Farming on the Fringes


Book Description

Agriculture is a central part of Tanzania's economy. Both within Dar es Salaam, its primate city, and in the city's peri-urban zone, agriculture is an important part of the livelihood strategy for people of all social classes. However, because the peri-urban zone is one of transition from urban to rural, it tends to undergo more pronounced changes in land use over time than do the city and rural area it borders. This paper examines recent changes in agriculture, land use and livelihoods in the peri-urban zone of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Based on a literature review and semi-structured interviews conducted in three peri-urban villages, this paper argues that structural adjustment policies and changing land tenure regimes are impacting the presence and practice of agriculture in peri-urban Dar es Salaam. This paper further argues that because agriculture provides a means of investing in the future, it is an essential part of the livelihood strategy for middle and upper class residents of peri-urban areas.




The Peri-Urban Interface


Book Description

Peri-urban interfaces - the zones where urban and rural areas meet - suffer from the greatest problems to humans caused by rapid urbanization, including intense pressures on resources, slum formation, lack of adequate services such as water and sanitation, poor planning and degradation of farmland. These areas, home to hundreds of millions of people, face unique problems and need distinctive and innovative approaches and solutions. This book, authored by top researchers and practitioners, covers the full breadth and depth of the impacts of rapid urbanization on livelihoods, poverty and resources in the peri-urban zones in diverse African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Topics include peri-urban resource sustainability, ecosystems and societies and environmental changes in peri-urban zones. Rich case studies cover production systems and livelihoods including the impacts of irrigated vegetable production, horticulture, dairy enterprises, waste-fed fisheries and pastoral livelihoods. Also addressed are planning and development issues in the peri-urban interface including the difficulty in achieving sustainability, conflict and cooperation over resources, and a fresh look at the relationship between people and their environment. The final part of the book presents policies and strategies for promoting and measuring sustainability in peri-urban zones including community-based waste management, the co-management of watersheds and empowerment of the poor. This book is the most comprehensive examination of the challenges and solutions facing the people and environments of peri-urban zones and is essential reading for all practitioners, students and academics in geography and development.




Improving Urban Land Governance with Emphasis on Integrating Agriculture Based Livelihoods in Spatial Land Use Planning Practise in Tanzania


Book Description

This study examines spatial land use planning and urban agriculture practises in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, one of the rapidly urbanising cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. It demonstrates how urban agriculture livelihood can be integrated in spatial land use planning and improve urban land governance by taking Goba, Chango2mbe 1A2 and Ubungo Darajani as case study settlements. Location and periurban typology are theoretical premises used in this study. These help in understanding the policy and practical premises that constrain urban agriculture livelihood integration in urban land use planning processes and land management principles. Methodological aspects deployed are documentary search, interviews, mapping, observations, and historical trends analysis. In addition, context, evidence based and institutional links are analytical frameworks used. The study shows that the urbanisation processes, urban poverty, food insecurity and inadequate community involvement in land use planning are the factors underpinning and catalysing changes in land use, land transactions, immigration and overall urban agriculture proliferation in the city. The implications generated by these factors suggest that poor urban land governance is not only the cause, but it is caused by the weakness of planning institutions to realise and adapt to the new challenges that urban agriculture presents to urban land development process. Correspondingly, the rise of urban agricultural land use by and large, indicates a disparity between the widely cherished planning norms and standards underpinning formal land use planning processes and structures in urban development. These include land use zoning, location, land use change conditions, density distribution, accessibility to resources, land tenure modalities, and equitable provision of basic services in ensuring sustainable use of urban land. Equally, the study indicates the existence of supportive city land development policies and country legislature for.




Urban Growth and Land Degradation in Developing Cities


Book Description

The peri-urban interface in poor countries is frequently an area of great dynamism and a focus of competition for basic resources. In Nigeria, peri-urban livelihood strategies have become an increasingly important survival mechanism in the context of rapid urban growth. This book uses an innovative combination of methodologies from both the natural and social sciences to examine recent developments in and around the city of Kano in northern Nigeria, and in doing so, provides insights into the sustainability of these livelihood strategies. Identifying some of the most significant forces that are currently shaping the process of peri-urban change, it argues that, despite the adoption of creative and ingenious strategies by many farmers, urban growth is having a considerable effect on the livelihood resilience of individuals, households and communities. The findings presented in this book have much wider relevance and are transferable to other burgeoning Third World cities where increased pressures on urban hinterlands have intensified contests amongst various actors, made access to resources much more difficult and made traditional smallholder mechanisms of adaptation and resilience increasingly challenging.




Land Delivery Systems in West African Cities


Book Description

This book proposes a new approach for a systemic and dynamic analysis of urban and peri-urban land markets in West Africa and applies it to Bamako, Mali. Based on a description of 'land delivery' processes, it sheds light on the challenges faced by the urban poor in accessing secure land.




The Spatial Organisation of Urban Agriculture in the Global South


Book Description

This book examines the role and position of urban agriculture in the spatial and functional structure of cities in the Global South. In the face of dynamic urbanisation and negative consequences of climate change, one of the key challenges is not only how to provide food for the ever-growing urban population but also how to achieve urban sustainability and simultaneously reduce the negative impact of cities on the natural environment. These problems are particularly urgent in the metropolises of the Global South that are experiencing the greatest population growth while struggling with increasing social inequalities and the resulting uneven distribution of resources. Examining the role that urban agriculture can play in addressing these challenges, this book draws on three case study cities: Havana, Singapore and Kigali. The case studies, differing in socio-economic, spatial, political and environmental terms, exemplify diverse characteristics of urban agriculture in different geographical conditions. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in each city, the book also provides a unique perspective on the constraints in the development of urban agriculture and the use of its full potential for urban sustainability. This book will appeal to students and scholars, as well as decision makers, interested in the issues of urban sustainability, food security, spatial development and alternative food systems.




Gone to Ground


Book Description

Gone to Ground is an investigation into the material and political forces that transformed the cityscape of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is both the story of a particular city and the history of a global moment of massive urban transformation from the perspective of those at the center of this shift. Built around an archive of newspapers, oral history interviews, planning documents, and a broad compendium of development reports, Emily Brownell writes about how urbanites navigated the state’s anti-urban planning policies along with the city’s fracturing infrastructures and profound shortages of staple goods to shape Dar’s environment. They did so most frequently by “going to ground” in the urban periphery, orienting their lives to the city’s outskirts where they could plant small farms, find building materials, produce charcoal, and escape the state’s policing of urban space. Taking seriously as historical subject the daily hurdles of families to find housing, food, transportation, and space in the city, these quotidian concerns are drawn into conversation with broader national and transnational anxieties about the oil crisis, resource shortages, infrastructure, and African socialism. In bringing these concerns together into the same frame, Gone to Ground considers how the material and political anxieties of the era were made manifest in debates about building materials, imported technologies, urban agriculture, energy use, and who defines living and laboring in the city.