PAST projets

EveryDay DaR: Emerging Geographies of Everyday Life in a Changing Urban Context

In 2016, I led a group of three other students on the MSc Urbanisation and Development course at the London School of Economics to secure a Graduate Fieldwork Grant from the Royal Geographic Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) to support a human geography research expedition to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Together, the four of us used the opportunity to conduct research for our individual dissertations while exploring the intersection of their respective areas of interest through the project ‘Everyday Dar: Emerging Geographies of Everyday Life in a Changing Urban Context’.

Everyday Dar explored everyday life in a rapidly changing urban context in the Global South. Situated in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania our team simultaneously conducted grounded research on four aspects of urban existence:

• gendered daily mobility and transport planning

• the use of urban space for informal livelihood activity by female food vendors

• experiences of climate change adaptation for Dar residents living in low-lying flood-prone lands, and

• an examination of the city’s cultural economy through the rise of Bongo Flava music

While these four areas of inquiry framed our individual MSc dissertations, the Everyday Dar project sought to join our individual studies through illuminating the areas where they intersected. Findings were disseminated through a report submitted to the Royal Geographic Society in 2017.