Abstract :
Zanzibarʹs Stone Town is currently undergoing rapid social and economic transformation. Following hard on the heels of 20 years of economic stagnation and urban neglect, economic liberalisation and privatisation since the mid-1980s has brought about thriving commerce, rocketing house prices and rents, and a rapidly changing physical fabric of the old town. These changes have been driven and accompanied by increasing numbers of tourists. Concurrently, Zanzibar has found renewed interest among the international donor community and many projects aimed at both urban and rural development are underway.
The Stone Town is at the centre of current development efforts, through a broad programme of restoration in which conservation, tourism and the free market go hand in hand. The old town is utilised as a resource to attract tourists and thus provide a stimulus to the liberalised economy. And vice versa, the tourists and the private sector are seen as providing the incentives and resources for conserving and restoring the Stone Town. Yet while these processes are assumed to create new opportunities for the local community and to improve their living conditions, the benefits have, in reality, been much more socially and spatially differentiated.
The present restoration programme affects the Stone Townʹs various different communities in ambiguous and contradictory ways. It can simultaneously preserve individual notable buildings while destroying many of the townʹs fragile social and cultural networks and much of the urban fabric they inhabit. It is argued, in this paper, that while such a tourist-driven conservation approach can be a means of economic and cultural revitalisation, the present depoliticised process is resulting in the sporadic gentrification of the Stone Town and the marginalisation of the poor. The paper advocates that planners and architects should act as educators and enablers, facilitating people to articulate their needs through the restoration of their urban environment. It concludes that only with a more process-oriented and participatory approach can conservation and tourism benefit the whole community and be used as vehicles for inspiring new meaning and action in the city.
