title: Circulation and Appropriation of Urban Technologies: Drainage and Traffic Infrastructures in Dar es Salaam, 1913 – 1999
Creators: name: Edward, Frank
Publisher: name: UNSPECIFIED
Year: 2023

description: The infrastructure in African cities has been discussed in the media and political discourses for several decades. The main narrative has been about their failures and unreliability. Electricity blackouts, the failure of water supply systems, traffic congestion and poor sanitation systems have been at the centre of the heated discussions about infrastructure. As a result, urban scholars have paid considerable attention to these systems at the expense of others. Problems relating to drainage infrastructure, especially infrastructure malfunctioning and flooding, often go unnoticed and are understudied, although they occur every year. Drainage failures frequently affect traffic infrastructure by damaging roads, causing traffic congestion and, at times, destroying urban transit systems. Weaving research approaches from urban, science and technology studies, this study examines the most historically-urbanised city of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to understand and explain the drainage problem and its connection to traffic infrastructure. Emphasising the technical and spatial entanglement, the study argues that the contemporary and past drainage and traffic problems are the result of colonial and post-colonial engineering and planning processes and decision-making. This study uses the splintering-urbanism thesis to posit that it was not merely the racial policy that led to the building of separate urban systems, as argued by social and historical studies of urbanisation. The retrieved archival and documentary sources show that medical and class forces as well as the continuity of colonial and early post-colonial infrastructure regimes were also at play in the unfolding of the drainage problem in Dar es Salaam. As such, the study does not only create knowledge on the drainage problem that occurred invariably but also controverts recent accounts which contends that the drainage problem — a problem that manifests through urban floods — is largely a consequence of climate-related changes and the rise of the sea level. The study demonstrates that, during the colonial and post-colonial periods, the design and distribution of drainage and traffic infrastructure were influenced by local and imperial urban infrastructure circulation and appropriation processes. In particular, the archival and documentary sources reveal that the colonial drainage and traffic systems were an outcome of the colonial technological circulation of certain forms of knowledge, materiality and practices, with limited local appropriation. The study submits that most of the studies on urban infrastructure done in the Global South do no articulate and discuss the context of the infrastructure beginnings in the Global North. With respect to the post-colonial era, the retrieved material indicates that the ill-conceived policy of science and technology, such as the desire to undertake urbanisation through industrialisation without having a critical mass of well-educated people and the appropriation of colonial technical pedagogical structures, led to the failure of the drainage and traffic infrastructure. Along with other socio-economic forces such as the long-term economic crisis that began in the late 1970s and continued until the 1990s, the non-articulated and disconnected infrastructure regimes and the sheer technical and financial dependence on aid the vulnerability and implications of the drainage and traffic infrastructure were exacerbated by uncontrolled and ever-growing urban sprawl. The study concludes that the past and present drainage and traffic problems in Dar es Salaam are an outcome of historical processes that contemporary technocrats and scholars need to understand so that they can develop comprehensive and tangibly lasting solutions. The processes are technological, cultural, environmental and political – the socio-technical processes that could be understood well if they were studied within their unique temporal-spatial landscape. Such an understanding would help to change the local and international agencies’ interventions into, and perspective on, floods, not only in Dar es Salaam but also in other Global South cities.