What does it entail for the production of the future city in an area when a large-scale redevelopment project collapses, leaving behind ‘only’ the utopian imaginaries that originally shaped the project? How do these imaginaries influence citizens’ anticipation of the future and their current engagement in shaping the urban landscape through everyday processes of anticipation, appropriation and planning? The thesis examines how the delay and ultimate cancellation of a large satellite city project in the periphery of Dar es Salaam has propelled forward a series of unexpected planning responses from residents inhabiting the area and its peri-urban surroundings. It argues that the project’s underpinning utopian visions, combined with the general uncertainty of materialisation, which has haunted the project from the very onset, has generated a productive temporal vacuum, in which residents have carried out their own appropriations of the future 'new city’. It tracks a series of examples of polyphonic planning initiated at resident-level by individuals, communities or through collaborations between residents and actors from the private urban planning sector.

Extern discussant: Claire Mercer fra LSE, UK

Intern discussant: Anders Sybrandt Hansen