Transformative top-down planning in a small African city: How residents in Bagamoyo,Tanzania connect with a city in motion

Abstract

The New Urban Agenda commits UN member states to the implementation of national urban plans, and this recentralization of urban governance reverses nearly three decades of political decentralization and devolution. The recentralization of urban governance is evident in Tanzania, where the most recent industrial development strategy articulates a spatial plan aimed at integrating the country with regional and global markets. The lynchpin of this spatial plan is Bagamoyo, a small city located approximately 60 km north of Dar es Salaam. It is situated at the confluence of two development corridors, and as a result it was designated the most appropriate location for a greenfield port and an export processing zone. In the context of Bagamoyo’s top-down transformation, authorities situated at the city and district levels struggle to expand services and infrastructure to accommodate a growing population and expanded urban area. In this article we present original research and narrate the evolution of a city in motion; we focus on the city’s fragmented water network and hybrid solid waste management services, and we explain how residents secure access to water and reduce exposure to waste on an everyday basis. We show that residents connect with the ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configuration’ in a range of ways, and many residents effortlessly switch from one to another in the event of a disruption (e.g. water shortage in the formal public system). We conclude that Bagamoyo’s infrastructure and services should be configured to foster meso-level connections, as neighbourhood water kiosks and waste collection depots would result in more equitable and efficient outcomes.

Keywords

Governance everyday politics regional planning Tanzania infrastructure planning

Introduction

Xi Jinping made his first official trip to Africa in 2013, and it began in Dar es Salaam where he highlighted the historic ties between China and Tanzania. The visit’s main highlight was China’s commitment to build infrastructure, including what was slated to become the largest port in Africa. The port was to be situated in Bagamoyo, a small city with approximately 50,000 inhabitants about 60 km north of Dar es Salaam (Buckley, 2013; Mirondo, 2016a). The announcement of the port project came as little surprise to insiders, because it was the culmination of a series of evaluations and negotiations which established Bagamoyo as the key node in Tanzania’s development strategy. Thus, the port was not to be built in isolation, but it was accompanied by an adjoining export processing zone, and Bagamoyo would be connected by rail to Tanzania’s landlocked neighbours whose imports and exports have historically passed through the overburdened port in Dar es Salaam.

Bagamoyo appeared to be on the brink of dramatic transformation. The amount of planned capital investment in its infrastructure was indeed unprecedented, with the port alone costing an estimated $10 billion. The city’s immanent transformation confirmed widely held assumptions about the rapid growth of African cities, and the fact that much of this growth would take place in small cities that have been historically isolated from global circuits of capital. However, the prospects of connecting Bagamoyo to the global economy and re-establishing it as a hub mediating trade between Africa’s resource-rich interior and East Asia has proven challenging. After a general election in which John Magufuli (a.k.a. ‘The Bulldozer’ for his reputation for getting things done) emerged victorious, the port project was abruptly cancelled. The following day the Government ‘clarified’ and stated that the port project would go ahead as planned (Mirondo, 2016b). At the time of writing this article, construction has not started for rather opaque reasons explored below. Nevertheless, Bagamoyo remains the lynchpin of the spatial component of Tanzania’s national development strategy; the export processing zone is being built and transportation infrastructure has been dramatically improved.

The anticipation of Bagamoyo’s dynamic future raises a number of questions, particularly surrounding the ways in which its rapid incorporation into metropolitan, regional and perhaps even global production and trade networks will impact the city and its residents. We approach this question by attending to Bagamoyo’s actually existing fragmented infrastructure and services. We focus on water provision and solid waste with the objective of understanding the governance of the city’s discontinuity, and demonstrating how residents connect with it the materiality of the city in a range of ways. We present findings from original research that combine semi-structured interviews, observation, transect walks and a household survey, which allows us to capture the richness of practices and politics surrounding the everyday use of infrastructure.

This article offers theoretical contributions as well as policy recommendations. First, our findings suggest that most residents in Bagamoyo adopt strategies to access water and dispose of waste that straddle the formal and informal divide. Rather than monopolizing public services/infrastructure within enclaves of affluence and connectivity, privileged residents switch from one system to another with alacrity in response to the disruption of material flows. Furthermore, our findings suggest that inequality is increasing with regard to access to infrastructure and services. The findings have implications far beyond Bagamoyo, as many cities are being rapidly transformed (Datta and Shaban, 2017), and they speak to other ‘ordinary’ cities that are being rapidly incorporated into complex territorial networks of urban settlements. We conclude that in urban environments with scarce public resources and growing populations, systems that encourage residents to engage with the materiality of the city at the meso-scale may result in the most equitable distribution of resources.

This article has five sections. In the following section we narrate the recentralization of urban politics and planning. We then set the stage for our empirical case study by reviewing scholarship on urban governance and infrastructure in cities in the Global South. This raises the question how are small- and medium-sized cities in the Global South impacted by their rapid incorporation into vast territories, and how do urban residents respond? In the third section we situate Bagamoyo within Tanzania’s urban system, both historically and in the country’s contemporary development strategy. We then proceed to present original research on the everyday politics and practices that animate Bagamoyo’s waste and water systems. In the fourth section we explore theoretical insights from this research that can travel and we offer policy recommendations. We conclude in the fifth section.

Ordinary cities in vast urban systems

An upwards politics of scale is currently underway, and urban policy is increasingly articulated by policy makers and institutions situated at the national or even international scales. The New Urban Agenda (NUA) was ratified by the UN General Assembly in 2016, and it outlines a division of labour among levels of government that highlights ‘the leading role of national Governments, as appropriate, in the definition of inclusive and urban policies and legislation for sustainable urban development’ (p. 8). National governments are tasked with ‘reinvigorating long-term and integrated urban and territorial planning and design in order to optimize the spatial dimension of the urban form and deliver the positive outcomes of urbanization’ (p. 8).

The recentralization of urban governance and transnational territorial design represents a sea change in policy, reversing decades of political decentralization and the disempowerment of states vis-à-vis actors in the private-sector and civil society. State involvement in infrastructure development and service provision was curtailed in the 1980s and 1990s when neoliberal hegemony was at its height. The World Bank’s 1994 World Development Report entitled Infrastructure for Development encouraged the privatization and commercialization of infrastructure, and this became a condition of structural adjustment loans. The result was the emergence of a ‘splintered’ urban landscape in which infrastructure systems that historically aspired to citywide reach and universal coverage were unbundled (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Meanwhile, civil society organizations were tasked with the delivery of social welfare objectives (Abrahamsen, 2001; Edwards and Hulme, 1996). These trends quietly began to be reversed as the notion that cities are engines of economic growth gained currency among policy makers. Given the perceived stakes, managing urbanization has become a national priority in many countries. Importantly, a key objective of contemporary national planning is the integration of dynamic sub-national regions – even if they are on opposite sides of national boundaries – and the production of dynamic territories worth more than the sum of their parts (Kanai and Schindler, 2018). The hope of national planners is that these networked settlements will be ‘plugged in’ to global production and trade networks.

Nowhere are these more evident than in Africa. According to Enns (2018) there are currently over 30 development corridors in various stages of planning and construction that stretch for 53,000 miles. The African Development Bank (2019) has directly financed 12,700 km of transnational highways throughout Africa. Many of the cities in Africa that are being absorbed by corridor development schemes are small- or medium-sized, and their sudden integration with global markets can usher in dramatic changes. Recent research has demonstrated that in the context of national planning, power is situated firmly with central government authorities (Kanai and Schindler, 2018). Thus, city governments and residents have little to say about how or whether their cities are enrolled in what Monte-Mór (2005) refers to as ‘extended’ urban systems. In this context, our objective in focusing on the urban scale is to better understand how a range of stakeholders seek to manage urban transformation and how city resident adapt to everyday life in cities in motion.

Infrastructure and everyday life in cities in motion

Cites in the OECD have historically been stitched together with networked infrastructure designed to provide universal access to urban utilities and services. The ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ was disrupted by neoliberal ideology in the 1980s and 1990s and integrated citywide networks were unbundled and splintered (Graham and Marvin, 2001). In turn, scholars began to focus ‘beyond the network’, and examine the urban space produced in the absence of bundled public infrastructure systems (Coutard and Rutherford, 2016; Criqui, 2015; Jaglin, 2016; Zérah, 2008). These scholars noted that in contrast to networked cities in the Global North whose residents historically enjoyed near-universal access to infrastructure and services, the notion of citywide networks and universal access remained a mere objective and guiding principal in most cities in the South. Increasingly a harsh realism has taken root as it is clear that universal access will never be achieved through the construction of seamless citywide infrastructure networks and service delivery systems. In this context scholars have sought to document the inner workings of actually existing infrastructure systems, and demonstrate how they are governed and structure everyday life.

The ideal-type Southern city is characterized by discontinuous systems with multiple and overlapping sub-systems (e.g. informal, private, public, community-built, auto-constructed, etc.) (Schindler, 2017). Thus, a host of formal and informal entrepreneurs, NGOs and community-based initiatives augment infrastructure and services where public systems are insufficient to meet demand (Ahlers et al., 2014; Demaria and Schindler, 2016; Liddle et al., 2016; Silver, 2014). The line between formal and informal is blurred as public actors operate informally and unregistered providers tinker with formal systems and establish parallel ones (Björkman, 2015; Cornea et al., 2017; Monstadt and Schramm, 2017). The existence of multiple overlapping systems creates considerable redundancy, but Lawhon et al. (2018) demonstrate that this can serve to reduce risk. The example these authors provide is on waste collection in Kampala, and they explain that even if informal-sector waste workers are absent on a given day, there are other systems that can absorb household waste. Thus, rather than a single system that could be vulnerable to disruption, they conceptualize waste management as a ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configuration’ comprised of a set of coexisting systems. In this conceptualization the fragmented nature of infrastructure and service systems allows residents to remain connected to the city in the event that one sub-system is disrupted (e.g. scheduled power cuts from the primary formal provider). This raises the following questions: what shapes infrastructure configurations and why do some become more heterogeneous than others? Second, if heterogeneity serves to inhibit disruption, what is the optimal level of heterogeneity? Finally, are urban residents able to switch from one infrastructural sub-system to another, as if they are rational actors maximizing utility in a market? Or alternatively, do entry and exit barriers inhibit people from switching and taking advantage of the heterogeneity exhibited by infrastructure configurations? The answers to these questions will differ from city to city, yet in all cases they depend on the governance regime that shapes and stabilizes the infrastructure configuration and influences how urban residents connect with it.

Many governments in the Global South have embarked on ambitious initiatives that aim for nothing short of comprehensive urban transformation (Datta and Shaban, 2017; Murray, 2017). While governments are forced to juggle competing objectives such as social welfare and land acquisition (Doshi, 2019), the emphasis of urban governance regimes is increasingly on the transformation of territory rather than the ‘improvement’ of populations (Schindler, 2015a). However, attempts at what Roy and Ong (2011) refer to as ‘worlding’ rarely unfold evenly across a flat urban fabric, as power does not emanate from a centre and recede with distance (see Allen and Cochrane, 2010). Indeed, urban transformation schemes tend to stop and start, variation is evident within cities and large-scale interventions get caught up in street politics at the neighbourhood scale (Gibert, 2018). Thus, rather than citywide transformation, formal public and private authorities tend to control enclaved territories, whose infrastructure bypasses surrounding areas that remain beyond formal networks (Bakker, 2003; Bhattacharya and Sanyal, 2011; Kleibert and Kippers, 2015; Murray, 2017; Shatkin, 2017).

Beyond these networked enclaves flows of resources and infrastructure are subject to localized governance regimes, in which power is exercised by locally situated actors whose status is often a function of their relationship with public authorities (Benjamin, 2005). Elsewhere these regimes are animated by more organic associational life (Simone, 2001), or neo-customary institutions that determine how and by whom resources are used (Cornea et al., 2016). These localized governance regimes inhibit governments and other power brokers (e.g. large-scale real estate developers) from realizing their ‘urban fantasies’ (Watson, 2014) in granular detail. So although the recentralization of political power affords key stakeholders in government and business with legitimacy to act on urban space, they struggle to ‘reach down’ to the street and other everyday spaces (Bayat, 2000; Gillespie, 2016; Pow, 2015; Schindler, 2015b). While ‘bypassed’ areas are not necessarily beyond the reach of the state, governments are unable to totalize control over material flows. Alternatively, locally situated power brokers are place-bound, and struggle to extend their control over larger territories or exert significant influence beyond the locale. Furthermore, ambitious top-down urban transformation schemes have limited control over the ways in which residents engage with the materiality of the city on an everyday basis, and development plans are commonly informed by visions whose realization is scheduled two or even three decades into the future. Thus, a significant amount of urban space and infrastructure is subject to multiple, overlapping governance regimes with competing visions and asynchronous rhythms (e.g. everyday vs. decades).

This multiplicity of governance regimes not only shapes heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, but it also determines whether and how residents can switch from one system to another. As people insinuate themselves into the materiality of the city they must remain cognizant of the localized rules of the game that obtain in any given area, as well as the intricacies of the material infrastructure that actually deliver resources and remove waste. While there is a near-universal impulse to enhance connectivity to certain systems/resources (e.g. water) and insulate oneself from others (e.g. wastewater), the particular ways in which people pursue these objectives vary. Preferences for certain modes of connectivity with the city are determined by a complex and shifting calculus. Some people try to display their engagement with public infrastructure because it can indicate one’s status, power and belonging in the city (Morales, 2016; Ranganathan, 2014; von Schnitzler, 2008). Elsewhere urban residents seek to circumvent systems, engage infrastructure surreptitiously or develop parallel systems (Bayat, 2000; Björkman, 2014; Trovalla and Trovalla, 2015; von Schnitzler, 2013). Urban residents can exhibit agency with regard to their relationship to the materiality of the city, yet switching systems – i.e. from one mode of waste disposal to another – is rarely a neutral exercise in maximizing utility in a market where multiple choices exist. The particular system that urban residents embrace influences everyday life, and switching systems can have consequences or costs. Finally, the calculus practiced by urban residents can be altered by large-scale infrastructure projects that foreclose or foster opportunities to (dis)connect to/from alternative systems (Arboleda, 2016; Carolini, 2017).

Scholarship on infrastructure in Southern cities rejects normative assumptions such as the ‘modern infrastructural idea’, and it has demonstrated that actually existing infrastructure systems are highly heterogeneous. What much of this scholarship has not questioned, however, is the scale at which people should engage with infrastructure systems. Much of this scholarship implicitly assumes that households are connected, even in cases where infrastructure systems are heterogeneous or largely informal. We argue that scholars and planners should take seriously the merits of meso-level infrastructure configurations, in which neighbourhoods – rather than households – are the basic unit of integration. While this would require the state to explicitly reject the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’, under certain circumstances it may be the most effective way to equitably distribute resources and access to services. In the following section we contribute to scholarship on ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ by presenting original research from a small city in motion, Bagamoyo, Tanzania. We demonstrate that authorities pragmatically (Jaglin, 2016), and sometimes explicitly, encourage parallel informal systems, while they continue to espouse a commitment to the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’. Meanwhile, residents tend to engage multiple systems to access water and dispose of waste. At present the extant infrastructural configuration meets the needs of most residents, yet our research suggests that in the long term a more equitable configuration would encourage residents to engage infrastructure and service systems at the meso-level.

‘From the destination of broken heart to a city of prosperity to Tanzanians’

Bagamoyo is located on Tanzania’s coast approximately 60 km north of Dar es Salaam, and until the late 19th century it was one of East Africa’s most cosmopolitan urban centres. It boasted a vibrant trading community – most of which hailed from India – which mediated trade between Africa’s interior and global markets (Fabian, 2007). Every year the city’s small population swelled with the seasonal arrival of caravans and porters from central Africa. Successive colonial administrations sought to disempower Bagamoyo’s trading community and gain control over these lucrative trade routes. While the city proved resilient to political machinations, its significance was eclipsed by Dar es Salaam with the construction of railways. Thus, Bagamoyo was purposefully bypassed and disconnected from the global economy, and it remained a backwater in the post-colonial period. Bagamoyo’s fortunes changed in the past decade when the Tanzanian government embraced spatial planning. In 2010 the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Marketing (MITM) released the Integrated Industrial Development Strategy 2025, whose objective is to reorient production in ways that will allow Tanzanian exporters to access global capital and markets. The plan calls for four development corridors to cut across the country, the establishment of a regional division of labour, and the construction of a new port to be built at Bagamoyo. The Tanzanian Ports Authority had already proposed Bagamoyo as the site for a much-needed expansion of port capacity, and the Export Processing Authority announced it would build an Economic Development Zone adjacent to the port. Thus, Bagamoyo was envisioned as an industrial and logistics satellite city of Dar es Salaam and Tanzania’s gateway to the world (see Kanai and Schindler, 2018).

The port project was to be built by a Hong Kong based firm, China Merchants Holdings Company, whose parent company is a Chinese state-owned conglomerate. According to the Chinese Ambassador to Tanzania, the project would transform Bagamoyo ‘from the destination of broken heart to a city of prosperity’ (Kusumuni, 2015). The project stalled from the outset due to the complex financial arrangements that involved Tanzania, China and Oman (the latter was to provide financial support for the project). According to one source the Tanzanian Government failed to raise enough money to compensate residents who would be displaced by the project (Tairo, 2017). After national elections that brought political non-conformist John Magufuli to power the Government sent a series of confusing messages about the port project, but according to official statements in April 2018 a public–private partnership that allows the state to retain ultimate control over the project is near completion (Buguzi, 2018). Meanwhile, the Export Processing Zone Authority has made considerable progress on a ‘mega zone’ that will include export-oriented industry and residential areas (EPZA, n.d.).

The anticipation of the port project and the ongoing construction of the EPZA’s mega zone have led to considerable speculation in land and urban sprawl. A significant number of housing plots south of Bagamoyo have been awarded in a public scheme, and interest from middle-class residents from Dar es Salaam and elsewhere has led to a building boom southwest of the city centre. While public infrastructure networks are expanding in this direction, many houses remain disconnected from water and electricity networks. The central area consists of a beachfront which is lined with historic buildings, a thriving fish market and modern hotels. Most of the buildings in this area are connected to formal infrastructure networks, although the hotels have invested in back-up systems to ensure continuity of services when the public systems are disrupted. Behind the beach front there is a cluster of historic buildings that house municipal offices, a museum and restaurants. There is a town centre laid out on a grid pattern, to the southeast of which is a very cluster of gated compounds for the city’s small community of domestic elites and resident expats. Finally, the city’s initial expansion was to the north of the centre. This densely settled area includes houses that are connected to public infrastructure systems, and it extends to an institutional area that includes educational and religious buildings. In summary, Bagaomoyo is a ‘fragmented’ urban landscape (McFarlane, 2018) whose neighbourhoods exhibit variation in terms of their connectivity to formal systems. The city boasts a significant amount of public infrastructure yet it remains far from the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’. It is in this context that we explore the everyday politics and practices that animate Bagamoyo’s solid waste management and water systems.

This research was over a period of 22 weeks in four visits from 2015 to 2018. We first used ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews to understand the diverse methods employed by residents to acquire water and dispose of waste. We conducted nine transect walks in 2017. This method is typically used to estimate the density of a given phenomenon (see Singh Nagpur et al., 2015), and we categorized observable instances of water-use and waste disposal. For water sources we observed open public wells, hand pumps installed by an Islamic charity, formal home connections, water delivery carts, and household borewells. For waste we observed collection by municipal workers, informal-sector collectors, burned, buried and dumped in the open. There are obvious limitations to this method because many water connections are not visible from the street, and waste that was effectively managed also remains out of sight. Second, with regard to water, extant connections are not necessarily indicative of water-use, as a formal connection could be turned off if a household is in arrears with its bills. Nevertheless, this method allowed us to establish tendencies, and based on our observations we divided Bagamoyo into four zones in which practices varied. The boundaries are indeed blurry, yet it was evident that practices within these zones exhibited a higher degree of differentiation from one another than administrative boundaries (the city is divided into four wards). Within each zone we sampled an equal number of houses and conducted semi-structured interviews and a household survey. Finally, we interviewed key stakeholders such as officials, formal- and informal-sector entrepreneurs and workers engaged in managing the city’s infrastructure and services.

Water provision and access

Water provision in Bagamoyo is the responsibility of the Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Corporation (DAWASCO), which assumed responsibility to manage coastal region’s water supply after an ill-fated two-year period of private ownership (see Bakker, 2003). The Bagamoyo office is well established and manages an infrastructure network that, according to a DAWASCO engineer, covers two-thirds of the city. However, he explained that the existing infrastructure ‘is from when Bagamoyo was small, [but] now Dar es Salaam is full and people are coming here’, and DAWASCO is struggling to keep pace with increased demand. While a large-scale infrastructure project is underway that will increase DAWASCO’s water processing and distribution capacity, many areas that are connected experience regular rationing while other areas remain disconnected. The DAWASCO engineer admitted that in one of the wards ‘we have not put infrastructure because at the end of the day the supply is a problem, there is no water’. DAWASCO has responded to the strain on supply by focusing on reducing leakage and theft. It also focuses on collection of fees, and its ageing infrastructure stands in sharp contrast to the sophisticated payment system, whereby users pay bills via mobile phones and receive reminders of overdue bills via SMS. Some public institutions have historically ignored water bills, but according to the DAWASCO engineer, this problem has been resolved with Magufuli’s administration because DAWASCO is now allowed to suspend their supply. Leakage and theft in neighbourhoods has been reduced by relocating water meters ‘upstream’, from the household to the water main. This forces users to act as caretakers of infrastructure, because they are billed for water at the point that it is diverted from the main line. According to a local plumber, this regulatory shift has been good for business, as he is constantly repairing public infrastructure at the behest of users. When asked if he or anyone he knows helps users circumvent meters, he stated unambiguously that such activity is too risky and those caught face hefty fines and even jail time.

The authorities focus on enhancing their control over formal infrastructure and they take a laissez-faire approach to the informal sector. This regulatory regime, combined with DAWASCO’s inability to meet the existing demand, has fostered the growth of a water industry surrounding the repair of formal infrastructure, and alternative modes of water provision. The heterogeneity of supply has resulted in near-universal access to water, although it varies according to quality and cost. The largest informal-sector provider is located in the city’s western outskirts, and operated by an entrepreneur who has invested significant capital in water distribution and storage infrastructure. He had pipes installed along the roadside at a depth of 25–30 cm, and they lead to a well that is 25 m deep on his property nearly one kilometre west of the city. He boasted that there is not a hint of salt in his water, in contrast to nearby wells whose water is brackish. He stores up to 75,000 liters in large tanks, and this operation was large enough to attract attention from authorities – DAWASCO officials tested the water he sold to ensure it was safe to drink. His business was essentially a water distribution depot and we observed brisk business; every morning approximately 30 young men with pushcarts arrive to fill plastic containers with water. According to the owner they can number up to 100 on hot days without rainfall. These young men traverse the city with their pushcarts, selling water to residents who live beyond the formal network. Most of these water deliverers are migrants from rural areas, and they are attracted to the activity because it generates cash immediately. They fill empty cooking oil cans for TZS 50 and sell them for TZS 300, and in the dry season they can earn up to TZS 20,000 per day. One water deliverer explained that he is from Dodoma and he intends to return and invest his earnings in farmland. He explained that the water deliverers know one another, and many of them share accommodation, yet they do not act collectively. This is probably because they presently do not face any existential threats to their operations. The DAWASCO engineer explained that they view this parallel water distribution system as complementary:

For the time being you can say it’s like a collaboration because we have not yet covered all these parts [of the city]. So if someone comes and has a wheelbarrow, it’s good, because he’s supplying water and we wish everyone has water. Automatically, all of these [informal providers] will be put aside [once DAWASCO expands]. It’s because there is no DAWASCO [residents] choose these options. And the price is quite cheap for DAWASCO, for us it’s a service. For one cubic meter they pay 1,263. But all those who are after money, you can see they sell for more, and still the water [quality] is not correct.

A significant number of residents obtain water from neighbourhood or private wells. A number of the former have a long history and are open to the elements, so users hoist water to the surface with a bucket. These are outnumbered by more recently built wells, most of which are operated with hand-pumps and have been installed by an Islamic charity based in nearby Morogoro. According to its Bagamoyo representative it has installed approximately 600 pumps in the city and its surrounding areas since 2006, but it lacks a system to maintain them, so many are in disrepair. We asked if he had a relationship with authorities, and he explained that many of the pumps are located near schools, and there are even pumps at the police station and the District Commissioner’s Office. Affluent residents tend to have private borewells, from which they pump water to rooftop storage tanks to be used when DAWASCO rations water. One user explained that DAWASCO’s treated water is preferable because well water is brackish. These wells are dug manually by teams of four to five workers. Workers sing while working, to maintain the rhythm of lifting and dropping the large drill. One team we interviewed explained that they work primarily in the city’s outskirts where middle-class residents from Dar es Salaam are building gated homes. They typically drill 18 meters to reach water, and this can take as little as one day or as long as a week, depending on the soil. They charge between TZS 500,000–1,500,000 per well, and in most cases they dig a well in two to three days.

The vast majority of urban residents access water from two or even three sources. Those who obtain water from a single source are overwhelmingly dependent on the manual pumps installed by the Islamic charity. The water provided by DAWASCO is preferred because it is treated, while groundwater is brackish. Thus, many residents lacked a formal household connection, but it is common to purchase water from neighbours who do. DAWASCO has not expanded its network into the rapidly growing periphery to the south and southwest of the city, whose residents tend to build gated single-family homes alongside plots of arable land. Many of these households have enough disposable income to construct private borewells, which is necessary given the amount of water they require for gardening. Households that cannot afford their own private borewells rely on pushcart deliveries for drinking water. Indeed, water sellers are a common sight at the edges of the city. Complaints about water infrastructure were common – the Islamic charity that installs hand pumps does not maintain them, and nearby residents accustomed to free water are frustrated when they fall into disrepair. Nevertheless, Bagamoyo’s extant infrastructure configuration fosters access and users are generally not inhibited from obtaining water from multiple sources. Inequality is evident, however, as cash-poor residents in peri-urban areas are forced to purchase more expensive water of inferior quality, than their more affluent counterparts in the city centre.

Solid waste management

In principle the municipal authorities are responsible for collecting waste and transferring it to the landfill approximately four km southwest of the city centre. In practice most waste is managed by informal-sector entrepreneurs, some of whom channel recyclable material into global value chains and others who simply transport waste to the landfill in the absence of adequate public-sector service provision. We will demonstrate here that the city’s heterogeneous infrastructure configuration is largely shaped by decisions made within households. Household strategies for avoiding bottlenecks are made on the basis of the availability and cost of waste management services, the likelihood of being fined for violating waste management regulations and the weather.

The municipal government established six collection depots in 2006, in which waste would be deposited by residents and then collected and transported to the landfill by authorities. These depots became bottlenecks in 2008 when the truck that transported waste broke beyond repair, and in response they were closed. Formal public collection services have been reintroduced, and a single large tractor collects waste from households. The municipal collectors charge 500 Tanzanian Shillings (TZS) ($.22) per bag. Numerous residents explained that the fees were negotiable, and if they were disposing of recyclable materials private-sector operators would remove it for far less. Each of Bagamoyo’s wards is managed by a councillor whose responsibility includes enforcement of waste handling ordinances that prevent burning, dumping or burying waste. There is significant variation in terms of the effectiveness of waste management collection, and also in the enforcement of municipal ordinances. In the city centre where the roads are passable the collection is most effective and enforcement is strict. Residents who openly burn waste can face fines up to TZS 50,000 ($21.93), and business owners complained about the enforcement of municipal ordinances. However, elsewhere collection services are intermittent and enforcement is lax. For example, one councillor admitted that the outlying roads in his ward were not passable to the tractor, especially in the rainy season, and in these areas it was impossible to prevent people from burning or burying waste. Another councillor acknowledged that the tractor simply could not collect most of the waste in his ward. He encouraged residents to have their waste removed by informal-sector collectors, and he threatened residents with fines of TZS 20,000–30,000 for openly burning waste but he admitted that he had never imposed a single fine. In summary, municipal collection services exist but they are patchy, particularly in areas beyond the city centre, and users pay according to the amount of waste they generate.

There is a small but growing informal-sector waste management sector. Entrepreneurs in this sector generate revenue from collection charges and they also collect recyclable material which they subsequently sell to Chinese recyclers in Dar es Salaam. This sector enjoys support from municipal authorities in subtle ways. One ward councillor explained that he encourages residents to pay informal-sector collectors, while the collectors uniformly reported that they are never hindered by authorities. The largest recycling operation is located in the city centre, in a densely populated area just beyond the city’s grid-patterned streets. It is based at a home where recyclable material is weighed on large scales in front and stored in mosquito nets in the back yard. The waste dealer was a young man who began buying and selling waste in 2011, and within six years he had purchased four small motorized vehicles which he rents to collectors on a daily basis (one is a pick-up truck but the others are three-wheelers with a cart in the back for storage). They ply the streets less travelled by the municipal collectors and they collect waste for a fee, although this is negotiable depending on the amount of recyclable material therein. They deposit the waste in the landfill and sell recyclable material to the truck owner. He specializes in recyclable plastic, buying it for an average of TZS 250 per kg, and selling it to Chinese recycling firms based in Dar es Salaam for TZS 450 (prices vary, according to the going rate of plastic, but he earns a profit of approximately $.09 per kg). In addition to the steady stream of recyclable material he receives from the collectors who rent his trucks, he also buys from some of the approximately 25 waste collectors who operate independently. They collect recyclable materials, particularly from the fish market and beach area where it is common to find empty bottles. Another entrepreneur who buys recyclable material locally and sells it to Chinese firms in Dar es Salaam lacks capital, such as trucks, so he obtains recyclable material exclusively from these individual collectors. When collectors arrive he segregates their recyclable materials and transfers them to mosquito nets, to ensure that rocks are not hidden in their sacks. The collectors reported that the authorities neither assist nor hinder their operations, while the dealers explained that they are under some pressure to relocate to more peripheral areas of the city.

The result of closing waste collection depots in 2008 without improving doorstep collection was that the bottleneck was rescaled and situated within households. Waste is currently collected on a rather ad hoc basis, with the city’s waste collecting tractor passing through some neighbourhoods weekly, monthly or not at all. Thus, residents are forced to use a range of strategies to manage the flow of solid waste, including burning, burying, or surreptitiously dumping it. Many households store waste somewhere out of sight from the main road, such as a courtyard. During our transect walks, interviews and surveys, many incredulous residents who struggled to divert flows of waste away from their homes invited us to examine garbage that had piled up behind their homes. It is illegal to burn waste but authorities only enforce the law in the city centre, beyond which most residents were dismissive of municipal efforts to prevent them from burning or burying waste. Indeed, these are traditional methods of waste management, but the problem is that the volume of waste has increased in recent years, reflecting new consumption patterns and the city’s newfound prosperity. Meanwhile, the composition of solid waste is changing and increasingly includes synthetic material. Thus, waste no longer decomposes, so a number of residents in densely populated areas adjacent to the city centre complained that they are running out of space to bury it.

For many residents in Bagamoyo the only options are to either pay private collectors to remove their waste or to burn it themselves and risk a fine. Indeed, the strategy employed varies according to the type of waste, time of year and the likelihood of anti-burning ordinances being enforced at a given time. Many residents practice numerous strategies; a carpenter explained that he gave wood chips to ‘mamas’ for cooking fires, sold bottles to itinerant waste collectors, and paid for the remaining waste to be collected. Our surveys showed that many households commonly pay for at least some of their waste to be collected by informal-sector operators. The price for waste removal is negotiable, and negligible for those whose waste includes recyclable material. Meanwhile, residents routinely burn waste, particularly organic matter but also plastic bags. Smouldering piles of waste are common in the interstices between houses and along roadsides, and occasionally we met residents in the process of piling waste into open fires. During the rainy season solid waste becomes waterlogged, while collection is inhibited in some areas where the streets are impassable. During this time of year residents take advantage of rare sunny days to burn waste; we met one woman who had a pile of plastic bags and organic waste tending a large fire. She explained that collection was too expensive and she had run out of space to bury it. We asked if she feared being fined by municipal authorities and she said they can issue as many fines as they like but she does not have money to pay. In summary, the primary bottleneck of solid waste is the household, yet lax enforcement means that at the very least it can be burned when the weather permits.

Contestation and meso-level infrastructure configuration

The near universal access provided by Bagamoyo’s heterogeneous infrastructure configuration explains why conflicts over flows of water and waste are uncommon. Our household survey revealed that affluent residents – i.e. those whose houses are made of cinder blocks rather them mud and sticks, and are on a tarmac road instead of a dirt road – tend to be more dissatisfied with services and infrastructure systems than their less affluent neighbours, but this may indicate more about their expectations than the city’s infrastructure configuration. Affluent residents tend to have access to more systems and can switch from one to another with ease. Thus, inequality is apparent – many affluent households have private borewells as well as connections to the public water system – but the vast majority of Bagamoyo’s residents are nevertheless able to access water and dispose of waste. However, the city is expanding at a faster rate than the authorities can expand infrastructure systems, and we question whether the expansion of the hybrid infrastructure configuration will be able to keep pace with population growth. In the remainder of this section we highlight two conflicts that suggest it has limits, and we offer a recommendation for the reconfiguration of the city’s infrastructure in a way that would retain its heterogeneous nature and reduce inequality.

Contestation over waste management and water was apparent along the beachfront. Hotel owners and managers agreed in principle that waste along the beach was a growing problem that posed a threat to the tourist industry. They disagreed, however, with the way it should be managed. One environmentally conscious hotelier sought contributions for waste bins at regular intervals along the beach. While the authorities originally agreed to regularly collect waste from the bins, collection became intermittent and ultimately waste began to overflow the bins. The other hoteliers were resentful because they were forced to manage the bins in front of their property. Meanwhile, the municipal authorities do show an interest in preventing hotels from burning large quantities of waste. Thus, there is bottleneck along the beach, and a significant amount of acrimony among the owners and staff members of the various hotels. One manager explained that waste is doused in diesel and burned at night, while anther claimed that he paid for private collection. The same area was the site of a dramatic conflict over waste water and surface runoff. In most cases storm runoff and wastewater drains from the city to the ocean through culverts that are adjacent to hotels’ property. These drainage systems are privately built, and cannot cope with runoff in the rainy season. Thus, stagnant water remains in pools west of the road running along the beach, and it poses a significant hazard to residents whose homes are made of mud and sticks. In one incident a group of residents arrived at the property of a beachfront hotel with shovels, with the intention of digging a drainage ditch across the hotel’s property that would carry standing water to the ocean. A boisterous stand-off between these residents and hotel management ensued, and it was only diffused by the arrival of representatives of the District Commissioner’s Office. One flashpoint exhibited both water and waste conflicts; a hotel accused the fish market of mishandling its solid waste, while representatives from the fish market filed a formal counter-complaint against the hotel for mishandling its waste water.

The incidents narrated above demonstrate that waste and water conflicts in Bagamoyo tend to erupt in certain places that are prone to bottlenecks. The city’s heterogeneous infrastructure configuration is ill-suited to the demands placed upon it by the volume of waste generated along the beachfront, while the waste water infrastructure cannot cope with runoff in the rainy season. Municipal authorities continue to pursue the modern infrastructural ideal of a single seamless network that encompasses the urban fabric in its entirety. This strategy is likely to show more strains as the city expands, so we propose that drinking water and waste management planners engineer the infrastructure configurations in such a way that residents engage the materiality of the city at the neighbourhood scale.

A meso-level infrastructure configuration at which the neighbourhood is the primary building block of infrastructure networks is not without precedent. Water provision in Tanzania has a long history, but it will suffice to say that the colonial and postcolonial governments embraced water kiosks, and it was not until 2002 that the National Water Policy advocated household connections (Smiley, 2013). Similarly, kiosks were introduced in townships surrounding Durban in the 1980s (Loftus, 2006) and more recently in Lilongwe (Adams and Boateng, 2018). While there are various models – e.g. public, private and community-run – in principle they operate as follows: treated water is pumped to a local distribution centre, from which it is sold to residents. Research has shown that water kiosks have the potential to deliver high-quality water and reduce waterborne illness (Heath et al., 2012; Sima et al., 2012). In the case of Bagamoyo, this would allow residents throughout the city to access affordable and safe drinking water.

A meso-level configuration of waste collection services would work similarly, with neighbourhood depots as the basic building block of the municipal management system. This sort of system is practiced elsewhere. Residents in many Indian cities are required to deposit their solid waste in neighbourhood depots, at which point its management becomes the responsibility of municipal authorities (Demaria and Schindler, 2016; Sharholy et al., 2007). Many Chinese cities have also experimented with neighbourhood-based depots where residents can sell recyclable waste (Zhang and Wen, 2014). This system also offers the opportunity of integrating informal-sector waste workers, who can still transport waste from households to depots for a fee, and who can segregate recyclable material from waste at the depots. The advantages are obvious – rather than haphazard door-to-door collection that rarely extends beyond the city centre, Bagamoyo’s lone tractor could collect waste from two to three depots in a single day. In conclusion, rather than a gradual expansion of infrastructure outward from the city centre to the periphery, a meso-level configuration would prioritize the construction of a network of water kiosks and waste depots that would extend to far-flung areas. Some residents would likely continue to access alternative systems, but the option to access public systems would be available to nearly all residents. Indeed, meso-level connections via neighbourhoods rather than households may be the most effective way to equitably expand urban infrastructure in cities that are undergoing rapid transformation.

Conclusion

We have narrated a top-down effort to transform Bagamoyo into a globally networked logistics and production hub, which is consistent with trends in global urban policy making in which city planning is increasingly centralized. However, we have also shown that Bagamoyo’s infrastructure configuration remains heterogeneous despite top-down planning. While there are plans to improve formal solid waste management and water supply, authorities welcome the participation of informal-sector actors which they view as temporary. Thus, the official narrative is that the city will ultimately become networked and achieve the modern infrastructural ideal. This is at odds with the fact that the city is expanding at a faster rate than its infrastructure and service systems, so every year a smaller percentage of the population accesses formal infrastructure/services. This explains why those responsible for formal public infrastructure and services tend to take a laissez-faire approach to the regulation of informal-sector water providers and waste collectors; at times they even encourage these parallel systems.

In the context of Bagamoyo’s transformation and its heterogeneous infrastructure configuration, urban residents obtain water and dispose of waste through a number of overlapping systems. Affluent residents exhibit dissatisfaction with the state of public systems, yet they are easily able to switch from one system to another in the event of an infrastructural disruption. Conflict erupts in the event of bottlenecks, and these are likely to become more frequent if the city’s population and infrastructure systems continue to grow at current rates. This is what is at stake if top-down urban transformation schemes that are designed by national governments fail to include and understanding of, or adequate investment for, urban infrastructure. Bagamoyo is an extreme version of these trends, as it is the centre of Tanzania’s spatially oriented industrial policy, but many other small-/medium-sized ordinary cities are being integrated into extended urban networks. While these cities may exhibit heterogeneous infrastructure configurations animated by at least tacit acceptance – and in some cases encouragement – of the informal sector, top-down plans continue to pursue the establishment of formal citywide systems. All too often the choice faced by cities has been framed as top-down and formal versus bottom-up and informal. Our research suggests that in cases where population growth is rapidly outpacing the expansion of infrastructure systems, planners should resist the temptation to attempt to homogenize infrastructure configurations. Instead, they should explore ways in which infrastructure configurations can remain heterogeneous, and be rescaled so that neighbourhoods rather than households are the basic building block.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Seth Schindler would like to thank the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences for hosting him in Tanzania. The authors would like to thank the reviewers for very constructive comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Seth Schindler would like to thank the Regional Studies Association for generous funding for this project.

Seth Schindler is a senior lecturer in Urban Development and Transformation at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. He previously coordinated the MA in Global Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Nancy Duong Nguyen holds a masters and a PhD in Statistics at University College Dublin. Her PhD was focused on the design and analysis of complex household surveys. In the summer of 2017, she served as a Research Tutor at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Bagamoyo, Tanzania.

Desdery Gerase Barongo is an assistant lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Marian University College in Bagamoyo, Tanzania.

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