Middle-Class Construction in Dar es Salaam
African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on city edges. The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer details how the “suburban frontier” has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle class, The Suburban Frontier offers significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-suburban-frontier/paper
Author & Guest:
Claire Mercer
Claire Mercer is Professor of Human Geography at the London School of Economics. Her research sits at the intersection of human geography and African studies and has examined the politics of NGOs, diasporas and development, and space and class in African cities. She is the author of The suburban frontier: middle class construction in Dar es Salaam (University of California Press 2024) and Development and the African diaspora: place and the politics of home (Zed Books 2008). She is currently Principal Investigator on the ESRC-funded project Home-Grown Growth in African Cities: How Self-Build Housing Drives Urban and Economic Growth in Ghana and Tanzania.
Guests:
Roger Keil
Roger Keil is Distinguished Research Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University in Toronto and a Fellow of CIFAR’s Humanity’s Urban Future program. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, infrastructure, and regional governance. He is the author of Pandemic Urbanism (Polity, 2023, with S. Harris Ali & Creighton Connolly) and Suburban Planet (Polity, 2018). He has recently edited two volumes on Peripheral Centralities (with Nick Phelps and Paul Maginn, 2025) and previously The Globalizing Cities Reader (Routledge, 2017, with Xuefei Ren), After Suburbia (UTP, 2022 with Fulong Wu) and Turning Up the Heat: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency (MUP, 2023, with Maria Kaika, Tait Mandler & Yannis Tzaninis, 2023).
Mariam Genes
Mariam Genes is an economist and Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Human Settlements Studies (IHSS), Ardhi University. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy Analysis and Programme Management and is currently pursuing a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her doctoral research examines the role of private real estate developers and entrepreneurs in urban growth along road transport infrastructure in Dar es Salaam, focusing on their motives and investment processes. Specializing in urban economics, local economic development, and public policy analysis, Mariam’s work focuses on addressing critical issues shaping contemporary urban landscapes.
Host:
Nitin Bathla
Nitin Bathla is a scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of urbanization, environment, and society. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methods for Urban and Landscape Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary Not Just Roads. Nitin serves as an editor for the Urban Geography journal and the Urban Political Podcast, and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Political Ecology. His current research focuses on the political ecology of nocturnal urbanization and public illumination in Switzerland. His transdisciplinary and pluriversal approach actively combines academic inquiry with artistic practices.
Related links:
Abdulrazak Gurnah – Afterlives (2021) https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/afterlives-9781526615893/
Claire Mercer (2024) ‘The coloniality of space: landscape, aesthetics and the middle classes in Dar es Salaam’ Antipode https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.13070
Claire Mercer (2017) ‘Landscapes of extended ruralisation: postcolonial suburbs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12150
Peripheral Centralities: The Lost and Past Urbanity of the Suburbs, Edited By Nicholas A. Phelps, Roger Keil, Paul Maginn (London: Routledge, 2025) https://www.routledge.com/Peripheral-Centralities-The-Lost-and-Past-Urbanity-of-the-Suburbs/Phelps-Keil-Maginn/p/book/9781032412498?srsltid=AfmBOopjmfoE5AQYMW6TvvWAai4LthumBZxF4-fTtNWIqd4oJbegsmCR
Peripheral Centralities: Instances of Anticipatory Urbanism, Edited By Nicholas A. Phelps, Roger Keil, Paul Maginn (Berlin: Jovis, 2025) https://jovis.de/en/book/9783986121525
After Suburbia: Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century, Edited by Roger Keil and Fulong Wu (Toronto: UTP, 2022) https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487523534
Nyiti, A.C. and Genes, M. (2023), Urban Planning versus Urban Agriculture in Dar es Salaam, Arbeitsberichte, Geographisches Institut, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 145 – 157
Nyiti, A., and Genes, M. (2022), Dwindling of the Tanzanian Housing Sector: Role of the Swahili Language, Innovative Governance of Large Urban Systems (IGLUS Quarterly), Vol. 8, Issue 2, 13-17. https://iglus.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/IGLUS-Quarterly-Vol-8-Issue-2.pdf
Shirima, M.G., Kombe, W.J., Kihaule, A., Nyiti, A.C., and Nuhu, S. (2021), The Impact of Stock Market on Smallholder Farmers’ Livelihoods: Lesson from TATEPA in Tanzania, Journal of Building and Land Development, 22(1), 16-31.