Peri-Urban Land Management for Rapid Urbanization: The Case of Dar es salaam

Abstract

The empirical findings of this study have illustrated that land management in the Peri- urban zone of Dar es Salaam, like in other towns in Tanzania (Nnkya 1997; Kombe 1995; Kombe and Kreibich 2000), is largely carried out by a wide range of informal grassroots actors. Where attempts of the public system of planning, control and land ownership have been made, they were met with resistance by the local communities whose interests were put at stake, bringing the role of the public system near to a col- lapse In view of the dwindling public capacity and rapidly growing influx of immigrants in the Peri-urban zone, the informal system which is pioneered by the local communities, groups, and even the individuals is largely the vehicle through which land is par celled and transacted, land uses are distributed, transacted, tenure security enhanced and de- velopment control enforced. This, however, is done in collaboration with some grass- roots institutions of the public system, namely, Sub-Ward government, primary courts and police. Apparently, the higher level institutions, that is, the central and local gov- ernments have rarely prepared workable paradigms to meet the current demands of ur- ban land and land management for the majority poor. The increasing role of grassroots land-managing agents and formal grassroots institution, however, does not necessarily reduce the government's role in managing land development in the Peri-urban zone. It should rather call for the government's strategic support to the grassroots land-managing agents and formal institutions for the creation of a conducive environment for the private sector to operate efficiently. For the gov- ernment to respond appropriately, there is a need to retrain its decision-makers, and practitioners. Their perceived negative attitudes on informal land management, their insensitivity on land ownership boundaries, and their unwillingness to learn from the lessons drawn from the informal land management system have not only taken away the jobs of the planners, but also created an environment of confrontation. This study has been conducted at the time when several transformations are taking place nationwide. These include: from state-led economy to a market-led economy, from a mono-party to multi-party political system, from land without value to land with value as acknowledged by the 1995 National Land Policy and the 1999 Land Act, from centralized regional administration to decentralized administration as observed in, for instance, the 1999 Strategic Plan of Restructuring Dar es Salaam City Coun- cil, Urban Farming Regulations of 1992 (Government Notice No. 10 published 25 Feb- ruary 1993) made under Cap 378 Town and Country Planning Section 78, and growing recognition that the government should play the role of a facilitator and not of the provider as propounded by the UNHCS-Habitat Environmental Planning and Management (EPM) concept of which Dar es Salaam is pioneering. These are policy changes that will undoubtedly influence the policy-makers, bureaucrats and technocrats to acknowledge the inherent potentials of the grassroots actors and insti- tutions in land management in, in fact, the urban and the peri-urban zone. In pursuing this study, more emphasis was given to the existing phenomena that ex- plain the driving forces for land development in the peri-urban zone than to a strict ap- Nnkya (1997) reports such cases in the peri-urban zones of Moshi. plication of the Western propounded theories that are less relevant to the Dar es Salaam context. Most of the land rent theories that were part of the research proposal for this study did not have a substantial contribution to help to understand the existing situation in the study areas. In fact, they showed some discrepancies after confronting them with the reality on the ground. As a contribution to acknowledge, this work has generated several examples to ex- plain the concepts of urbanisation and sub-urbanisation under poverty in the peri-urban zone, the workable institutional arrangements based on subsisting grassroots land- managing agents and the policy strategies for the integration of informal land manage- ment in the peri-urban zone. On the methodological frontier, starting from the obtaining phenomena on land development and management has proved time-consuming, but has produced the advantage of making the results more practical and user-oriented. Finally, this study has confirmed its two major propositions that there are potentials among grassroots actors and local institutions that if harnessed could enhance the effi- ciency of land management in the peri-urban zone. It also confirms that so long as there is relatively abundant land in the peri-urban zone and urbanisation obtains under the dictate of poverty, the peri-urban zone will continue to grow irrespective of the lack of higher-level community services.