Abstract
The largest share of urbanisation in Sub Saharan Africa is taking place in settlements that are smaller than cities. However, these small urban settlements are conceptually neglected and mostly mistheorised as overriding land governance concepts and institutional procedures were designed for large urban centres or the extreme opposite, villages. As a result, there is either a total lack of specific policies on small urban centres or the policies are designed wrongly thus contributing to challenges of informality, poor servicing and environment degradations. This paper, using the Tanzanian case, is an attempt to contribute in understanding the dynamics of small towns through establishing the population thresholds that can appropriately be classified as small towns and the factors driving their growth. The study analyses census data spatially using geographical information system and statistical software. The results indicate that the typical size of small towns where polarisation forces still gravitate towards the town has a number of people between 10,000 and 50,000 people with population density at the core of the settlements ranging from 40 to 120 people per hectare. The major factors for the development are the presence of economic activities that have value addition options contributing to off-farm employment, and the typical radius of its hinterland for each small town is about a one hour drive. As the number of small towns continues to grow in Sub Saharan Africa due to continued polarisation forces, policies and interventions for the management of small have to be pre-emptive and anticipatory.
Highlights
The largest share of urbanisation in Sub Saharan Africa is taking place in settlements that are smaller than cities
This trend calls for a rethinking of policy focus on issues that impact on small towns in subSaharan Africa
The results of the study show that small towns emerge through the polarisation process as they attract populations of the immediate soundings while they themselves feed into population growth of larger urban centres
Summary
The largest share of urbanisation in Sub Saharan Africa is taking place in settlements that are smaller than cities These small urban settlements are conceptually neglected and mostly mistheorised as overriding land governance concepts and institutional procedures were designed for large urban centres or the extreme opposite, villages. Indications of failures of moderation theories corresponded with the strengthening of socialistic ideas in some countries, including Tanzania, saw the rekindling of interests in small towns as a tool to drive rural development. Donors through their technical agencies financed projects such as Integrated Rural Developments Plans [9, 10], in which small towns were conceptualised as development nodes to service the hinterlands. Since small towns and large urban centres in sub-Saharan Africa have been proliferating in the
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