Sylvia Munisi’s scientific contributions

Dar es Salaam is one of the world’s fastest growing cities and is expected to be the third largest by 2100 with a population of 76 million. Dar es Salaam city is made of multiple neighbourhoods that are very diverse in terms of socio-economic status, gender, age and prevalent activities. One of the biggest challenges facing the city of Dar es Salaam is urban sprawl due to informal settlements that in turn leads to very long travel time and hinders equal mobility and accessibility of labour and goods. This study found that the current mobility vision for Dar es Salaam city that bases on transit-oriented development can help to alleviate transit pressure to the current mono-centric city, although integration of the vision to informal settlements that are the current majority of the land use is still lacking. The study also found that the current regularisation strategies of informal settlements provide an opportunity for urban mobility. However, the resulting mobility networks are not sufficient to meet the demand of the government mobility vision. To capture the future rapid population growth in the city, this study recommends a back casting strategy that looks on the future needs of the population including residency vis-à-vis mobility to establish current new transit corridors passing though redeveloped informal settlements.

The history of the port city of Douala spans pre-colonial period, colonial period of the Germans and French occupation, the post- colonial era and the contemporary situation with continuous occupancy of the coastal environment. This article looks at the relationship between the history of the city of Douala to the resulting urban situation focusing on governance structure as well as rapid urbanization. The findings show that governance structure allowing for a duality of modern political system and traditional cultural system of kingships and chiefdoms has an effect to the resulting urban sprawl. Moreover, rapid urbanization under this condition has an overall impact to the challenges resulting from urban sprawl including development of settlements that do not have basic services. Developing comprehensive urban planning policies that prioritize sustainable and green building practices and transport systems, promoting the use of locally sourced building materials, use of technology to encourage generation of renewable energy, encouraging a broader participation of local communities in the planning and development of the city are some possible interventions recommended to ensure a more sustainable and resilient city of Douala.