Abstract
This chapter1 is concerned with housing and its crucial role in the survival strategies of certain women-heads of household in Tanzania2 It has emerged from my long-standing interest in the field of housing and the urban poor in Tanzania (Sheriff, 1987). This interest has been backed consistently by a deep conviction that an analytical treatment of such a multi-faceted topic needs to be situated in the wider framework of how societies historically produce and manage residential space in relation to their construction of social hierarchies and allocation of privileges, according to a specific vision of the role of women in those societies. In other words, I believe that the gendered production of and the control over the use of residential space play a crucial role in the dynamics of social relations, property relations, and relations of power.
[Spatial] boundaries are never established gratuitously. Society does not form divisions purely for the pleasure of breaking the social universe into compartments. The institutionalized (spatial) boundaries dividing the parts of society express the recognition of power in one part at the expense of the other. Any transgression of the boundaries is a danger to the social order because it is an attack on the acknowledged allocation of power. (Mernissi, 1975:8).
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Sheriff, F. (1991). Shelter and Beyond: The State, Gendered Residential Space and Survival in Tanzania. In: à Nijeholt, G.L. (eds) Towards Women’s Strategies in the 1990s. Institute of Social Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12622-4_4
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