Never too late to start caring about urban heritage?

On Friday 1st of April we had the pleasure to present our project Ng’ambo Tuitakayo alongside renown scholars and urban activists as Hannah Le Roux, Johan Lagae, Joy Mboya and Iain Jackson (only to mention a few) at the Simulizi Mijini symposium on Urban Heritage in Dar Es Salaam.

The symposium was jointly organized by DARCH and the TU Berlin. It started with a session on urban heritage in an international African context and gradually narrowed down its focus towards Tanzania and Zanzibar to end up with a discussion on built legacy and cultural heritage in Dar Es Salaam.

Many issues related to the topic of urban heritage were raised along the way which later on led to interesting discussions on the political nature of heritage, the contested and highly problematic notion of shared heritage in the postcolonial context and the overall difficulty of defining the term heritage in relation to the multi-layered nature of cities.