dar es Salaam. The race-based colonial logic of segregation has now been transformed into an economic segregation that currently conditions the planning practice of the post-colonial Dar es Salaam. Despite this continuum, no specific African post-colonial urban model has been developed to address the particular urban challenges arising, neither in academic discussion nor in planning practice. However, the spatial dimension of informal urbanisation (accounting in Dar es Salaam for about 70% of the area) makes it clear that it obviously represents the majority of the urban area and underlines the refusal of any codified urban planning model and urban planning regulations. The growing gap between the continuum of planning approaches and underlying urban models and ideals on the one hand and informal urban reality on the other hand, calls for a re-thinking of urban planning in general and for the development of a suitable urban model for African cities and appropriate planning legislation, accordingly. Acknowledgements This paper is developed from an ongoing research project implemented at the Faculty of Spatial Planning of TU Dortmund within the framework of a German Research Foundation (DFG) special priority programme (SPP1448), Adaptation and Creativity in Africa e Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder.
References AAPS (Association of African Planning Schools). (2010). Conference on revitalising planning education in Africa Conference (Background paper, Unpublished). Alexander, L. (1983). European planning ideology in Tanzania. Habitat International, 7(1/2), 17e36. Armstrong, A. (1986). Colonial and neo-colonial urban planning: three generations of master plans for Dar es Salaam Tanzania. Utafiti, 8(1), 43e66. Basteck, T., Hill, A., Hühner, T., Kreibich, V., Lindner, C., & Scholz, W. (2007). Intermediate report megacities Dar es Salaam. Trunk infrastructure and urban growth e Managing rapid urbanisation in poverty in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Dortmund: University of Dortmund (Unpublished report). Brennan, J., Burton, A., & Lawi, Y. (Eds.). (2007). Dar es Salaam: Histories from an emerging African metropolis. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyola Publishers. Burian, B., & Kyariga, A. (2004). Sustainable development in an urban Tanzanian context. In W. David (Ed.), From unsustainable to inclusive cities (pp. 107e125). Geneva: UNRISD. [1934] Dewey, J. (1986). A common faith. In J. A. Boydston, et al. (Eds.), The later works (pp. 1925e1953). Arbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 9. Doherty, J. (1976). Ideology and town planning. Journal of Geographical Association of Tanzania, 14, 84. Harrison, P. (2006). On the edge of reason: planning and urban futures in Africa. Urban Studies, 43(2), 319e335. Kasala, E. S. (2013). Operationalizing strategic urban development planning: The case of Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania. Ph.D. dissertation. Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam. Kironde, J. (2007). Race, class and housing in Dar es Salaam. In J. R. Brennal, A. Burton, & Y. Lawi (Eds.), Dar es Salaam. Histories from an emerging African metropolis (pp. 97e117). Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers. [PAPER TITLE] Lupala, J. (2013). In Annual Conference of the Tanzanian Association of Planners, Dar es Salaam. Mabogunje, A. L. (1990). Perspective on urban land and urban management policies in sub-Saharan Africa. World Bank Technical Paper No. 196. Washington DC: The World Bank. MLHHSD. (2010). Kigamoni new city master plan. main report. Dar es Salaam: Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development (MLHHSD). Moss, D., Happold, B., Arch, A., & Q-Consult. (2012). Dar es Salaam master plan 2012e2032 (Preliminary draft, Unpublished). Myers, G. (2011). African cities: Alternative visions of urban theory and practice. London: Zed Books. National Bureau of Statistics. (2013). 2012 population and housing census (The United Republic of Tanzania). Nnkya, T. J. (1999). Towards strategic planning: the case of sustainable Dar es Salaam project. In Workshop on local government strategic planning/management for Eastern and Southern Africa, Addis Ababa. Odendaal, N. (2012). Reality check: planning education in the African urban century. Cities, 29, 174e182. Porter, L. (2010). Unlearning the colonial cultures of planning. Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate. Rugumamu, S. (1997). Lethal aid: The illusion of socialism and self-reliance in Tanzania. Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc. Scholz, W., Shedrack, J., Dayaram, T., & Robinson, P. (2013). The influence of planning standards on the long term suitability of settlements: evidence from Dar es Salaam. In ISOCARP review 09, frontiers of planning: Visionary futures for human settlements (pp. 28e44) (Den Haag). Silva, C. N. (2012). Urban planning in sub-Saharan Africa: a new role in the urban transition. Cities, 29, 155e157. Smiley, S. (2009). The city of three colors: segregation in colonial Dar es Salaam, 1891e1961. Historical Geography, 37, 178e196. Smiley, S. (2013). Mental maps, segregation, and everyday life in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Journal of Cultural Geography, 30(2), 215e244. UN-Habitat. (2008). State of the world's cities. Nairobi: UN-Habitat. The United Republic of Tanzania, The Urban Planning Act 2007, No. 8 of 2007, The United republic of Tanzania, Tanzania. Watson, V. (2003). Conflicting rationalities: implications for planning theory and ethics. Planning Theory & Practice, 4(4), 395e407. Watson, V. (2009). Seeing from the south: refocusing urban planning on the globe's central urban issues. Urban Studies, 46(11), 2259e2257.
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Translation of urban planning models: Planning principles, procedural elements and institutional settings Shahadat Hossain*, Wolfgang Scholz, Sabine Baumgart Faculty of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund, August-Schmidt-Str. 10, 44227 Dortmund, Germany
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 15 September 2014 Received in revised form 27 January 2015 Accepted 13 March 2015 Available online
This paper presents the process of the translation and instrumentalisation of colonial urban planning principles into contemporary urban planning laws and instruments in Dar es Salaam. Based on a historical reading of the urban planning institutions and empirical references about current urban planning practices in this city it develops three main claims. First, there is a continuation of colonial planning institutions in the post-colonial Dar es Salaam. The shift of power from the colonial authority to the national state of Tanzania did not greatly impact on the planning institutions and practices in this city. Second, colonial urban planning legacies still dominate the planning institutions and practices in the post-colonial Dar es Salaam, however in different forms. They are now shaped by different sets of actors, follow economic logics, benefit only small groups of the economically privileged at the cost of the majority, and support the accumulation of power of the nation-state authorities. Third, the urban consequences and the urban planning institutions and practices of Dar es Salaam are interrelated; each is a result of the process of translation and instrumentalisation of colonial urban planning principles in the post-colonial setting accompanied by poor management and governance processes as well as the contradictions in the land tenure system that characterise this city. Acknowledging the urban consequences as being conditioned by the intense interplay between planning institutions and practice, and urban management and governance, this paper shows how the continued presence of colonial planning principles in the shaping of post-colonial planning practices may contribute to present-day urban consequences in Dar es Salaam. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Translation Urban planning practices Planning institutions Segregation Dar es Salaam
1. Introduction The urban planning ideals and the corresponding organisational and planning models of African cities are inherited from the Western countries that colonised them. The zoning concept with separated land-use categories used in the former British colonies is the basis of most planning legislation in many African countries (Watson, 2009), while euro-centric colonial-type master planning systems inform planning education in Africa (AAPS, 2010). Improvement in sanitary conditions for the white population (Mabogunje, 1990: 137) and racial segregation (Alexander, 1983) were the key elements of colonial urban planning principles. The need for sanitary improvement and consequent racial segregation also provided a necessary reason for the translation of colonial planning principles into contemporary urban planning laws and
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Hossain). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.03.006 0197-3975/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
instruments. While there are literature that have examined the colonial legacies of planning in Africa including planning legislation, spatial planning systems and planning education, there has been little study of the process of the translation and instrumentalisation of colonial planning principles in contemporary urban planning laws and instruments. Only recently have the dynamics and outcome of the translation of paradigms, processes and instruments of urban planning from Europe to African cities been put on the agenda in urban planning studies (Odendaal, 2012; Silva, 2012; Watson, 2009). Based on critiques of the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of persistent planning approaches, in particular the supremacy of the rational planning model and its master planning concept (Myers, 2011) and Western approaches to comprehensive planning (Porter, 2010), these studies argue that African cities are largely developed outside the scope of public planning and landuse regulations (Harrison, 2006; Watson, 2003) and that they are thus not shaped by the inherited ideals and concepts of urban planning. Acknowledging the above argument, we frame our study
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around the assumption that persistent approaches to urban planning in African cities have their roots in Western urban contexts which do not hold in African cities (e.g. ideals of comprehensive planning approaches). Although these models and ideals are dominantly persistent in urban planning, they have in fact been appropriated, adapted, hybridised or refused depending on very place-specific and spatially diverse conditions and needs, and also framed by arrangements of actors. We accordingly argue that the reality of urban planning in African cities is characterised by hybrid arrangements and their constant reproduction and translation, acting partially within and partially outside of state regulations. In this article we understand translation as the process of appropriation, adaptation, hybridisation, and refusal and their interplay in the rationalisation of dominating circulating models and planning ideals and thus context-specific urban planning practices. Following Dewey (1986), we define the key terms as follows. Adaptation relates to adjustment to a changing environment by changing one's internal structures and one's normative and epistemological orders. It accommodates strategies that are necessary to address circumstances that are beyond control, close to adherence, resignation and submission, and also includes tactics that preserve internal structures for the continuation of a prevailing benefit structure, despite changes. Appropriation relates to something being changed in relation to a given context, however in such a way that the receiving context remains basically unchanged, while the integrated element is reproduced in order for its adjustment to the receiving context. Hybridisation refers to the situation where adaptation and appropriation are simultaneously at work, however at varying degrees and levels of influence and without allowing a distinct separation between the two processes. Refusal presents the process of rejection of a new feature or a part of it at a given moment in time. It refers to those that have to date failed to get an acceptable status. Understanding the process of refusal is important as it indicates the struggles and contestations that the successful have already experienced and the fact that the successful achieve their comprehensive meaning only in the presence of the refusal. This article is based on our historical reading of urban development and planning practices in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and its mapping on our empirical experience gathered within the framework of an on-going research project started in the first half of 2013. In our analysis we thus link the planning documents and literature with our knowledge gathered from interviews of local practitioners and professionals. We start with a historical reading of the development process of planning institutions and planning practices in Tanzania, dividing its past into two main periods regarding the development of planning legislation: the top-down period with a master plan approach including the colonial time and post-colonial socialist period following ujamaa,1 and the contemporary more market-led period characterised by
1 After independence with the turn towards nationalism under the guiding vision of ujamaa in the period between 1967 and the mid-1980s, Tanzania developed an “impressive planning infrastructure” consisting of e.g. economic development plans and urban master plans (Armstrong, 1986; Rugumamu, 1997:142). With the end of urban racial segregation there was insufficient infrastructure to provide economic plans to guide national development. There was massive population growth in the city after independence and this caused the post-colonial government to introduce a comprehensive programme to decrease the urban primacy of Dar es Salaam. Attention was given to regional development and the capital city of the country was also shifted from Dar es Salaam to a centrally located part of the country, Dodoma, in 1973. Concerning the administrative structure, urban authorities, responsible e.g. for providing sanitation and water supply, were abolished in 1972. Instead, regional and district authorities were put in place with responsibility for all public services in rural and urban areas.
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international pressure from globalisation but also by the demand for participation from civil society. This division into these two periods is shaped by the analysis of planning documents and planning legislation. From early colonial times up to the 1990s (or 2007 when the new General Planning Scheme was officially introduced), urban planning displayed a topdown attitude derived from the various governments (German, British and independent Tanzanian) and the master planning approach in keeping with centrally made decisions. Furthermore, the colonial racial division of planned areas which created three zones of different plot size for Europeans, Asians and Africans continued in post-colonial times with zones of high, medium and low density that used the same size standards as before. Only the racial division was replaced by segregation along income groups, continuing to shape the city with neighbourhoods defined along sharp lines. Concerning informal settlements, an important phenomenon from colonial times up to today, the policies remained hostile to poor settlers both in earlier times and throughout the ujamaa period, and have only recently moved towards recognition and regularisation (Brennan, Burton, & Lawi, 2007). Therefore, from colonial times up to the 1990s a continuum in planning legislation and approaches can be observed and forms the basis of the periodical division of this article. From the 1990s onwards internal and external factors like the introduction of a multi-party system, a market-led economy and pressure from civil society towards participation has somewhat changed urban planning. Nevertheless, the sharp segregations remain an important feature of Dar es Salaam. This article intends to overcome the common colonial and post-colonial divide and focus rather on the outcomes of urban planning legislation and power relations, which are shaped by strong social segregation in favour of dominant groups. In the following sections we discuss the characteristics, underlying normative ideals and assumptions of the dominant urban planning models that have shaped urban planning reality in Dar es Salaam in the periods under consideration; how their involvements in planning practice have changed the urban morphologies and the planning procedural elements in this city; how these changes are related to the expression of power relations of the individual time periods; and how in each period urban planning in Dar es Salaam has dealt with the issue of appropriation, adaptation, hybridisation, and refusal. We thus claim that the translation of planning models and ideals in Dar es Salaam has historically benefitted the powerful or at least those with the capacity to influence planning institutions and practices. This translation process followed a path that largely excluded the ordinary from planning benefits, instead deepening the very discrimination on which the planning process in Dar es Salaam is historically grounded. This is true for planning institutions and practice in the Dar es Salaam of both colonial and independent Tanzania. Spatial segregation is still in place in this city e the race-based planning practice of colonial times has simply been replaced by the urban planning practices of independent Tanzania that consider populations differently according to their different economic statuses. Despite efforts to overcome the colonial legacy, the planning practice, institutions, administrative system and planning consequences continue to resonate with the colonial past. A reason for such continuation of colonial planning practice, albeit in different forms, is planning's differential relations with different sections of the population. 2. Dar es Salaam: a brief introduction Dar es Salaam was unoccupied land near a small coastal village with a handful of fishermen until it was converted into a small harbour and trading centre in 1867 by the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar, Sayid Majid. After the death of Sultan Majid in 1870, it experienced
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continuous decline and decay until 1887 when the German East African Company took control over the coastal strip in Tanganyika [present mainland Tanzania] and subsequently converted Dar es Salaam into the new capital of German colonial rule in East Africa. After it became the administrative and commercial centre of the German East Africa Company in 1891, the settlement started growing significantly. At the end of the 19th century, the city had about 4000 inhabitants in an area extending about 2 kms from the coast into the hinterland (UN-Habitat, 2008). This city experienced continuous urban growth from colonial times up to today with several intermediate ups and downs, as evident from the recent population census and several other publications (e.g. Brennan et al., 2007; National Bureau of Statistics, 2013). In 1913 it had a population of 22,500 on a land area of approximately 500 ha extending up to 2½ kms along the coastline. The First World War and the transfer of colonial power from the German to the British resulted in a decline in the city's population at a rate of 3.5% annually in the period between 1913 and 1921. The city expanded to 4 kms in 1945, covering an area of about 1200 ha and accommodating a population of 93,363 in 1957. Tanzania's independence in 1961 (Zanzibar in 1963) and the withdrawal of colonial migration restrictions after independence resulted in massive immigration into Dar es Salaam, as evident from its very high population growth of 11.3% for the period 1957e1967 and 7.8% for 1967e1978 e a late effect of the rather anti-urban policy of ujamaa. In the period 1978e2002 the city experienced somewhat lower population growth due to the economic crisis, felt especially in urban areas. Economic liberalisation in the mid-1980s and subsequent economic growth led to an ongoing higher annual population growth of 5.8% that has continued until the present day. Today, being a dominant economic, political and administrative centre, Dar es Salaam continues to attract migrants from all over Tanzania. Its 4.36 million population now constitutes one third of the country's urban population, accommodated on an area of about 1350 km2 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2013). Its present high population growth (about 5.8%) has led to massive physical expansion, the uncontrolled growth of informal settlements and an absence of municipal services for the majority of the population. The physical growth pattern of the city along the coastline and the four arterial roads resulted in the development of linear service structures with few pronounced hierarchies. The linear development of Dar es Salaam that dominated in the 1980s has now been supplemented by extensive urban sprawl in the hinterland of the major trunk roads, covering up to 40 kms to the west and the north. Large settlement areas, mostly unplanned and without basic infrastructure, have developed between the arterial roads, transforming agricultural land informally into building plots, especially for residential uses (Basteck et al., 2007). The high population increases, massive physical expansion, uncontrolled growth of informal settlements, informal peripheral expansion and absence of municipal services for a majority of its population are a few of the issues that render today's Dar es Salaam a city with severe government and management challenges. Despite expansion in terms of space and population, segregation has remained similar throughout, with planned serviced settlements for the European and/or well-off Africans, and unplanned areas for the African poor having emerged during colonial times and been characterised by similar features until the present day. 3. The colonial urban planning of the German and the British: spatial traces of political dominance The colonial Dar es Salaam presents a race-based spatial segregation. In its three-decade rule in Tanganyika, the German colonial power adapted a new institutional and organisational
setup to organise urban space in Dar es Salaam based on race. It started this process first by occupying the eastern part of Dar es Salaam, displacing the native African from this coastal area, and then regularised this appropriation of the coastal and core area of Dar es Salaam by enacting the Building Ordinance of 1891. It tactically employed the ordinance, which was based on the German Bauordnung, to divide Dar es Salaam into 46 separate lots and then to allocate the lots facing the harbour to Europeans. In order to preserve this spatial privilege exclusively for the Europeans, the ordinance allowed only high building standards and Europeanstyle constructions in this area, which was thus affordable only to the Europeans. The backward-facing lots were then allocated to the rich Arabs who could afford the high building standards prescribed. The settlements for Africans in African-style huts were situated outside these 46 lots and separated from the European settlements by Arabs' farmhouses. In 1914, the colonial government amended the ordinance to create three zones: Zone 1 for European-style and standard construction, Zone 2 for mixed construction using only sturdy materials designated for Asians, and Zone 3 for native-style constructions (see Fig. 1). It not only prohibited the construction of African-style huts in Zone 1 and Zone 2, but by imposing high building standards and detailing every specification for buildings, it simply made these areas (Zone 1 and Zone 2) unreachable to the African. The German colonial power thus successfully adapted a colonial planning principle in Dar es Salaam and instrumentalised it carefully to appropriate urban space and to administer racial segregation in the city. Adaptation and appropriation were the major strategies applied to translate colonial fear about the native Africans into a spatially segregated city that offered spatial privileges primarily to the Europeans (and to some extent to the Arabs), however at the cost of the natives. An important urban planning step was the creation of Kariakoo as an African neighbourhood with a chessboard layout, separated from the city centre of Zones 1 and 2 by a cordon sanitaire created in 1913 by demolishing African huts (Brennan et al., 2007: 29). Fig. 1 displays the zoning concept with Zone 1 for Europeans along the seashore with large plots in favourable locations, Zone 2 as a buffer zone and Zone 3 with Kariakoo and other settlements closer to the location of industry. This overall spatial organisation has continued up to today (see also Fig. 2). The Germans introduced race-based spatial segregation in Dar es Salaam, but during the British colonial period (1916e1961) it was heightened through the 1933 British modification of the German building ordinance. The amendment redefined the description of Zone 3 as an area for any type of building construction subject to approval from the government authority. It thus opened up Zone 3 for appropriation by Asians, who took this opportunity to access cheap housing and business opportunities there. The requirements for European styles and sturdy materials remained intact in Zone 1 and Zone 2, respectively. An administrative structure for urban and infrastructure planning was created for Dar es Salaam in 1931 when the Township Authority was established under the Township Ordinance of 1920. The authority consisted of Europeans and Indians who were responsible for town planning and building permits including infrastructure provision, urban sanitation and trade (Brennan et al., 2007). In this administrative setup, the necessity for government approval for building in Zone 3 put construction by Africans at the mercy of the Europeans and Indians. While the Native Authority Ordinance of 1926 (Ch. 72) empowered native chiefs to exercise some administrative, executive and judicial power, these chieftaincies functioned in such a way as to support the colonial government. This building ordinance based segregation practice continued until 1940 and functioned as a central consideration in government activities concerning the allocation of public resources, urban
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Fig. 1. Urban Development of Dar es Salaam, 1925 to 2012.
amenities, opportunities and perspectives. Public provisions were largely restricted to European areas, while African settlements e planned or unplanned e were without any services (Brennan et al., 2007). The later part of British colonial rule experienced rapid population growth, increasing poverty among the African populations and their worsening living conditions due to overcrowding and a lack of infrastructures (Brennan et al., 2007: 38ff). Attempts to tackle this situation were made by adapting a number of legislations and institutions like the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940, the Town Planning Department in 1947, the first master plan for Dar es Salaam in 1948, and the institutionalisation of the Town and Country Planning Ordinance in 1956 (revised in 1961).2 These steps failed to bring much improvement however,
2 Some other influential plans for urban development were the ‘Outline of post war development’ developed in 1944 and the ‘Ten Year Development Plan for Tanganyika’ established in 1946.
especially because the government's broad approach towards the three zones and thus statutory planning practices remained unchanged. While the government administration paid more attention to quality and standards for the European Zone, it only attempted to control the quantity of housing construction in Zone 3 without any serious consideration of quality or standards. As the Act came into being in reaction to the poor conditions experienced by the native African, Zone 2 with its Asian population was largely ignored in the government's considerations. While the 1946 Ten Year Development Plan for Tanganyika provided for investment into urban infrastructures such as roads, water, sanitation, electricity and sewerage networks, the initiative was too little to make a major change in the African areas that had already experienced decades of negligence and discrimination by the colonial powers. These first urban legislations clearly display the translation of Western planning concepts in Africa, with some appropriations to achieve the goal of racial segregation by applying different building and infrastructure standards. The outcome is rather the same as
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Fig. 2. Urban Morphology of Dar es Salaam, 2012.
using land-use categories for different ethnic groups but is more politically hidden. The hiding of the principle of racial segregation by using three zones was so successful that it is still in place in postcolonial Tanzania as zones for high, medium and low density. Many of the institutions, after minor changes, are also in place in presentday Tanzania. Dar es Salaam has three master plans for its land-use regulation and guided urban development: the 1949 Master Plan of colonial Dar es Salaam and two posteindependence Master Plans drawn up in 1968 and 1979.3 The plans integrated Western planning ideas, health and safety concerns, and the issue of aesthetic visualisation; however in such a way that they actually supported the continuation of the earlier race-based segregation practice. While the British Garden City idea, the North American self-contained neighbourhood unit concept and the creation of breeze lanes and greenbelts were included on grounds of health considerations, they in fact addressed the safety concerns of the Europeans and the native elites who demanded the segregation of residential areas. By proposing separate densities, plot sizes, different building standards and quality of services for the three earlier segregated zones and deliberately proposing open spaces between zones in the form of ‘breeze lanes’, the 1949 plan clearly showed its close relation to the discriminatory colonial planning ideology. The breeze-lanes concept of the 1948 plan also re-emerged in the 1968 plan, however not based on aesthetic and health grounds but rather as a
3 The 1949 Master Plan was prepared by the colonial British government, while the two successive master plans were prepared by a Canadian and a Swedish company without a contractual agreement with the Government of Tanzania.
landscape corridor that derived its meaning in relation to the government complex as an impressive symbolic entity. Several other ‘breeze-zones’ still exist as open spaces for annual national events, but they also function as boundaries between segregated residential zones. Racial integration became an important consideration in the posteindependence Master Plan of 1968 and the Acquisition of Building Act in Tanzania of 1971. While the 1968 Master Plan proposed narrowing down disparities between zones by reducing density in the earlier high-density zones and at the same time infilling the low-density zones, the 1971 Building Acquisition Act allowed the President of Tanzania to acquire buildings valued over 100,000 Tanzania Shillings and the rentedout second homes of Tanzanian owners in order to create a pool of national housing to be distributed to non house owners. Neither effort brought about much change due to the fact that by then racebased spatial segregation had already resulted in a situation that could not be solved only by addressing density and redistribution issues. Many Africans allocated land in the European and Asian areas returned to the earlier African areas simply because the large homes and lot sizes of the European areas were unaffordable for them or because the distant location of these areas from the city centre and inconvenient road conditions make them less attractive than the centrally located African areas like Kariakoo (Smiley, 2013: 216). Such reallocation under the Building Acquisition Act of 1971 therefore benefited only those few Africans who were already socially and economically privileged. On the one hand the 1968 Plan relaxed building standards to encourage increased production of traditional dwellings, on the other hand it fulfilled the earlier objective of the healthy city not by improving services and amenities in the squatter settlements but by the removal and displacement of the residents of these areas without compensation or resettlement options. Government recognition of squatter settlements, only three years after the publication of the master plan, offered a form of security but most of the inhabitants of these settlements nonetheless experienced continued discrimination. This time it was based on their employment affiliation. The political vision of ujamaa supported the deportation to rural areas of inhabitants who were not employed in the formal sector in Dar es Salaam. As native Africans inhabited the squatter settlements and they have historically been dependent on informal-sector work, such displacement and deportation mainly affected the native population of the city. In line with the socialist orientation of the country, ujamaa focused on service provision in rural areas while living conditions in the urban areas, especially in the sprawling shanties, further deteriorated: they were prone to flooding, lacked access to water and generally lacked services and infrastructures (Brennan et al., 2007: 54ff). This led to increasing health problems and a “serious cholera outbreak” (Armstrong, 1986: 58). The 1979 Master Plan, which emerged as a revised version of the 1968 Master Plan and as a working management document, offered practical programmes considering the existing urban realities. It emphasised control and implementation with physical design based on Western grand concepts (e.g. Garden City, neighbourhood unit, corridors, greenbelts, sub-cities). However its proposed programmes never achieved implementation status due to the funding crisis of the time with Tanzania experiencing severe economic hardship and stringency. The plan therefore effected no changes in the already segregated Dar es Salaam, ‘The City of Three Colors’ (Smiley, 2009). While the ultimate direct impact of the master plans was quite limited, they nevertheless served to consolidate the urban structure with all the contradictions and inequalities of the colonial time. One of the reasons for this lies in the position of the planner who aimed to be an independent and objective technician designing a city controlled by planners (Alexander, 1983). Armstrong observed
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that “[T]he underlying virtually environmental determinist philosophy was translated into a characteristically physical planning approach, exemplified by its application of somewhat mechanistic Garden City principles, an overriding concern with layout and visual appearance, and its devotion to the arithmetic of prescribed standards and densities” (Armstrong, 1986: 45). This observation also applies to the two successive master plans of Dar es Salaam, at least in part. Doherty sees that plans in Tanzania “were not primarily motivated by a desire to house the growing African population, but rather fear of the possible consequences of an outbreak of contagious disease in severely overcrowded and inadequately serviced slum Settlements” (Doherty, 1976: 84). The physical segregation of different racial groups by plot sizes and building standards, introduced by the German authorities in 1914, remained (Armstrong, 1986: 46). Armstrong (1986: 52) concludes that “[T]he importation of fashionable contemporary Western planning ideas served to further enforce this elite bias. For example, no modification was proposed to the rigorous building code in operation which, by insisting on relatively high standards of space, materials and service provision, continued actively to discourage the extension of African owner-occupation.” The present planning administration resonates with its colonial past, the institutional environment has rarely changed or modified to seriously address the colonial logics that shaped it, the current governance logics continue to follow colonial exclusionary principles, and the planning ideals, models and concepts of its colonisers continue their primacy in the present planning institutions and practices of Dar es Salaam. The urban morphology of the city displays a wide range of imported planning schemes. Neighbourhoods following the Garden City style were mainly reserved for well-off residents and characterise areas in Zone 1. They were primarily implemented along the favourable coastline. This approach was discontinued in the 1980s due to high investment costs and low densities. The neighbourhood unit scheme, providing different plot sizes and areas reserved for public use (schools, open spaces) was introduced in the site-andservices schemes between Mwenge and Ubungo in the 1980s and is still the official planning approach of the Ministry of Lands, also forming a major part of the curriculum of the planning school. However due to its more advanced and costly planning and implementation process (public uses), it is not the only model in use. The grid or chess-board layout, introduced once for Kariakoo, is again the preferred model for quick land development especially at the periphery and in the 20,000 plot projects (described below). It has created plots of three different categories based on simple layouts without hierarchies.
4. Global impacts after the turn of the century Dar es Salaam experienced massive urban and economic growth and required investment in infrastructures at the end of the last century. From 1980 to 2007, Dar es Salaam's population “almost quadrupled” from 836,000 to more than 3 million and had reached 4.3 million by 2014. The radius of the city from the coast to the hinterland has expanded from 14 km in 1980 to a radius of 40 km today (UN-Habitat, 2008: 130). This urban growth is coupled with economic growth but decoupled from the planning system and its institutional set-up which was designed to manage a small colonial city with limited growth and restricted access. The environmental and living conditions in the city deteriorated considerably and the urban and institutional setting therefore seemed to require revision, allowing the emphasis of strategic elements reflecting the limited resources.
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4.1. From the master plan towards a General Planning Scheme The master planning concept was contested in the early 1990s when the Government of Tanzania sought financial and technical support from its international development partners to review the long-outdated Dar es Salaam Master Plan of 1979. Given the fact that the master planning approach had become obsolete even in the Western context where it originated, UN-Habitat instead offered the necessary financial and technical support to prepare a Strategic Urban Development Plan (SUDP) for Dar es Salaam within its Sustainable Cities Project (SCP), taking Dar es Salaam as a pilot study case (Dar es Salaam Sustainable Project, SDP 1992e2003). The SUDP considered the Environmental Planning and Management (EPM) approach recommended by the Rio conference as a suitable alternative to master planning for the planning and management of cities. Its main objective was to strengthen municipal planning and management capacities and improve the participation of stakeholders to fulfil the urban management needs of the city. Following a collaborative planning approach, it focused especially on planning as a process. In order to address the on-going complex urban development processes, SDP was claimed to have adopted a more dynamic, continuous and consensual visionbuilding and policy-making process. The output of the strategic planning process was not just a physical development plan for the city but a set of interrelated strategic projects aimed at enabling all public, private and community initiatives to promote economic growth, provide basic infrastructure services and enhance the quality of the environment. This new approach attempted to move away from the rigid formality of blueprint urban master plans. Rather than providing a top-down guideline for a certain period of time and for specific population predictions and instigating zoningbased plans (as in the master planning approach), EPM offered development conditions based on environmental considerations. The implementation of various development projects within the SDP improved the environmental conditions of Dar es Salaam considerably. The Tanzanian National Environmental Policy of 1997 also originated from this strategic urban development project. A draft SUDP report was prepared in early 1998. The SDP process and the SUDP as a planning document demonstrate a translation process in which modern Western planning concepts concerning sustainable cities were locally appropriated and hybridised. While the projects carried out within SDP improved the environmental conditions in Dar es Salaam (Kasala, 2013; Nnkya, 1999), the Ministry for Land, Housing and Human Settlement Development (MLHHSD) rejected the SUDP report mainly due to the absence of a comprehensive land-use plan. The Ministry expected a document with a comprehensive future land-use plan and was not prepared to leave decisions on future land uses open. The planning document of SUDP provided only options for future development and set preferences for land uses according to suitability criteria based on factors like accessibility, existing infrastructure, topography and surrounding land uses. The refusal of the Ministry to accept this new approach displayed the continued strength of the colonial influence on planning, whereby only master plans were seen as legal planning schemes. The conflict between process-orientated flexible planning and the demand of the authorities for a final land-use plan led to the development of new General Planning Schemes (GPS) “combining the advantages of both” (Lupala, 2013) in 2007 (Urban Planning Act, 2007). Today in Tanzania, a GPS has to follow documented stakeholder meetings on the one hand and produce comprehensive planning documents with defined future land uses on the other hand. Although the GPS aimed to include elements of both master planning and the SUDP and thus involved a process of
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hybridisation, it is no different from blueprint planning as stipulated by the traditional master planning approach. With the rejection of the SUDP, Dar es Salaam still lacked a new general planning document. Therefore, with the financial support of the World Bank, the MLHHSD assigned the planning task to a group of Italian consultancy companies (Moss, Happold, Arch & QConsult, 2012). The work was carried out by sub-contracting various responsibilities to several local planning firms and planning experts. While the idea of the hybrid planning concept GPS is to promote greater participation and thus to open up the planning process to a wider group of stakeholders, the current master planning process continued its earlier tradition and limited the planning process to include only a few planning experts. The lack of stakeholder participation is one of the criticisms of the review committee of the MLHHSD, which recently rejected the draft report of the on-going master plan. It seems as if the SUDP represented only a short period of discontinuation of the master planning approach, which with the GPS is again back on the agenda. GPS is a rather compromised product that supports the continuation of the MLHHSD's planning authority, neutralising any challenge by others,4 acknowledges the status quo of the local authoritative divisions that have been shaping urban planning in Tanzania, and accepts the shaping of the planning process by the budgetary conditions of the influential stakeholders.
4.2. New approaches: 20,000 plots and New Town development Kigamboni In cooperation with the three municipalities of Dar es Salaam, the MLHHSD introduced a so-called 20,000 plots project in 2002 with two linked aims. First, this project was to address the severe shortage of planned, surveyed and serviced plots through the development of self-sufficient, self-sustained satellite towns in the peri-urban areas of Dar es Salaam. It claimed, and this was the second aim, that the development of satellite towns at the urban fringe would act as a mechanism to control land speculation and the corruption of land officials. The project started with a 8.9 billion Tanzanian Shilling loan from the government treasury and a plan to repay the loan and also finance later project activities with earnings from the sale of plots developed in all the earlier phases. Although the project delivered more plots than expected (about 35,000) and in a timely fashion, it was subject to massive criticism on planning issues. Most of the plots were developed at a great distance from the town where land is affordable, but utility supplies to these remote and isolated locations are difficult. Given the fact that major economic activities are concentrated in the city centre of Dar es Salaam, the 20,000 plot areas provide settlement options only for those with their own transport facilities (like private cars). This has resulted in many of the plots remaining undeveloped and being obtained by landowners intending to benefit from land speculation. However, it can be seen as a project that picks up on the ideas of the satellite towns from the 1968 Master Plan combined with new financial tools in the form of a revolving fund, i.e. as appropriation. Furthermore, it represents a second attempt to address the shortage of building land after the site-and-service project of the 1980s.
4 SDP was implemented with the Ministry of Regional Administration and Local Government as the main implementing authority and thus without respecting the existing authoritative hierarchy. This new authoritative setup was claimed to have the potential to threaten the planning authority of the MLHHSD and to be one of the reasons why the MLHHSD rejected the SUDP report (see Burian & Kyariga, 2004; Kasala, 2013).
Following a call from the President of Tanzania, the MLHHSD initiated a New Town project in 2007/2008. The idea was to attract global investment and to promote international businesses, developing the Kigamboni area as an international business and recreational zone with very high standard business facilities, a convention centre, world-class tourism facilities and high-rise residential buildings (MLHHSD, 2010). Kigamboni is located very close to the CBD on the other side of the river that forms the harbour, but is accessible only by ferry. With the construction of a bridge, this area becomes a prime location. The project was justified by relating it to the recommendation to develop satellite towns in the more than 30 years old Dar es Salaam Master Plan and success stories of similar projects in cities like Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai. The place-specific complexities, organisational and institutional differences and socio-political context of Tanzania that speak against the project were, however, played down. The government issued a 'stay-order' in 2008, preventing any type of development in the Kigamboni project area, created new institutions in support of the project and setup a new planning authority, the Kigamboni Development Agency, under the MLHHSD to plan and implement the project. It has, however, made little progress to date due to severe local protests against the project, difficulties in land acquisition, and a lack of finance for this large project, especially as a consequence of the global financial crisis in 2008. The Kigamboni case demonstrates how the translation of a world-class planning vision necessitates the adaptation and creative articulation of many other imported concepts like the satellite city and competitive Singapore, Dubai and Shanghai models to give it a relational meaning. It also shows a form of hybridisation in the reference system for planning justification. In addition to its relations with earlier master plan traditions, planning references are now also derived from a broader global context that includes the South. While globalisation has opened the door for the circulation of both of Western and non-Western ideals and concepts, it has equally complicated their local level translation, informing local people and thus positioning them strongly in local level contestations and increasing the chances of local rejection. 5. Adaptation, appropriation, hybridisation and refusal in urban planning The above discussion reveals the processes of adaptation from European legislation by the German Building Ordinance (Bauordnung) of 1891 as the basis for urban planning (Kironde, 2007) and the 1914 Three Zone Ordinance that used plot sizes and building standards for the racial segregation of the urban area. The British 1933 modification of the Building Ordinance and the 1956 Town and Country Planning Ordinance are rather appropriations of existing legislation to the colonial context than newly developed legislation. The latter, the 1956 Town and Country Planning Ordinance, is still in place, albeit with minor changes, and represents the main planning law in current Tanzania. The later post-colonial 1971 Act that nationalised the building stock as part of the ujamaa policy can be seen as an adaptation, following the socialist agenda of the day. The same applies to the later 2000 National Human Settlement Development Policy, an adaptation which is in line with similar UN documents. Only the latest General Planning Scheme of 2007 developed an appropriation of participatory planning approaches with elements of the old master plan approach and can, therefore, be seen as a hybridisation of approaches from outside the country for the Tanzanian context. Nevertheless, the colonial approach of organising planning areas by plot size has continued from colonial times up to the present day, in this regard there is thus no difference between colonial and post-colonial times. Only the intended racial division has been replaced in favour of
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Fig. 3. Adaptation, appropriation, hybridisation and refusal of influencing factors on the urban development of Dar es Salaam.
segregation by income and political influence. Fig. 3 displays the key terms and key variables in a timeline of urban development in Dar es Salaam, divided into two periods as shown before: the colonial with the socialist period (ujamaa) and the current marketled period. A similar continuum of colonial and post-colonial approaches can be observed in relevant planning documents. During colonial times, planning instruments, methods and contents were imported from Europe. In the era of structural adjustment, a generally growing disillusionment concerning planning was felt in Tanzania in general and particularly in Dar es Salaam, with the 1979 Master Plan being the last legally approved city-wide plan (at least until 2009). The focus shifted towards practical and rather piecemeal interventions and urban management, away from the large-scale long-term planning of urban space and infrastructures (Armstrong, 1986). More surprisingly, the economic development plans were designed by British or French planning teams, also in the socialist period between the colonial phase and the phase of structural adjustment which was characterised by its striving towards self-reliance (Rugumamu, 1997). The master plan approach also continued to be the main planning tool until the 1990s. Master plans for Dar es Salaam were designed with the support of Britain (1949), Canada (1968) and Sweden (1979). According to Armstrong (1986: 63), it was the “application of fashionable western urban planning ideas” that rendered the three urban master plans of Dar es Salaam from 1949 to 1979 largely irrelevant for urban development. Similarly, the new master plan under preparation is funded by the World Bank and undertaken by an Italian consultancy. Only the Strategic Urban Development Plan (SUDP) of the 1990s was prepared with the collaboration of local planners and selected stakeholders and pursued a wider participatory approach. Although it allowed for more participation it did not mark a final shift from comprehensive planning to a strategic planning approach focused on a few implementable programmes and projects in line with available resources. The resulting SUDP was refused by the authorities as it did not strictly follow the inherited
master planning approach and did not produce a final land-use plan with only one fixed land use for each area. The resulting urban morphology of Dar es Salaam (Fig. 2) also shows a continuum. While the imported Garden City model, which was tailor-made for the settlements for European colonialists, was not implemented after independence, all other models and layouts have remained part of planning practice up to the present day. The grid pattern introduced by the Germans for Kariakoo and later applied by the British to African settlements in Ilala is still in use today in urban planning in Tanzania, as seen in the recent 20,000 plot projects. The neighbourhood model, imported from the US and applied in the site-and-service projects of the World Bank in Mwenge and Sinza, remains the main model for urban development and service distribution and is still the one preferred in education and planning practice by the Ministry (Scholz, Shedrack, Dayaram, & Robinson, 2013). The application of these Western models was always accompanied by their constant refusal by the majority of the local population who could not afford to comply with the prescribed rules and regulations. This resulted in the emergence of informal settlements in colonial times and their continuation today. Informal settlements are therefore not a phenomenon of post-colonial rapid urbanisation, but rather a continued phenomenon of the Tanzanian colonial past. Despite the expansion of Dar es Salaam in terms of space and population, segregation has remained similar throughout with planned serviced settlements for the European or well-off Africans and unplanned areas for the African poor, the latter having emerged during colonial times and preserved similar features up to today. Considering the role of actors in promoting the circulation of ideals and models of urban and infrastructure planning, as presented here, Tanzania relied strongly upon 'Western' experts in economic, urban and infrastructure planning. On the one hand, this is related to historical phases in which the economy of Tanzania was quite explicitly dependent on or oriented towards Europe or the 'West', i.e. the colonial period as well as the period of the adoption of the SAP from the mid-1980s on. However, even during the first decades
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of independence when self-reliance was the political goal, planning was also highly influenced by foreign actors. Each of the master plans of Dar es Salaam has coincided with important transitional phases in Tanzania's broader post-war development: 1949 marked the beginning of the final colonial period with a different constitutional basis when the first territorywide development programme was launched; 1968 immediately followed the major ambitious policy shift of the Arusha Declaration; and 1979 was in the post-villagisation phase of administrative decentralisation and in the midst of a steadily growing economic crisis (Armstrong, 1986: 44).The 1992 SUDP was also started at a point when comprehensive planning had failed to guide urban development and strategic planning appeared on the agenda. 6. Conclusions The analysis of the urban planning legislation, its underlying concepts and the resulting urban fabric clearly displays a continuum in urban planning principles from early colonial times until today. In none of the fields of planning legislation, planning documents, planning goals and the resulting urban morphology (Fig. 3) can a clear division between the colonial and post-colonial period be observed. Processes of adaptation, appropriation, hybridisation and refusal took place in planning, however not within clearly distinguishable periods. The top-down planning approach continued from the colonial to the post-colonial period, informal settlements already existed in the colonial period and the colonial principle of segregation as spatially expressed through the introduction of the three-zone model is still a main feature of the urban fabric of Dar es Salaam. The race-based colonial logic of segregation has now been transformed into an economic segregation that currently conditions the planning practice of the post-colonial Dar es Salaam. Despite this continuum, no specific African post-colonial urban model has been developed to address the particular urban challenges arising, neither in academic discussion nor in planning practice. However, the spatial dimension of informal urbanisation (accounting in Dar es Salaam for about 70% of the area) makes it clear that it obviously represents the majority of the urban area and underlines the refusal of any codified urban planning model and urban planning regulations. The growing gap between the continuum of planning approaches and underlying urban models and ideals on the one hand and informal urban reality on the other hand, calls for a re-thinking of urban planning in general and for the development of a suitable urban model for African cities and appropriate planning legislation, accordingly. Acknowledgements This paper is developed from an ongoing research project implemented at the Faculty of Spatial Planning of TU Dortmund within the framework of a German Research Foundation (DFG) special priority programme (SPP1448), Adaptation and Creativity in Africa e Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder.
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