ABSTRACT
The recent discovery of minerals and precious stones, particularly gold and diamonds, has catalysed extraordinary growth spurts in previously unpopulated or sparsely populated rural areas of Tanzania. Small-scale miners have migrated in large numbers to the mineral strike sites to try their luck. Their early makeshift settlements have expanded into jumbled concentrations of rural and urban modes of livelihood, metamorphosing from remote ‘deep rural’ to pulsating urban centres of goods and service provisioning. In many cases, these population growth spurts, however dramatic, have been short-lived and have dissipated as the extractable ores become less accessible to the small-scale miners. This inevitably leads to the question of how sustainable mining-led urbanisation is over time.
