GUIDEBOOK

Zanzibar
TANZANIA
Ng’ambo Tuikayo: The buffer we want.
Implementation of HUL approach in Zanzibar town, Tanzania.
Dr. Muhammad Juma, Director of Urban and Rural Planning, Zanzibar
1. Layers of the site
The Stone town of Zanzibar is the administrative, social and cultural centre of the Zanzibar
Islands of 1.3M inhabitants in an area of 2, 460 km². Until the end of the 19th Century, this
old town was the main hub and capital of a powerful and wide commercial network, which
connected three regions in three continents: East Africa; the Indian subcontinent and the
Persian Gulf. This period of zenith for commerce consolidates the most important character
of the old town: cosmopolitism. It enhanced the fusion of people, ideas and values of Indian
Ocean rim, and gave the Stone town its significant and core spatial and social values.
2. Background
Until the beginning of the 20th Century, the history of urbanisation in Zanzibar was primarily
the history of its centre: the Stone town of Zanzibar. Yet, a presence of a creek between
the Stone town and “other side” of the creek, known as Ng’ambo created a division,
transformed into a “spatial divide”. With the inscription of the Stone town in the UNESCO
World Heritage List in 2000, the Ng’ambo area become a part of the buffer zone and lost its
status as a part of city. In this context the management of the pillar of Outstanding Universal
Value (OUV) of the Stone town, the fusion, was threatened. The Stone town existed in social
and spatial discontinuities; hence its future development was hindered.
Image (left): Public space in Stone town, World Heritage Site, 2000
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