Our training institutions have been churning out Town Planners, and other land-based professionals by the hundreds.
Town Planners (TP) in the Country are holding their 10th Annual General Meeting (AGM) between 27 and 28 November, 2025, at the Gold Crest Hotel in the City of Mwanza.
Town Planners, who should appropriately be called Land Use Planners (LUP) to reflect their role to in both rural and urban areas, are an important crop of professionals, given that Tanzania, like other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), is urbanizing fast.
They have to be in control of this process, yet it is possibly an understatement, when one observes that all our urban areas, large, medium-sized or small, are growing chaotically, right under the noses of these professionals.
Our training institutions have been churning out Town Planners, and other land-based professionals by the hundreds.
You have these professionals at central government level as well as at the level of both rural and urban local government authorities (town councils, municipal councils and city councils), as well as at the level of regional secretariats. Some are in the private sector.
One of the achievements that Town Planners usually put forward in their reports, is the number of land use plans of various levels that they have prepared, yet hardly are any of these implemented.
Many planners are still using the old methods of preparing colorful masterplans, which are good to look at and displaying but, given that they take a lot of time (and resources) to prepare, by the time they are completed, the situation to which they are supposed to apply will usually have changed drastically.
Our urban areas are growing by leaps and bounds while the land use plans to guide this development are being prepared at a snail-slow speed. It is possible that town planning methods have not evolved fast enough to be ahead of the rapidly growing and evolving urban areas.
The land use mosaic in many of our towns and cities, shows pockets of planned areas on a huge landscape of unplanned development. Clearly, the Town Planners, as they meet in their AGM, have to do some soul searching about their continued relevance to what is happening in SSA.
Way back in 2008, Professor T.J. Nnkya published a book titled: “Why Planning does not Work: Land-use Planning and Residents’ Rights in Tanzania”.
The book is a must-read for both seasoned and newly-recruited town planners, since, based on case studies, it explores various reasons that lead to the failure of town planning, a profession that had been around since 1906.
Town planners need to think of new approaches, since by growing in an uncontrolled manner, our urban areas become a cost to the nation and to the residents. Unplanned urban areas cannot unleash the potential which cities have, to become an engine of development.
People who put their investment in expensive properties in areas that are unplanned, do not realise the value of such properties.
Not only are our urban areas growing fast, they are also spreading uncontrollably creating sprawled cities which are difficult to service and to navigate.
Clearly, town planners are not utilizing the advances which technology has brought about through the use of satellites and drones, which can very much assist in collecting the necessary land use data, fast and accurately, to map existing land uses as well as project future ones.
Google earth, for example can easily show which part of an urban area is densely developed and which is not, and this can go a long way to assist in making useful land use plans.
With the coming of AI, there can no longer be excuses of lack of resources to manage our urban areas, at least in the sense of land use planning.
Town planners have to think of new approaches, best based on involving communities and land owners to work together in a collaborative manner. A good example, which I usually quote, is how the Upanga Area was planned without acquiring land.
The idea of wanting to get a tabula rasa, a clean table on which to design land use plans is outmoded. People are always ahead. Town planning must reverse this and be ahead of development.
Approaches like land pooling and readjustment may come to the rescue, whereby both land owners and authorities agreed to share lan; owners getting planned and serviced land and authorities getting land for public uses.
I am aware that one seasoned town planner, who was one of the presidential candidates for the just-ended General Election (under CUF), has been pioneering such land sharing arrangements, much as the entrenched town planners especially in government have not been happy about this move.
The private sector is also handy. Its resources should be harnessed to rescue our urban areas from the chaos that they are growing into.
