Building the Just City in Tanzania: Essays on Urban Housing Neema’s house story is far from excep­tional. The 2016 World Bank’s Measur­ing Living Standards in Cities Survey, which is statistically representative of both formal and informal areas, re­vealed that 80% of Dar es Salaam’s households live in one or two rooms (Panman, 2021:237). Evidence that I will present later estimates that 89.7% of the activities taking place in consol­idated informal settlements in Dar es Salaam remain invisible to municipal governments, and yet they provide in­dispensable urban services, goods, and social protections that make life in the city possible. Now, if this is how the majority lives, it is fundamental to have a better understanding of these space­use dynamics. Housing policy is due for a more granular understanding, recog­nition, and support, of the realities of the majority. 2. Introduction This essay is based on a previous re­search collaboration between FES and The New School on The Just City ini­tiative, specifically the working paper: “Urban Informality and the Making of African Cities”, published by the Frie­drich-Ebert-Stiftung Kenya Office in 2022. The paper has four main objectives: First, to portray the current theoretical notion of a continuum between infor­mality and formality, as a more appro­48 piate framing for Tanzanian policy. Sec­ond, to present and discuss evidence of space-use intensity in informal housing in Dar es Salaam. Third, to discuss in­sights on urban formalization from the experts of the Tanzanian Just City Plat­form Housing Working Group. Fourth and last, to advocate for an integrated approach to housing policy connecting housing with policies on employment, businesses, community services, and social protection. 3. The continuum approach to urban informality Current thinking about urban infor­mality disregards the strict binaries— formal versus informal, rich versus poor, North versus South—in favor of a differentiated approach that embrac­es the shades of grey in between, the linkages, the back-and-forth move­ments between formality and infor­mality. The initial dualism of traditional development economics(Lewis, 1954; Harris& Todaro,1970; Hart, 1972), that argued that industrialization and eco­nomic growth would shrink informality (i.e. unemployment) out of existence, is increasingly seen today as an outdat­ed and inaccurate picture of our world (Jutting& Laiglesia, 2009). The shift in thinking has been gradual over the last fifty years. A very schematic overview of this process summarized in Figure 3 below and further elaborated in other reviews(Moser, 1994; Chen& Carré, 2020; Carrizosa, 2021).