Author(s):
Garth Andrew Myers* - University of Kansas
Abstract:
The scope and pace of urbanization in Zanzibar's West District is unprecedented, since its population has quadrupled, from 1988 to now. The pace of the urbanization of land is especially notable. This extraordinary expansion has taken place during a transition in Zanzibar's political system and economic development framework. Like the rest of Tanzania, Zanzibar has seen tremendous change since 1985. These two decades or so of transformation and restructuring have brought a reform agenda to issues of land and urbanization as well, with new development projects, new governmental and non-governmental institutions, new legislation, and new processes and processes all designed around reshaping the way land is developed, controlled, managed, or claimed in and around the city of Zanzibar. The latest example of this reform agenda in land is the Finland-funded program for Sustainable Management of Lands and Environment (SMOLE). SMOLE is inseparable from the broader development rubric that dominates Tanzania, aligned with rhetorical movements for sustainable development and good governance within a neoliberal model. In exploring the limited outcomes of this project, in this piece, I want to focus on the first of what will be six themes of my research, based around the preliminary phase of a two-year research project that includes interviews with donors, officials, land agents, and residents, as well as archival analysis. This theme is the as yet unexamined - and seemingly counter-intuitive - continuities of SMOLE with the profound failings of colonial-era peri-urban land and environmental management.
