The Suburban Frontier

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.

“Claire Mercer tells a story about the transformation of Dar es Salaam’s periphery that is being replicated everywhere in Africa. The gates and walls of the houses in these communities do not merely speak to a desire for safety; they are also a cipher for intense dreams and aspirations. This book will resonate well beyond its immediate audience.” — Ato Quayson, author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

“Mercer traces access to land in Dar es Salaam from the colonial era to the independence era, when an entrepreneur class of new urbanites has driven the city outwards at supersonic speed. The moving of the frontier is an unending episode, which makes the book extremely interesting to read.” — J. M. Lusugga Kironde, Professor, Urban Economics and Management, Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam

“The Suburban Frontier is a major intervention concerning debates on the African city, arguing that class is not an a priori category, but instead a process.” — Jason Sumich, author of The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa

CLAIRE MERCER is Professor of Human Geography at the London School of Economics.