The challenges of urbanization in rapidly growing cities across the world necessitates new models of design, planning and governance. One form that has arisen is self-management, especially by the urban poor, in fringe areas at the urban edge. Though they are often referred to as slums, these huge urban expanses represent a hundreds of thousands of small solutions to everyday problems, many of which are not addressed by larger scale design solutions, often imported from, or influenced by, Western or international design standards. What follows is an examination of one idealized system of land management, villagization in post-colonial Tanzania, as well as a framework for addressing its legacy by linking rural systems to growing urban systems in the country today.
Westernized theories of urban design, as they are broadly understood today, were fully catapulted into being by the great upheavals of population, technology and sprawl brought on by the Industrial Revolution. The bourgeoning of newly industrializing Europe was enough to engender a restructuring of the way we see and occupy space, and, by extension, the natural landscape. The unfolding of the first metropolises — slums of urban poor and working class billowing forth from the borders of cities like London and Paris — can be seen as a point of departure: the moment when humans went from defending against the natural environment, to fully conquering it. Suddenly, the old medieval enclave--walled, inward facing, surrounded by rural hinterland— burst its boarders and issued forth into the landscape.
Birmingham, England, in 1886 - Note the slums and smokestacks in the background.
These early exo-urban areas became the first sites on which a “rationalization” of the land took place on a large scale. The metastasizing growth of European cities during the industrial revolution led, for the first time, to the view of spontaneous, organic growth as impure and fundamentally flawed. The hygienic, social, and political concerns that accompanied this rapid phase of expansion only lent weight to the argument for creating order and legibility out of “chaos.” Haussmann’s infamous boulevards in Paris, which he laid in place by carving broad swatches out of the city fabric, were no more highly visible than historic tropes of urban monumentality (think triumphal axes in Rome) but, by cutting through poor, dangerous and “rebellious” areas of the city, and broadening the streets so they couldn’t be barricaded by revolutionaries, Haussmann was an early example of the use of landscape to address a social condition. This type of highly readable solution—the spatial imprinting of values—continued with the “progressive” urban planners, for whom rational modernism became the solution for everything from drunkenness and vagrancy to typhoid.
A utopian clarity sprung up not only in designs responding to urban conditions like slums and tenement districts, but also, in suburban and rural areas, far removed from such dire spatial circumstances. Utopian model cities and factory towns, such as New Harmony, Indiana, and Pullman, Illinois, dotted the ever-expanding American frontier, their checkerboard streets hopeful miniatures the national grid on which they rolled west. The salubrious effects of such carefully calibrated towns could be clearly read in their manicured green spaces, ornamented brick buildings, and flower gardens, which stood out in sharp contrast not only to the dense, dark cities, but to “wild” nature, as well. Perhaps the apex of the modern city arose from the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, whose solution to urban complexity was the famous plan for the Ville Contemporaine, The City for Three Million, which called for the razing of central Paris and the insertion of a series of identical skyscrapers corralled at regular intervals within a flat, rectangular urban park.
In a Berkeley project entitled “New Geographies,” Nezar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy wrote, “If the previous fin-de-siecle was marked by rabid discourses about the chaos of the First World metropolis, then at the turn of this century, the Third World metropolis has emerged as the trope of social disorganization and unfathomable crisis. And if urban planning emerged as a 19th century drive to rationalize the city, then now the ideology of 'civil society' -- a celebration of grassroots movements and self-management by the urban poor -- bears the new millennial promise of taming the urban crisis.”
Self-management has arisen in urban fringe areas to address rapidly urbanizing Third World cities, largely out of a lack of alternatives. Informal urban settlements are the result of changing social and economic structures which force people out of their traditional relationships to the land. Yet this bottom-up approach of self-management can be seen as the continuing exercise of a mode of interacting with one’s environment, that is not new, but rather, as old as the relationship to the land itself – a potentially positive alternative to the rigidity and imperialism of western of land-use tropes, which do much to obfuscate a nuanced understanding of, and relationship to, the land, with drastic consequences for the human relationship to the environment.
In postcolonial Tanzania the newly independent state wasted no time in subjecting the people and land to a widespread, authoritarian, high-modernist scheme for development— a forced-relocation policy of villagization called ujamaa. The legacy of this policy lives on in Tanzania's rapidly urbanizing and overcrowded cities, where the disruption of traditional relationships to the land can be clearly read.
Ujamaa Village Plan, showing rectangular cultivation plots surrounding a village center with civic and light commercial buildings. (Rural Setlement Commission, 1964.)
Villagization's overly rigid design discounted the importance of community and focused on agriculture for production rather than subsistence, eventually hastening a migration away from the land and into cities, where rapid urbanization and slum formation folloed.
Villagization reorganized the landscape with a focus on 'efficient' agriculture for cash crop production, rather than subsistence. Ultimately, it created hardship and starvation, hastening migration of rapidly expanding cities and creating slum conditions. Thus, it degraded both the rural and urban landscape.
Ecological Consciousness and the Legacy of Ujamaa
The loss of indigenous wisdom, which accompanied the supplantation of complex local traditions of land-use with modern, technocratic methods, had drastic environmental impacts. In Policy Implications on Environment: The Case of Villagisation in Tanzania, Idris Kikula documented the results of a detailed study in five Tanzanian districts, exploring how the rapid replacement of traditional land use with “developmentalist” methods had led to land degradation. He presented findings on desertification, soil erosion, debris and land slides, deforestation as a result of wood fuel shortage, and distress of indicator species as a general sign of the overall decay of ecosystem health.
The main culprit, in Kikula’s study, was the replacement of shifting systems of agriculture by stationary settlements, and thus, the discontinuation of beneficial practices such as the burning of vegetation, green composting, and fallowing. Stationary settlement likewise increased the intensity of point-wise stresses on the land, leading to deforestation and erosion, the condensed forms of which are much harder for ecosystems to recover from, as compared to dispersed forms. Furthermore, the abandonment of traditional methods of inter-planting, in favor of the more aesthetically legible and economically motivated practice of monoculture, led to increased need for pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.[1]
Kikula’s findings clearly demonstrate that faith in the “science” of high modernism could trump the science of ecology, with disastrous consequences for the environment. Certianly, this faith in the westernized developmental aesthetic was a departure from the traditional attitudes toward the land that had evolved slowly, and in concert with the actual ecosystems which farmers depended on. The lack of understanding that planners demonstrated for this symbiosis not only affected the health of the land, but the policy of villagization itself. In examining the underlying systems of thought which overrode traditional attitudes toward the land, replacing them with a new environmental ethic that enabled such a radical and (most agree) catastrophic treatment of the land in the ujamaa system, Yusuf Qwaray Lawi, from the University of Dar es Salaam, argued that local attitudes are important in assuring a policy’s success. In his detailed case study of forced villagization (Operation Vijiji) in the Eastern Iraqwaland region of Tanzania, Lawi cites not just the wholesale disregard of local environmental knowledge, but also the disregard for local ecological consciousness, as a reason for the policy’s failure.
The Iragw people, unaccustomed to the whole set of western land-use norms introduced by Operation Vijiji, including stationary settlement, mechanical cultivation, and perhaps, most tellingly, the radical concept of farming not for subsistence, but for surplus, were nonetheless expected to comply with legislation which grew out of these imported values, rather than their innate ones. Not surprisingly, the regulations of vijiji were widely ignored, resulting in low levels of cooperation, and ultimately, production. Farmers coerced into leaving their traditional settlements moved to new villages only temporarily, making a show of inhabiting their government-issued homes, only to return to their huts in the cover of darkness. When this tactic was discovered, and government officials took to burning and dismantling villagers’ huts, the peasants nonetheless returned at night, sleeping in the burnt ruins, or pulling together dismantled walls for shelter, only to re-collapse the shelters each morning before returning to their decoy homes in the government camps.[2]
Sustainable Development from the Inside Out
In the introduction to his book, Kikula notes that part of the reason for his study is to clarify, for the actual inhabitants of the areas affected, the specific environmental problems that their ecosystems face. Without such an action, the attempt to impress upon local policy-makers, in the wake of the ujamaa era, the importance of environmentally-sensitive actions, would be fruitless. For him, perception is essential for planning strategy--the main significance of local people’s perceptions of land degradation lies in the future planning of rehabilitation of the degraded environment. He notes the dichotomy between “inside” (local, non-western) and “outside” (Western) views as they create policy in Third World countries—warning of the disparity as it applies to the treatment of existing land and environment problems. Thus, we see the potential for a cyclical crisis to develop in the relationship between Western and Nonwestern land-use mentalities, and it is made clear in the perfect storm of Tanzania’s policy of ujamaa villagization, and the corresponding aftermath: the replacement of nuanced and sensitive traditional relationships to local landscapes by western developmentalist attitudes has created social and environmental problems which must be addressed, and which are once again vulnerable to the overbearing influence of Western culture. Thus, there is the need for a break in the cycle—the substitution of beneficial land-use policies that come from within.
Patrick M Dikirr contended that ever since the Brundtland report of 1987,[5] and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro,[6] the standard consensus has been that ultimately, bottom up solutions are needed to genuinely address the problems facing Africa (and third-world countries in general.) He writes, “The future of Africa, according to this logic, lies ultimately not so much in slavishly emulating Western models, skills and ideas, but rather, in developing and implementing homegrown, local specific, corrective responses.” Such responses, according to prominent Nigerian novelist and thinker Chinua Achebe, must fulfill three requirements: firstly, they must come from Africans themselves, and secondly, they must be sensitive to the history of developmentalist thought, and under-development of Africa by the West. Thirdly, they must, while keeping on the front burner the survival needs and legitimate aspirations of populations locked in poverty and underdevelopment, not compromise the goals of environmental conservation. [7]
What is crucial to note, in conjunction with Achebe’s three points, is the fact that top-down, utopian western schemes have so frequently been accepted without resistance in recent years, because populations are already so desperate and disadvantaged by the cycle of underdevelopment. As he makes clear, then, any attempt at environmentally conscious policy must readily address the very real issues of poverty, while steering clear of the types of top-down strategies which readily perpetuate the cycle.
[1] Kikula, 1997
[2] Lawi, 2007.
[3] Ibid., p. 70
[4] Kikula, 1997, p. 14-15
[5] Drafted at the World Commission on Environment and Development, also called “Our Common Future,” Oxford University Press, 1987
[6] The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, see “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,” 1992.
[7] Journal of Pan African Studies, Vol.2, No.3, 2008 p. 84
Addressing the legacy of villagization and the crisis of informal settlement that followed is a complex problem that requires attention to details of the landscape, local culture, and global economic markets. In the following Request for Proposals, I outline the issue in greater detail, provide a framework for improving urban-rural linkages, examine case studies moving in the right direction, and ultimately call for design solutions at the regional scale that can support smart growth, focused on reading the possibilities of informal settlements in new ways.
Informal urban communities and peri-urban spaces yield particular adaptability and flexibility. Indeed, amid a very frequently desperate lack of alternatives, communities evolve surprisingly effective urban formations, arrangements for shared public space, and provisions for radically unstable circumstances. In Dar es Salaam there is a trend toward the integration of sustainable practices into planning initiative. According to the International Development Research Centre, seven out of ten of the city’s residents live in unplanned settlements, where they use any available space to grow food—backyards, vacant lots, even the streets themselves host crops and livestock.[1]
This practice was formally adopted into policy with the creation of the Sustainable Dar Es Salaam Project, a joint venture between the IDRC and UN-Habitat in 1993. Since then, catalogues of urban agriculture have yielded impressive findings: each day, urban farmers supply the city with an estimated 95,000 liters of milk, 6,000 trays of eggs, and 11,000 kilos of poultry. Each year, 100,000 tons of crops, including staples like maise ans cassava, are grown by city farmers.[2] By reducing the distances over which the process of agricultural production and consumption take place, urban agriculture reduces the need for costly and environmentally taxing remote rural infrastructure, allowing for more infrastructural development in high-density areas.
Urban farming practices not only help reduce hunger, but they provide economic freedom, reduce the dependency on wage-labor (which often supports environmentally destructive practices such as commercial farming, mining and industrial production, with products and profits being shipped overseas) and sets up an interface for the creation of further sustainable practices. For example, Dar es Salaam residents were allowed to keep up to four animals in any “city area,” provided they did not graze freely. In the Dar city center cattle were often kept in inadequate shelters with, with few options for safe waste disposal and composting. In lower density areas, farmers were keeping more that they allotted four animals. According to a Sustainable Cities case study, “To try and resolve these sorts of problems, researchers gathered recommendations for the urban farmers themselves on which activities should be prohibited or strictly regulated and why. They critiqued the adequacy and enforceability of by-laws and offered advice in revising them and writing new ones.”
Urban agriculture was just one topic among many in a series of city-wide consultations identifying nine priority environmental issues, ranging from solid waste management to the urban economy and petty trading. Each issue became the basis for smaller working groups tasked with detailing the problems and proposing action plans. At the insistence of the Minister of Urban Development, urban agriculture was added to the working group dealing with recreational areas, open spaces, hazardous lands, and green belts, with solutions proposed in each of these areas coming primary from urban residents. [3]
Likewise, flexible partnerships between private companies and community-based organizations joined to address a solid-waste management problem of vast proportions, leading to innovative programs in recycling. According to Garth Andrew Myers in Disposable Cities, by 2003, 75% of paper, plastic, metal and glass were being separated out of the Mtoni dumpsite in Dar, with rises not only in the consumption of post-consumer products within the city, but accompanying innovative solutions, such as the selective use of waste placement and landfilling to address erosion in the city, and new programs for recycling and redistributing building materials to residents constructing and maintaining makeshift homes.
[1] “The Sustainable Cities Programme in Tanzania, 1992-2003” 2005
[2] IDRC, “Feeding the Sustainable City.”
[3] MO-RALF, 2007