Social construction of peri-urban places and alternative planning in Zanzibar

Abstract

Increasingly, scholarship on urban Africa has focused on the social construction of place in informal neighbourhoods. In this approach, researchers often highlight the fluidity, contingency, or creativity of the urban poor majority. Efforts to remake planning processes to work with or be driven by these informal everyday place-making strategies can be quite inspiring. Yet I question whether these ideas as put into practice in cities can be anything more than survival strategies of the abject poor. Historical-geographical roots and social relations with the state make each informal neighbourhood a particular case, and these factors have significant influence on people?s capacity to make new, alternative statements with their urban places, or to create alternatives that might be replicated. This essay is based mainly around fieldwork in 2006?8 in Zanzibar?s peri-urban West District shehia (locations) of Mwera and Welezo, including assessment of the built environments, interviews,...