Countercultural Ujamaa: Planning Lessons from a Tanzanian Village
Essay for OASE journal [117]
“Project Village”.
August 2023.
“Project Village”.
August 2023.
The essay addresses the spatial dimension of the 1970s Tanzanian villagisation programme and the Norwegian contribution to its development. The new ideology of Ujamaa-socialism emphasised self-sufficiency and self-reliance and placed the rural at the core of its development model. Since Tanzanian political ambitions seemed to align well with Nordic ideas of social democracy, Norwegian planners were tasked with developing rural house prototypes based on traditional dwellings. In the search for affordable local solutions, Norwegian planners experimented with observation-based methods and incorporated new interdisciplinary approaches. And although this “expertise” could be considered too distant and naïve to enact meaningful change, Tanzanian village research created a peculiar osmosis of ideas. It foreshadowed emergent sustainability and ecological concerns in Norway and informed growing political criticisms of the developmental paradigm. The essay then investigates the universal redemptive promise the village seemed to hold in the post-1973 world against the homogenising powers of global techno-capitalism.