Annual Keynote Lecture by Professor Claire Mercer (London School of Economics)

The Suburban Frontier: Middle Class Construction in Dar es Salaam

African cities are under construction. Beyond the dazzling urban re-development schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, the majority of urban residents are putting their cash, energy and aspirations into finding land and building homes on city edges. In the process they are re-shaping the social and economic geographies of Africa’s urban peripheries. This books explores these dynamics in Dar es Salaam, one of Africa’s fastest growing cities. New self-built residential neighbourhoods form a suburban frontier – a zone of accumulation, risk, aspiration and experimentation – that is central to middle class formation. The book shows how suburban property, understood as land, housing and landscape, is foundational to both the experience of being middle class, and to middle class reproduction. By turning attention to the edges of the city, where the most dramatic transformations in urban land use have taken place over the last two decades, the book contributes new insights into the nature of contemporary urbanization and the emerging middle classes in the city of Dar es Salaam and in sub-Saharan Africa more widely.