Join us for a talk with Dr Matteo Rizzi on his paper exposing the inadequacy of mainstream approaches to promoting good governance in cities, through the study of the politics of governance in the passenger transport system of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city. It focuses in particular on the politics of its workforce. Dar es Salaam is a city with over 3 million people. Less than 20 public buses and over 7,000 private buses supply its passenger transport. About 30,000 informal, and highly exploited, wage workers operate these private buses. Having shown the causal link between workers’ “problems” and urban transport “problems”, the paper reflects on the efforts, dilemmas and partial achievements in claiming labour rights for the transport workforce. By contrasting these real attempts to address urban problems through better governance with the neoliberal fantasy of it, the paper underlines the mainstream’s failure to analyse urban capitalism, and the social and economic relations that cause urban problems. It therefore calls for a contextualised understanding of issues of power, authority, and exploitation when studying, or trying to bring about, (urban) good governance.