Land, landscape and lifestyle: middle class boundary work in suburban Dar es Salaam

Land, landscape and lifestyle: middle class boundary work in suburban Dar es Salaam
Thursday, April 27, 2017 - 16:00
Rocque Lab, Ground Floor, Rhetoric House

The Department of Geography Seminar Series 2016-17

Land, landscape and lifestyle: middle class boundary work in suburban 
Dar es Salaam 

Dr. Claire Mercer 

Associate Professor of Human Geography, 
Department of Geography and Environment, 
London School of Economics 

Abstract:
This paper brings sociological approaches to the boundary work of class into conversation with human geography. I argue that attention to the explicitly spatial and material elements of boundary work is a necessary step towards an analysis of social class in the contemporary African city. The paper’s empirical focus is the new suburban landscapes being built by the middle classes in Dar es Salaam. Suburban space provides a useful window onto contemporary class practices where it is difficult to identify social classes on the basis of income or occupation. The paper argues that the middle classes and the suburbs are mutually constitutive. I discuss the material, discursive and lived practices of middle class boundary work in relation to land, landscape and lifestyle. The suburban landscape emerges as an arena in which people are involved in daily small-scale struggles to access and use urban space. Middle class attempts to shape suburban space are conducted against their class others, the poor and a state ‘elite’, and sometimes with, sometimes against, middle class neighbours. If the middle classes do not presently constitute a coherent political-economic force, they are nevertheless transforming the city’s former northern peri-urban zones into desirable suburban residential neighbourhoods.  

4.00-5.30pm
Thursday April 27, 2017
Rocque Lab, Ground Floor, 
Rhetoric House
Maynooth University