House-building in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
By Claire Mercer, author of The Suburban Frontier: Middle-Class Construction in Dar es Salaam
When I first visited Thomas and Rosemary’s house in Dar es Salaam in 2015, the house was mostly complete – sand-cement block walls plastered inside and out, roofing sheets and internal ceiling boards, floor tiles, and a sofa and coffee table in the living room. When I came back in 2017, they had painted the living room walls cream and the exterior of the house a bright pastel pink, with the arches of the simple veranda picked out in white, and they had added a sand-concrete block wall around the edge of their small plot. Despite the investments they had made in their house they were already looking out for opportunities to buy additional plots of land. The existing house was in a good location in Salasala, not far from the main tarmac road that connected the northern suburbs to the city centre 20km away where they both worked in routine government administrative offices, but it was changing fast. When Thomas bought the land in 2004, a decade before he and Rosemary had got married, there were fewer buildings in the vicinity. By 2015 they could no longer park their pickup and their small car in front of the house. Newcomers to the area had bought small plots of land and built their houses encroaching onto the path that led to Thomas and Rosemary’s house. They had to park their cars on a yet-to-be-developed plot of land nearby. As we sat in the living room, watching passers-by on the path outside through the windows, Rosemary complained about the lack of space inside and outside the house.
When I visited Thomas and Rosemary again in 2022, they had shifted to a new house 10km further north of Salasala that was very much under construction. They were living in the completed rooms while finishing the additional bedrooms. They had also invested in five ‘frames’ next to the path in their new neighbourhood – sand-concrete block shops for rent – from two of which they ran a small grocery store. They anticipated renting out the other three. The original house in Salasala was now rented to tenants.
Thomas and Rosemary are among the middle class house-builders at the heart of my new book, The Suburban Frontier: Middle Class Construction in Dar es Salaam. Based on qualitative research that I conducted with house-builders in the neighbourhood of Salasala between 2012 and 2022, the book proposes a way of thinking about the city as an accretion of land and property that is produced in dialectical relationship with society – the suburb and the middle classes construct each other. As a form of urban accretion, the suburban frontier captures one dynamic of contemporary social and spatial change in postcolonial cities where most urban residents build their own houses. The suburban frontier is a dynamic zone created by layers of dispossession, commodification, risk, aspiration, construction, experimentation, and accumulation.
Domestic investment on Dar es Salaam’s suburban frontier may not match universalized assumptions about what counts as productive property, value, or surplus, and putting cash into urban property may not offer much in terms of capital accumulation. In economies dominated by cash, land and houses are important stores of material and aesthetic value. Urban residents’ investments in land and housing drive opportunities for land value capture and urban rents in African cities. Houses are key sites of aesthetic value, reflecting the uwezo (capacity) and style of their builders. The landscapes that are constructed through self-building are widely read as reflecting the social value of their residents, a process analyzed in the book as the coloniality of space.
Colonial urban planning—however patchy and incomplete—enframed many of Africa’s cities, leaving its imprint not only on the city’s material form, but also on how people thought about urban space and their place in it. The Suburban Frontier shows how the coloniality of space is central to middle-class urban imaginaries and urban spatial practices. Dar es Salaam’s middle classes acquire, buy, occupy, use, enclose, or lend land, and they build, rent, extend, and improve their domestic space. In so doing the middle classes make property, raise land values, produce rental opportunities, and slowly accumulate material and cultural assets that reproduce middle-classness. In the process, they make urban space that works for them.