CONDOMINUIMS AND GATED COMMUNTIES: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE ATTRIBUTES INFLUENCING BUYING DECIONS: A CASE OF DAR ES SALAAM

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCYMERINA SHAIDI
Keyword(s):  
Dar Es Salaam

Taken for a Ride

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Rizzo
Keyword(s):  
Public Transport ◽  
Dar Es Salaam ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Urban Informality ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Contextual Understanding ◽  
Informal Economies ◽  
Political Economy Analysis ◽  
Analytical Power

The chapter starts by describing public transport in Dar es Salaam as ‘functional chaos’. It then critically reviews two thematic literatures, on African cities and on their informal economies, to reveal that references to chaos, dystopia, and their opposites, order and functionalism, are common. The key argument is that a highly contextual understanding of urban informality and of how African cities work is required to avoid overly deterministic structural accounts and romantic celebration of African agency without due attention to structural constraints. The chapter presents the book’s approach: namely a political-economy analysis, centred on class analysis and wary of automatically reading off the political interests of actors from their class position. It argues that neoliberalism and post-socialism are key to understanding Tanzania and public transport in Dar es Salaam, and calls for grounding ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ in a particular context while retaining the analytical power of the concept of neoliberalism.

Taken For A Ride

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Rizzo
Keyword(s):  
Public Transport ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Dar Es Salaam ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Bus Rapid Transit ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Informal Economies

The growth of cities and informal economies are two central manifestations of globalization in the developing world. Taken for a Ride addresses both, drawing on long-term fieldwork in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and charting its public transport system’s journey from public to private provision. The book investigates this shift alongside the increasing deregulation of the sector and the resulting chaotic modality of public transport. It reviews state attempts to regain control over public transport, the political motivations behind these, and their inability to address its problems. The analysis documents how informal wage relations prevailed in the sector, and how their salience explains many of the inefficiencies of public transport. The changing political attitude of workers towards employers and the state is investigated: from an initial incapacity to respond to exploitation, to political organization and unionization, which won workers concessions on labour rights. A longitudinal study of workers throws light on patterns of occupational mobility in the sector. The book ends with an analysis of the political and economic interests that shaped the introduction of Bus Rapid Transit in Dar es Salaam and local resistance to it. Taken for a Ride is an interdisciplinary political economy of public transport, exposing the limitations of market fundamentalist and postcolonial scholarship on economic informality and the urban experience in developing countries, and its failure to locate the agency of the urban poor within their economic and political structures. It is both a contribution to and a call for the contextualized study of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’.

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