Urban lives and urban legends: re-examining the slum in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

This thesis brings together literature on slums in urban economics and institutions in political science with new empirical data. In doing so, it contributes knowledge to both bodies of research while also advancing the multidisciplinary discourse on cities in international development. It uses a mix of research methods to examine theories about the emergence and persistence of slum deprivation. It takes a case study approach, drawing on large-scale household survey data to measure patterns in characteristics of slum households and their housing as well as semi-structured interviews and focus groups to understand the processes that underpin these observations. This analysis reveals that most slum households in Dar es Salaam are not poor, and that there is no clear relationship between informality and housing quality. Institutions play a key role in explaining these results: strong informal land ownership and transfer arrangements eliminate differences in transaction risks across formal and informal owners, while weak land coordination institutions trap well-located middle-income housing at slum standards. The analysis shows that slum theories which rely on expectations about market behaviour will have limited explanatory power unless they can better account for the mediating influence of informal market institutions on this behaviour. Improved understanding of informal institutions is needed to refine these theories and to improve their predictive power. The thesis concludes by drawing insights from the analysis of informal institutions in Dar es Salaam into potential foundations of a more complete market theory of slum deprivation.