Urban and regional planning in Finnish-Tanzanian development schemes, 1972–1981: The rise and fall of a global rationalistic project

This doctoral thesis examines seven urban and regional planning projects that were funded with Finnish official development assistance and implemented in Tanzania in 1972–1981. The main aim of the research has been to compile a basic understanding of the projects implemented within the framework of development cooperation, in which Finnish experts from the fields of architecture, urban and regional planning, and construction have played a major role. The thesis therefore opens a new strand of research in Finnish architectural historiography one that focuses on studying Finnish urban and regional planning experts’ mobilities, encounters and endeavours in the socalled global South. The secondary aim of the thesis has been to explain why the role of urban and regional planning was particularly significant in Finnish development cooperation in the 1970s rather than at some other period. The main source material consists of the final reports from the seven planning projects and other project-related archival material kept at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Helsinki, Finland. The research utilises qualitative analytical methods, particularly interdisciplinary contextualisation, thematic analysis and grounded theory analysis. Interpretation of the material has been based on three theoretical components. Development theory has been applied particularly in relation to the theme of modernisation in the source material. It explains the dynamics between the Finnish state aid agency and Tanzanian development policies and aims. Postcolonial theory has been applied especially to examine architectural and urban and regional planning practices in the context of Tanzanian political history and to problematise the global ‘North/South’ axis in the post-imperial world, following the conventions of the field. Rationalistic planning theory is used to explain and deconstruct the case studies in terms of contemporaneous ideas about how ‘development’ was expected to play out in its physical, spatial and architectural forms. The research illustrates that the close relationship between urban and regional planners and Finnish development cooperation in the 1970s was founded on a shared understanding of the preconditions of welfare and progress: hierarchical, rationalistic planning ideas had produced the desired outcomes of economic and societal development in the Finnish context just a short while earlier. This understanding of welfare and progress encouraged the MFA’s development officials to attempt the same development model elsewhere, making it a global rationalistic project. Applying the rationalistic planning model in the global South was also encouraged by 1970s topical understandings of the planners’ social responsibilities, since welfare and progress were at the time understood primarily as outcomes of physio-spatial planning. In the geopolitical context of the Cold War, development cooperation became one of the major forums in which the Finnish image of ‘neutrality’ and ‘Westernness’ were reproduced. The model of rationalistic modernisation in developmentalist architecture entered a period of crisis with the postmodern paradigmatic changes of the 1980s, resulting in its demise.