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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on city edges. The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer details how the “suburban frontier” has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle class, The Suburban Frontier offers significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.
African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on city edges. The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer details how the “suburban frontier” has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle class, The Suburban Frontier offers significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.
Price: $34.95
Pages: 220
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
30 July 2024
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520402386
Format: Paperback
"The book makes a significant contribution to expanding this growing field of urban study by focusing on the African suburb, offering a wealth of new information and resources. . . .TheSuburban Frontier is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of suburban life beyond Western norms – shattering the confines of Euro-American urban theory and redefining what it means to belong to middle class on the African frontier."
“Mercer introduces the middle classes as the ‘natural’ occupants of a certain single-family-home- dominated landscape at the margins of expanding urban regions. But the middle classes don’t just occupy, they create their homes and socio-spatial environments themselves . . . through steady and cash-based investments into a built environment that is taking shape in and through emerging markets that are themselves embedded in both traditional land governance and modern legal and institutional constructs.”
“Mercer introduces the middle classes as the ‘natural’ occupants of a certain single-family-home- dominated landscape at the margins of expanding urban regions. But the middle classes don’t just occupy, they create their homes and socio-spatial environments themselves . . . through steady and cash-based investments into a built environment that is taking shape in and through emerging markets that are themselves embedded in both traditional land governance and modern legal and institutional constructs.”
“The Suburban Frontier provides a wealth of empirical detail that will be of interest and indirectly advance debates among researchers working in other traditions of analysis. . . . It makes a central contribution to scholarship on the relationship between space and social class, while also illuminating dynamics that are relevant to wider debates on urbanisation in Africa; it deserves a wide readership.”
Claire Mercer is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. She is coauthor of Development and the African Diaspora: Place and the Politics of Home.