Just access to land for affordable housing in Tanzania of 5.3 million which is approximately 30 percent of the country’s 32-million urban population. The annual urban growth is 5.2 percent(Gardner, Lock­wood and Pienaar 2020). The increase in population is attributed to rural-ur­ban migration and urban expansion that has over the years accelerated the establishment of new settlements in the peri-urban areas of the city, mostly to the south(e.g. Pugu and Kigamboni), the west(e.g. Kimara and Kibamba) and to the north towards Bagamoyo (e.g. Bunju, Mwabepande, and Mbwe­ni)(Oates, Gillard, et al.,.2020). Some newcomers to the city have settled in unoccupied reserve lands, such as open spaces and flood plains in the Msimbazi River Basin that runs through the cen­ter of the city. The government’s capac­ity to implement land use plans for the orderly planning of the city has been low(Huang, et al. 2018). As a result, a large part of the city, estimated at 70 percent, is occupied by informal set­tlements that do not conform to land use plans(Nuhu and Kombe 2020). The key features of the city are (i) its organic growth struc­ture with developments taking place along major transport corridors away from the central busi­ness district(Figure 1), (ii) the segregated neighbor­hoods between the affluent and poor households, and (iii) the spatial density variations between own­er-occupiers and tenants (Three City Land Nex­us Research Team 2020). Poor households and tenants are more likely to locate in dense settle­ments and closer to the central busi­ness district(CBD), while more afflu­ent residents locate in sparse locations away from CBD. Another important feature of Dar es Salaam is the con­gestion within a 10-kilometer radius of CBD, vulnerability to floods, and a persistent problem of enforcing phys­ical planning development conditions. The urban planning system in Dar es Salaam is deeply entrenched in the concept of the master plan(Linda and Yang 2019). The gist of the city plan is to ensure all areas within the city’s boundary are planned including areas already with housing that was devel­oped without an approved land use plan and in effect to formalize infor­mal settlements. Formalization is per­formed either by incorporating rural areas into the urban land use plans or through regularization of informal set­tlements within the urban areas. The implementation of the Master Plan has, however, not been effective for several reasons(Huang, et al. 2018). One rea­son is the critical disconnect between national economic plans and work 23