The Uporoto Mountains are highly populated agricultural lands whose environmental conditions allow the production of a wide range of crops which feeds various national urban markets in Tanzania and its neighboring countries. Located at 1700 m above sea level, on the south-western outskirts of Tanzania, Mbeya City has about 400,000 inhabitants. It is the regional center and the business gateway to the landlocked countries of the sub-region. Mbeya City and Uporoto are entities which are located between urban and rural areas and between different geographical scales. The exchange function predominates, it leans on the development of an agricultural model based on commercial food crops. Through a systemic approach, this study shows how geographic agricultural development and urbanization are interwoven and produce the causes and effects of their dynamics. The thesis is organized into four parts and nine chapters that analyze how the emergence of an integration model based on new food-cash crops, based on a network of markets and on the complexity of the flows, produces a system that redefines the mountain and its place in the territory. The cohesion of the mountain system is based on the complementarities within the mountain and between the latter and the lowlands; it is characterized with commercial logics that reinforce dependences of the Uporoto towards the market. This thesis proposes that the outgoing organization of the mountain system contributes to its fragmentation and to a failing integration nationwide.
