The bridge, insurance and the fund: Building uncertain city futures in Dar es Salaam

Thesis

Drawing upon eighteen months of fieldwork between 2016 and 2018, this thesis provides an ethnographic account of culturally mediated and materially founded emergent forms of urban life in Dar es Salaam. The fieldwork was mainly conducted in close proximity to two ‘field sites’: the Nyerere Bridge, popularly known as the Kigamboni Bridge; and East Africa’s largest pension fund, a parastatal pay-as-you-go pension scheme whose investments financed the building of the bridge together with the Tanzanian government. The thesis begins by setting out on a short journey some 680 meters across Kurasini Creek, the tidal creek stretching through central Dar es Salaam that divides the dense downtown neighbourhoods from the lofty Kigamboni district in the south. As we venture over the Nyerere Bridge, however, we are embarking on a much longer journey, one of insurance, of how risky urban futures are negotiated, based on participant observation, mapping and archival work, extended interviews and conversations with operators, bureaucrats, managers, politicians, worker, engineers, and residents, all implicated in ‘city-making’.

The thesis is divided into four parts. Part I consists of the first three chapters: introduction, theoretical outline, and methodology. The three middle parts are ethnographically driven and structured by a tripartite engagement, each part of which - the bridge, insurance and the fund - includes two chapters each. The thesis ends with a concluding chapter.

Authors: Joelsson, I

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-jvaqe4dy5
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: Swahili and English
• Keywords: uncertainty; people as infrastructure; providential fund; temporality; Tanzania; infrastructure; world city; worldliness; pensions; social security; futurity; urban imaginaries; insurance urbanism; popular insurance; insurance; Dar es Salaam; welfare
• Subjects: Anthropology of insurance; East African studies; Urban studies; African studies; Development studies; Economic anthropology; Anthropology of temporality; Urban anthropology; Urban geography