Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how gender and generation impact the way people creates and engages with new urban spaces, by showing how people’s everyday life practices, create, shape and alter the cultural, social and physical spaces of rural small towns of Tanzania.

Paper long abstract:

Rural towns and small urban centers are important locations when examining urban growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), as the majority of urban growth in SSA is forecasted to happen here. However, research on small urban centers is scarce, and even less is known about how these centers emerge as spaces of urbanity. The term urbanity is used to cover ways of living which are thought unique to urban places and qualitatively different from rural lifestyles. The aim of this paper is to present how the transitioning from rural to urban locations materializes in a sense of urbanity, reflected through residents' everyday practices and place-making. Through an exploration of livelihood practices and how these are interlinked with the physical environment, the study shows how certain urbanities are created in the mixture of rural and urban positioning's. The paper further highlights how these urbanities are materialized differently along an axis of gender and generation. The paper seeks to demonstrate how the ways and means of being urban are not uniform between genders, and to highlight how gender and generation are important factors to include when examining and understanding the development processes of new urban spaces.