Generative urbanization in Africa? A sociotechnical systems view of Tanzania’s urban transition

ABSTRACT

Africa’s recent growth successes are raising hopes that its cities can generate the positive externalities needed to sustain long-term development. This paper examines the prospects for such a transformation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A sociotechnical systems framework is elaborated: one which conceptualizes urbanization pathways as determined by the practices, modes of governance, couplings, and multiscalar relations that constitute production, consumption, and infrastructure regimes in cities. The framework is deployed to assess whether Dar es Salaam’s industries, markets, public services, and built environments are generating distributive development outcomes. The analysis shows that the city is experiencing socioeconomically and spatially uneven development driven by processes of extraversion, intraversion, and splintering. Urban regimes are thus serving a more “parasitic” role by channeling capital offshore, bringing imports onshore, and creating highly uneven distributions of basic services. The paper highlights points of intervention and the value of the conceptual approach for comparative urban research.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociotechnical systems
• urban-regional development
• extraversion
• parasitic urbanization
• Tanzania

Acknowledgments

The authors thank J. Alex Sphar for his assistance with the field research and Richard Grant and Francis Owusu for feedback on the paper’s conceptual approach. We also thank Ayona Datta and the anonymous reviewers for highly constructive feedback on prior versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Wage goods refer to the regular durable and non-durable commodities (e.g., food, clothing, furnishings, energy, etc.) consumed by all workers and residents of a city. As Williamson (1977, p. 29) notes: “Wage goods…include all consumption goods and services for which the income elasticity of demand is less than unity- that is, necessities.”

2. Not all agree with the assessment that urbanization in Africa is “abnormal” (e.g., see Obeng-Odoom, 2010) but, as a noted here, there is growing evidence that urbanization without industrialization is an increasingly common phenomenon in the Global South.

3. As Hart (2001) noted, Cowen and Shenton’s (1996) distinction between imminent and immanent development reflects what she (Hart) terms the difference between “d” and “D” development. The former being manifest in the uneven material and socio-economic conditions that are produced by and dependent upon the latter, that is the expansion of capitalism in the post WWII era driven in part by development agencies, structural adjustment programs, state actors, corporations, and the financial system (see also McGrath, 2017).

4. As McGrath (2017) argues, value can and should mean much more than simply capital accumulation or the exchange value of what a city produces in global or regional markets.

5. Sociotechnical regimes are not used in the same manner as in urban regime theory (e.g., Stone, 1993, 2015) although this approach is inspired by urban geography scholarship that seeks to understand urban-regional governance relationally (e.g., Allen & Cochrane, 2010).

6. In operationalizing the regime concept, some view them as primarily rule structures that are stabilized through Giddensian-like structuration processes (Fuenfschilling & Truffer, 2014, Giddens, 1984). For others (e.g., Shove, 2004), emphasis is placed on the everyday practices and routines that reproduce and stabilize regimes in more or less sustainable ways. Still others view regimes as complex, heterogeneous, and multiscalar assemblages of structures, technologies, knowledges, identities, logics, meanings, consumer preferences, policies, power relations, formal regulations, and cultural traits (Smith & Raven, 2012, Smith et al., 2010). The approach taken here adheres most closely to the latter view.

7. In one sense, production and consumption regimes reflect what Phelps, Wood, and Valler (2010, p. 375), call “the tension between the pursuit of growth and provision for collective consumption.”

8. The results of some of this research have been published previously (Murphy, 2013, Murphy & Carmody, 2015, Murphy, Carmody, & Surborg, 2014) but with a different focus, on the dynamics of industrial and technological change in the manufacturing sector.

9. Murphy (2003, 2007) has studied the wood products industry in Tanzania since 1999 and the analysis here is informed significantly by this work.

10. For example, the expansion of the road to a Coca Cola bottling plant resulted in the eviction of several manufacturers.

11. As one businessperson observed: “all the machines are simple….no electronics for reliability reasons…if you go for major electronics, once its broken its done….repairing it is impossible here.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [BCS-0925151];