How Planning Works in an Age of Reform: Land, Sustainability, and Housing Development Traditions in Zanzibar

Abstract

This is a geographical study of urban planning focusing on the on-going neoliberal land reform practices introduced in Zanzibar since the end of the 1980s as a major effort to improve the land sector. Throughout the application of these reforms, the land and environmental management projects were unable to sustain their adopted sustainability agenda that was based on democratic, collaborative, and participatory principles. The government finds it difficult to simultaneously cope with the reform results characterized by multiple overlapping policy changes in the urban land development sector. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and critical archival analysis of government papers, my narrative explores how planning works in this reform era. In line with Habermas's (1984) theory of communicative action and its subsequent influence on collaborative and sustainability planning theories in works by Healey (2006), Forester (2009), and Myers (2010), among others, this dissertation also conceptualizes what is happening in formal and informal housing contexts during the last two decades. I am answering the question of whether the sustainability strategy, which lacks excitement among the targeted local people, has been able to break through state controlled planning practices. The culturally-inspired traditional patterns of the people's land and housing development operations keep on normalizing informal processes which risk repeating the limitations of previous strategies during the years before the reforms. Finally, I examine practical reasons for these identified limitations via case study examples. The case study findings have helped to understand the disjointed element of the sustainability model, based on theoretical, empirical, and local analyses, which can itself be a step forward for further research.