The peri-urban fringe of Kinshasa as an in-between space

All over the world, but especially in the Global South, cities expand at a high pace with as a result an ever moving urban frontier and ever growing peri-urban zones. These dispersed peri-urban zones, only in part clustered around one or more historical cores, seem to have a life of their own. While being an integral part of the urbanization process, they cannot be understood in traditional urban terms, they seem to exist in-between the rural and urban, the dense and non-dense, the horizontal and vertical. The illegibility of these sprawling peri-urban landscapes is often related to the failure to read the (production) of these urban landscapes. However, it seems important to understand the peri-urban condition as in many cities in the Global South, for instance Kinshasa (the capital of the DRCongo), the majority of the people live in these kind of settlement patterns and not in the historical core, which is often limited to the former European town. In cities as Kinshasa, the old geographical distinctions between centre and periphery or town and countryside seem to have collapsed, if they ever existed, with the historic/colonial centre becoming gradually peripheric to the periphery. New hierarchies are at play, while old ones are not swept away completely, altogether forming a layered palimpseste (Corboz, 2001). In this paper we will take a dive in Kinshasa’s peri-urban palimpseste in order to understand the underlying mechanisms and dynamics of its spatial production in the post-independence years. While several planning schemes have been drawn in the framework of a French cooperation programme to steer the peri-urban urban development of Kinshasa after independence, none of them has been implemented. In the absence of any urban planning from above, the urbanization process of the city has been primarily directed by the massive appropriation of space by the urban dwellers. This paper aims at highlighting the underlying parallel system of land tenure that guided the urbanization of Kinshasa’s peri-urban fringe.

Publication year:2015

Accessibility:Open