DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2015.v03i02.029

Pages: 538-548

The concern over sustainable development in cities of the developing world has evoked a debate from various scholars and contexts. The justification for this debate emanates from the fact that informal urbanization that pervades urban development presents bleak opportunities towards achieving sustainable development goals. This has been largely attributed to the limited capacity of urban local authorities to plan and provide basic services and address spatial and environmental challenges. Unplanned sprawl, low population and housing densities, rapid growth of informal settlements and conversion of agricultural land into other urban uses charactirize spatial concerns of urban sustainability. On the other hand; limited capacity to manage wastes and flooding and inadequate water and sanitation constitute key environmental concerns. This paper attempts to analyse sustainability issues from spatial and environmental point of views from eight major urban centres of Tanzania. It utilizes data that was collected from the ‘Tanzanian State of the Cities Project’ (2010-2013). The data collection methods included household interviews,review of official records, workshops, group discussion and reports from city coordinators. The results shows that across the eight urban centres, Zanzibar was leading towards sustainability by achieving 476.7 points of the aggregated indices, followed by Mwanza city that registered 458 points. The least performing was Tanga that achieved 221.1 points. As a way forward, it has been recommended that; cities should be planned and guided for increased densities and facilitated to provide services to achieve sustainable urban development.