These days, as you wind through Salasala in Dar es Salaam’s northern suburbs, you can buy gas canisters from the shiny red Oryx franchise shop, branded dog food from the supermarket, or malt whisky from the imported liquor store. When I first visited the area with my friend Alex 13 years ago, we had stopped to pick up a few cartons of imported South African juice at a small concrete box of a grocery store, it’s standard, limited wares stacked on shelves that lined the shop and surrounded the vendor, who sat behind a glass-fronted cabinet displaying stacks of eggs in cardboard boxes. Alex had constructed his shop close to the house he had built as an investment to provide extra income. The store was nestled among a string of identical shops selling identical items, and he passed it every day on his way to and from work in the city. But by 2025, the line of small shops was no longer there. Someone else had bought the land and the existing structures had been demolished to make way for larger investments: a bakery, a bar, and a petrol station. Alex had taken the opportunity to shift his investment to a series of “frames” (concrete shops for rent) in strategic locations on the city’s new frontier, now five to ten kilometers north of Salasala. He had just bought a plot of land near one of his frames where he intended to build a house. He wasn’t upset about moving. There was more space further out of the city, he said, and Salasala was only going to become a more congested and less pleasant place to live. “It will be like uswahilini,” he said, “the road will be right outside your window!”

In Tanzania, uswahilini is a popular term that refers to densely built neighborhoods characterized by small homes and poor public services. The term originates from the era of German and then British urban planning that organized the colonial city into three zones that were effectively divided between racial groups. The zones became known in Swahili as uzunguni, uhindini, and uswahilini (the place of the European, Indian, and African, respectively). They were characterized by the different qualities of permitted building materials, the dimensions and uses of built structures, the size and layout of plots and streets, and the provision of public services. Although the city has long outgrown this model, the colonial framing remains a pervasive cultural trope. It is not uncommon to hear people refer to expensive planned neighborhoods as uzunguni, or to unserviced neighborhoods containing closely packed housing as uswahilini. For some, uswahilini is a mark of pride and belonging; Tanzania’s musicians have used it as a cultural location from which to critique the city’s long-term abandonment of its residents. For the middle classes, uswahilini is the foil for their more aspirational—though still informal—residential neighborhoods and is to be guarded against, even if this means building again in a new location.

The coloniality of space—the insistence that urban space is divided, and that some residents deserve to live in better-serviced and -laid-out neighbourhoods based on class (and in the colonial period, race)—continues to reverberate through the built environment of Tanzania’s largest city. Although Dar es Salaam’s population has grown rapidly in the postcolonial period, from around 150,000 at independence to 5.5 million by 2022, the spatial afterlives of colonialism continue to shape the city’s development and residents’ experience of urban space. The coloniality of space is evident in the land-tenure regime that has persisted since the colonial period, in which secure tenure is enjoyed by the minority; in the lack of investment in the city’s housing stock that has forced the majority of the city’s population to construct their own houses; and in ideas about what, and who, makes good urban space and who deserves to live where. The coloniality of spaces produces an aesthetic politics that serves to legitimize historically embedded unequal access to land, services, and housing.

Frantz Fanon and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o remind us of how the colonial framing of the city was experienced by the colonized. For Fanon, the racialized bifurcation of the colonial city—powerfully described in The Wretched of the Earth (1963)—was key to the psychological trauma inflicted by colonialism and racism. In his description the European enclave was characterized by the colonized as a space of order, modernity, and physical luxury. The space of the colonized—the native town—was described as the negative opposite of the colonizer’s, characterized by congestion and the lack of embodied comforts, “starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light.” Writing about postcolonial Kenya two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o insisted in Decolonising the Mind that the traces of colonialism remained scattered across contemporary African landscapes, cultures, and what he termed “the mental universe of the colonised.” Fanon and Ngũgĩ show us that colonial alienation entailed both the reordering of material space and was also experienced psychologically in the struggle in, and for control over, the urban landscape. In Dar es Salaam today, land use, urban planning, and housing all bear the imprint of the city’s colonial past and produce stark inequalities in the built environment, particularly between the middle classes and the urban poor.

The city of Dar es Salaam has expanded into its rural hinterland over the past few decades. People have bought and sold ever-smaller plots of land in the informal land market, but their investments are mostly insecure: between 70 and 80 percent of the city’s land is occupied without land titles in what the government refers to as “informal settlements” or “unplanned areas.” This insecure, informal land market is the hallmark of the coloniality of space, traceable to a land-tenure regime fundamentally unaltered since the colonial period. German and British colonial governments alienated all land in the territory, vested it in the governors of the German imperial government and then the British colonial government, and restricted statutory rights to land to Europeans in the cities and on the plantations. “Natives” were allocated customary rights only, administered by native authorities outside the towns. As the city has extended into these rural areas in the postcolonial period, the government has struggled to keep up. The city’s periphery has become a frontier zone: Officially designated as a “planning area” in which no further informal development should take place, in practice the availability of cheap land governed by “quasi-customary” tenure practices, in which local leaders and neighbors recognize claims to land, has enabled thousands of people to find a piece of land. But the middle classes’ and elites’ zeal for urban land has driven up demand and, with it, prices. Poorer urban residents are pushed further out for affordable land. Quasi-customary modalities of accessing and securing land struggle as rogue land brokers and conflicts over plots have filled the local courts. A national program to survey all land parcels has been underway since 2013. The program could deliver security to the thousands of urbanites who have built their homes on insecure peripheral land, but to date, the government has insisted that state recognition must be paid for by urbanites themselves. While many in the middle class can afford to secure their land, prices are simply too high for the majority.

The provision of housing also bears the imprint of the coloniality of space. There has never been adequate housing available for citizens to rent or buy in the city. The British colonial government refused to countenance that Africans would become legitimate urban dwellers. It belatedly provided a few hundred housing units for rent to government workers in the 1940s and 1950s. The postcolonial government did not do much better. In the 1960s, it provided some finance for self-build housing and fewer than 10,000 units for sale or rent to civil servants. These were replaced from the 1970s by sites and services schemes that laid out planned neighborhoods with statutory leasehold titles and (eventually) urban services such as tarmacked roads. They were quickly monopolized by government officials. Since the early 2000s, government efforts to provide housing in the city have been limited to similar schemes that have planted small oases of planned, serviced neighborhoods in the wider, insecure city. Demand and prices are high, and plots are difficult to get. Everyone else has been left to their own devices.

While elite consumption of land and housing in the city is widely remarked upon—President Samia Suluhu Hassan is said to have a prime plot in one of the new planning schemes on the edge of the city—the middle classes have quietly taken advantage of the coloniality of urban space by investing in land and housing. Hidden in plain sight on the city’s suburban frontier, the middle classes are nevertheless anxious that uswahilini will catch up with them. And so those that have the means repeat the cycle of buying a plot and building a house, pushing the city’s frontier further outwards. In the process they construct urban space that works for them.