Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the Zanzibar Urban Services Project and associated infrastructure and urban planning. The paper questions whether the new era of inclusive planning and infrastructure investment strengthened the urban poor majority’s citizenship or continued a long run of state planning failures.

Paper long abstract:

Drainage has been a central discursive arena of urban planning for Zanzibar for 150 years. From the mid-19th century until the recent Zanzibar Urban Services Project (ZUSP), elite outside voices have alternately fixated on or ignored the city’s perpetual drainage crisis and absence of sanitation infrastructure. While colonialism’s links of drainage infrastructures with racial hierarchy have faded, elements of urban planning remain tethered to colonial state tactics, particularly for Ng’ambo, the city’s historic African-Swahili “Other Side”. This paper interrogates ZUSP’s 189 million-dollar (US) World Bank-funded infrastructure programs on the Other Side in the context of 2015’s Local Area Plan for Ng’ambo and National Spatial Development Strategy. A critical content analysis of these and related planning documents produced in 2014-2021 is paired with deep reading of implementation reports and field analysis from 2018, 2019 and 2023. I am examining what happened to space production in poor neighborhoods heavily impacted by ZUSP, but also the even more marginalized settlements beyond the range of its planning map. The central research question is this: has the new era of seemingly inclusive planning and the most substantial investment in infrastructure for Ng’ambo in history strengthened the urban poor majority’s citizenship, or has it continued the long run of state planning failures for Ng’ambo’s residents? My answer is ambivalent, with notable positive transformations alongside the endurance of exclusionary legacies. This case study is placed in conversation with other critical studies of large 21st-century infrastructure projects for Africa’s cities, where a similar ambivalence is apparent.