Gone to Ground

Gone to Ground is an investigation into the material and political forces that transformed the cityscape of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is both the story of a particular city and the history of a global moment of massive urban transformation from the perspective of those at the center of this shift. Built around an archive of newspapers, oral history interviews, planning documents, and a broad compendium of development reports, Emily Brownell writes about how urbanites navigated the states anti-urban planning policies along with the citys fracturing infrastructures and profound shortages of staple goods to shape Dars environment. They did so most frequently by going to ground in the urban periphery, orienting their lives to the citys outskirts where they could plant small farms, find building materials, produce charcoal, and escape the states policing of urban space.