The Coloniality of Space: Landscape, Aesthetics, and the Middle Classes in Dar es Salaam

Abstract

In Dar es Salaam, an aesthetic politics of landscape shaped by the coloniality of space is central to middle-class boundary work that drives the city's middle classes to congregate in the city's northern suburbs. The colonial city was divided into three racially marked zones that became known as uzunguni, uhindini, and uswahilini (the place of the European, Indian, and African, respectively). The coloniality of space remains as the spatial residue of this colonial enframing. It endures in an aesthetic politics of landscape in which ideas about what, and who, makes good urban space in terms of architecture, topography, and planning, and who deserves to live where. The paper examines how middle-class suburban residents’ mobilisation of the coloniality of space naturalises existing social and spatial hierarchies in the city.