A NEW CHAPTER IN DAR ES SALAAM’S CITY TRANSFORMATION

By James Rayner, Monika Bik, Phil Bonds, Sean Cleary - 16 February 2018

A city poised for change Dar es Salaam is a vibrant and fast growing East African coastal city of 5.7 million people (growth rate projections for 2017 based on 2012 Census data and The World Bank) with a population expected to more than double over the next 15 years. The city’s past has been heavily influenced by early Arab and German colonists before falling under British rule following the end of World War one until Tanzania secured its independence in December 1961. Today, while state functions are being relocated to Tanzania’s new inland capital Dodoma, Dar es Salaam is expected to become East Africa’s main port and trading center, supplying six inland countries, and it is well positioned to host imports from China, India and elsewhere. The city is divided into a number of distinct quarters and at its core, the central business district (CBD) has a formal, managed structure and waterfront aspect. The CBD contains Dar’s best hotels, downtown residences and international businesses, being serviced by legacy infrastructure dating from the 1960s and featuring elegant art déco and modernist buildings, competing with more recent interventions rising to 35 stories on the foreshore. The west side of the CBD is the consolidated city center area - a dense, gridded, fine-grained streetscape of commercial and retail activities under crammed offices, hotels, and apartments in a bustling streetscape of competing shop and restaurant frontages. Dar’s economic urban areas include its industrial port linked strategically to the airport; and the Peninsula - Dar’s distinctive diplomatic enclave, located to the north. Elsewhere, dense slum settlements cluster around the local markets and employment sub-centers that accommodate much of the city’s urban population. The area beyond comprises an outer ring of peri-urban settlements - a creeping blanket of largely informal development that sprawls along Dar’s four key radial...