Comprendre la construction des périphéries urbaines à Lomé et Yaoundé

Urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa is mainly marked by an extremely high speed. For a couple of decades, it has become more and more difficult to study and control the urbanization processes using the available means due to their rapidity. These conditions do not allow to master social, cultural and economic potentials of urbanization at their best so as to develop the countries in the sub-Saharan region of Africa. The binding speed of urban sprawl that we are witnessing further leads to an accelerated consumption of natural spaces, and more generally, to a degradation of natural ecosystems; while the urgency to tackle the environmental crisis requires the establishment of more sustainable models of cities. Indeed, in addition to the rapid consumption of natural spaces, cities are responsible the most for the global production of greenhouse gases and other negative externalities for the environment. This is why our response to climate change necessarily involves smart choices in urban planning. In my doctoral research the urban peripheries are what constitute the most relevant research objects – the crucial ingredients to debate on the African city of the future. Surprisingly, very little attention has ever been drawn on them. I hold that no urban planning would be effective without a careful study of the shared reality of social, economic, political and cultural dynamics of the cities concerned. This hypothesis further leads me to offer a solid understanding of construction mechanisms in the peripheral areas of such two large cities as Lomé and Yaoundé in thinking about the models of the future. A two-tier triangulation is used to achieve the study goal. Three different thematic entries namely urban land, mobility and the legal framework for town planning get used at the theoretical level. At the methodological one, a variety of tools are made available for data collection and analysis to deal with the difficult processes of accessing urban data. GPS tracking of motorcycle taxis operating in emerging neighborhoods, participatory mapping for land use and prices at the agglomeration level, Geo-Computation, Geo-visualization, content analysis and more traditional interviews are the main methods used in my research. The thesis shows that the construction of a larger portion of new neighborhoods in the cities of Lomé and Yaoundé result in a weaving of a sort of ‘individual urbanistic projects’, which are totally outside the rule of law. The speed and spatiality of this process are also strongly increased by motorcycle taxis—means of transport unprecedented in their scale—which come massively along with the new residents’ home ownership projects. Again, the thesis highlights that the configuration of the land market escapes the administrative limits of cities, thus rendering the lawful measures non-operational in the planning and monitoring of space. All in all, the research results reveal individual strategies to be extremely varied and complex even if all residents of urban peripheries seem like to ‘bet on’ their urban status to regain it later. This latest finding dispels the myth that the lower middle class moves as far from the city center as possible in search of affordable land. On the basis of major results, the thesis formulates practical recommendations aimed at improving urban planning policies in sub-Saharan Africa, in the sense of making them more in line with the reality of the city’s production processes.