Exploring Self-organized Commercial Streets: Towards a Participatory Design Approach through an Anthropological Study of Shekilango Commercial Street in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Abstract

In sub-Saharan Africa, urban studies have primarily focused on planning, engineering, and sanitation. Research has also shown that state-driven interventions in urban environments do not address daily lived realities, thereby missing their aim and affecting the livelihoods of residents on one hand. On the other hand, since residents have the capacity to shape their environment through self-organization by employing tacit knowledge, this knowledge, which can be an inspiration for authorities and professionals, remains largely unanalyzed. This study is an attempt to unveil self-organized processes and resident-created qualities along Shekilango commercial street in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. To connect this study with livelihoods, it employs the asset-based approach in which the qualities of the physical asset (the built environment) and the social asset (actors’ interrelations) are analysed and discussed. The study employed a design anthropological approach in which the researcher observed and interviewed respondents through coworking, and shadowing. Complexity theory was employed as the main lens for analyzing informal processes, actors’ interrelations and self-organized practices. Lefebvre’s Social Production of Space theory (1991) was used for analyzing space use and space generation. With the help of the concept of scarcity and literature on attributes of commercial streets in the west, mostly achieved by professionals, the study revealed residents’ contributions in Tanzania with similar qualities, suggesting that non-professionals positively contribute to urban built environments. The combination of design anthropology and complexity theory has revealed strong actors’ interdependencies and codesign processes for overcoming what is scarce in urban built environments. The study proposes timely and more active actor involvements to substitute self-organized participatory design, which is triggered by untimely and top-down spatial development approaches. The study also proposes closer interactions among authorities, professionals, and residents to address residents’ contributions and guide their daily decisions in generating and using space. As much as we would like these spaces and the efforts to be integrated in formal planning, they need to be “understood” rather than to be “solved” since their creation and use are too dynamic to be predicted. They remain to be “negotiated lived spaces” which continually evolve.