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# Beyond Metropolization: exploring new hybrids

Chiara Cavalieri, Bénédicte Grosjean

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Chiara Cavalieri, Bénédicte Grosjean. Beyond Metropolization: exploring new hybrids. U&U - Urbanism and Urbanisation, 518p., 2023, 978-2-931069-10-3. hal-04373003

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BEYOND
METROPOLIZATION

*Exploring new hybrids*
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École Nationale
Supérieure
d'Architecture et de
Paysage de Lille

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Université
de Lille

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UCLouvain

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LAB

Louvain research institute for Landscape,
Architecture, Built environment

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MINISTÈRE
DE LA CULTURE

Liberté
Égalité
Fraternité

LACTH
CONCEPTION / TERRITOIRE / HISTOIRE / MATERIALITE

EUROMÉTROPOLE
EUROMETROPOOL

LILLE • KORTRIJK • TOURNAI
# BEYOND METROPOLIZATION

## Exploring new hybrids

10th International U&U PhD Seminar

Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai

ENSAP de Lille, 28-30 June 2023

### U&U SEMINARS

After successful editions in Leuven, Venice, Barcelona, Paris, Delft, Lausanne and Ghent, the 10th edition of the Urbanism & Urbanization International PhD Seminar will be hosted in Lille, France. The LACTH (Laboratoire de recherche de l'Ecole d'Architecture et de Paysage de Lille) and the LAB (Louvain Research Institute for Landscape, Architecture and Built Environment, UCLouvain) are responsible for the scientific direction and organization of the Seminar.

U&U seminars seek to bring together students writing their PhD dissertations in urbanism, working within very different disciplinary traditions, combining historical research, design research and different forms of urban research. The community supporting this seminar series over the years shares an interest in work that tries to speak across the divide between urban studies and the city-making disciplines, seeking to combine the interpretation of the process of urbanization with the commitment and care for the urban condition in all its manifestations.

The seminar welcomes all PhD students working in this mixed field. The call for papers foregrounds a set of themes that will be given special attention. We invite students to respond to these thematic lines, however, papers addressing other themes and concerns will also be taken into consideration.
# BEYOND METROPOLIZATION

## Exploring new hybrids

### HYBRIDIZATIONS...

It is increasingly difficult to use boundaries and perimeters to define 'territories', whether we are talking about physical or political, disciplinary or professional, economic or cultural ones. For these delimitations are constantly being overstepped and contradicted: by contemporary forms of urbanization, by the life, training and jobs paths of people, by the flows of resources involved in our economies, as well as the diversity of the 'circles' that now constitute our plural identities.

As a consequence, over the last decades, urban theories have already embodied three major paradigm shifts, even if they are percolating more slowly into the dominant practices and visions of urban policies. In the early 1980s, urbanized territories started to be analysed in terms of lines and *networks*¹, rather than surfaces and *functions*; this was mainly about infrastructures, but more recently the role of network actors (such as those managing services, energy, water, waste, etc.) in the organization of territories has also been highlighted².

At the same time, urbanism and urban planning research has also focused, in addition to *static* spatial descriptions, on *dynamic* approaches, investigating the trajectories of resources required by different urbanized forms, such as the territorial metabolism³. And consequently, we have become aware of the importance of the secondary effects that an urbanization process in *one place* produces *elsewhere*, sometimes very far away. The agglomerated city, a model of sustainability for some, in fact consumes resources produced in "operational landscapes"⁴ on a global level, generating widespread interdependence on a planetary scale.

In many fields, we are already thinking in terms of links, and interactions: *inter-disciplinarity* between two different defined *scientific methods*, cross-border cooperation

1. Dupuy G. (1991), *L'urbanisme des réseaux. Théories et méthodes*, A. Colin, Paris.

2. Vanier M. (2015), *Demain les territoires. Capitalisme réticulaire et espace politique*, Hermann éd., Paris.

3. Duvigneaud P. (1974), *La synthèse écologique : populations, communautés, écosystèmes, biosphère, noosphère*, Doin, Paris.

4. Brenner N. (ed.) (2014), *Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization*, Jovis, Berlin.

between two distinct territories, short food circuits between urban and rural areas, partnerships between public issues and private finance, etc.

But beyond making the link, we would like today to question its result, what is produced as new hybrids, as “third terms”, when we go for *trans-disciplinarity*. When ecology focuses on the *lisières*, or ecotones, it is because they put in contact distinct domains, but it is mainly because that allows hybridizations, thus biodiversity. Similarly, the richness of *métissage*, for the creole poet Edouard Glissant, is to generate new identities. And in the philosophy of science, several forms of hybrids have already been conceptualised, between the scholarly and the profane⁵, or humans and non-humans⁶, etc.

### ... BEYOND METROPOLIZATION

The crucial questions that our territories in transition are facing today - energy, mobility, health, water, food, soil artificialisation, access to healthcare, fair remuneration of work, spatial equity, etc. - are often envisioned in polarized models, that can freeze positions. In order to better address these issues, we postulate the need to dismantle categories, to break out of univocal patterns, to build new coalitions along different dividing lines. To this end, this 10th U&U seminar wishes to explore the potential of hybridization, between different theoretical models, between diverse urbanized forms, between various working methods, etc.

Metropolization particularly - as a process of political concentration, economic accumulation and spatial differentiation - has been the dominant urban model since the 19th century. And in these three areas it in terms of spatial injustice or lack of representativeness. Moreover, this model has been able to develop thanks to a historical regime of abundant cheap energy, conditions which are now declining. What are then the alternatives to current trends? S. Marot⁷, for instance, *identifies four* scenarios which challenge our

5. Callon M. et al. (2001), *Agir dans un monde incertain. Essai sur la démocratie technique*, Seuil, Paris.

6. Latour B. (1991), *Nous n'avons jamais été modernes. Essai anthropologie symétrique*, La Découverte, Paris.

7. Marot S. (2019), *Taking the country's side. Architecture and agriculture*, Lisbon Architecture Triennale : *The Poetics of*
current categories, whether they be planning tools, urban strategies, practical action modalities, or societal paradigms.

This seminar therefore wishes to welcome contributions that explore the potential of different forms of hybridization (we suggest some possibilities below), grounded on the idea that, in light of the current climatic, energetic, geopolitical and economic crisis, urbanism and urban planning need to cross multiple thresholds. We believe that it is possible, in this way, to collectively contribute to renewing current theoretical models.

## TRACK 1

### RURAL AND URBAN HYBRID

Nowadays urbanism necessarily finds itself dealing with a context where boundaries between city and countryside are not delineated, and where habitat, production, leisure, services and agriculture merge into a single landscape. While many works have already contributed to the description of these fabrics - città diffusa, zwischenstadt, nebular city, etc.<fnref n="8" /> - today, actors are also considering them from the point of view of the project, whether on a local<fnref n="9" /> or territorial scale<fnref n="10" />, or by soft densification.

Indeed, ecologists have shown that the forms of habitat in suburbs, mixing garden plots, vegetable gardens, backyards, crafts and small industries, are intermediate environments with much higher levels of biodiversity than those in the city or the countryside. The fact of increasing the contact line between inhabited areas and cultivated plots also makes it possible to facilitate local agriculture, in terms of production by growers (easier access to land), of local distribution through short circuits, and of education of the inhabitants.

This track welcomes papers that analyse the potential of mixed fabrics in terms of quality of life, ecological diversity, social opportunities, local economies but also what the costs are, and for which communities.

Reason, Polígrafa, Barcelona.

By studying forms of values less clear-cut distributed between centres and peripheries, (economical, symbolic, cultural, political values, etc.), these papers explore alternative forms of metropolization, in the sense that the latter implies a selective policy that concentrates attractiveness in what are sometimes called ‘poles of excellence’, from which only spill-over effects are expected.

## TRACK 2

### TERRITORIALIZING POLITICAL HYBRIDS

Inter-territoriality is an increasingly important issue, as there is nowadays a growing disconnection between the perimeters of public competences and life trajectories (professional mobility, multi-residentiality, multi-culturalism), or the flow of resources that are necessary for our lifestyles. For some authors, it is even the duty of political districts today to reflect on the modalities of a shared inter-territorial power, because “it is only in the complementary of the resources of each territory (...) that we will be able to be at the same time attractive (even competitive), equitable (even supportive), and economical (even sober)”<fnref n="11" />.

Cross-border territories<fnref n="12" /> in particular are interesting situations for experimenting with inter-territoriality because they raise all the issues at stake in an enhanced manner. Unlike the classic model of the metropolis, which organizes its relations with its neighbours in terms of dependence and decision-making hierarchy, these conurbations are living areas with horizontal inter-dependencies. They are places of opportunity (for trade, leisure, employment or services) and of negative externalities (waste deposits, different regulations, disconnection from networks, lawless areas), with no real citizen counterparts and no democratic representation in their governance.

In order to engage a project perspective, many of these hybrid territories, under the impulse of European programs, have used the “vision” as a tool for bypassing both policies and physical borders in order to promote a long-term image of the future. Nevertheless, how it can effectively guide the more traditional “strategic” and “operational” dimensions is still to be investigated. The urban

<footnote n="8">8 Barcelloni Corte M., Viganò P. (eds) (2022), *The Horizontal Metropolis. The Anthology*. Springer Link.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Mariolle B., Léger J.-M. (eds.) (2018), *Densifier dédensifier. Penser les campagnes urbaines*, éd. Parenthèses, Marseille.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Cavalieri C., Viganò P. (eds.) (2019), *The Horizontal Metropolis: a Radical Project*, Park, Zürich.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Vanier M. (2008), *Le pouvoir des territoires. Essai sur l'inter-territorialité*, éd. Anthropos, Paris, p.64.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 As for example the NWMA-North West Metropolitan Area or the conurbation Lille Kortrijk Tournai.</footnote>
project in particular is identified as a “blind spot” in cross-border cooperation.

This track is therefore interested in articles presenting and analyzing forms of experimentation, whether citizen or public action, proposing specific collaborative mechanisms for implementing joint projects, aiming to overcome the objective difficulties of performing policies and operational tools, in a situation of inter-territoriality.

is also the principle of permaculture, not to exploit each resource in autonomous and parallel channels but to favour each one by the presence of the others, by interweaving their cycles, their inputs and their outputs<fnref n="15" />.

This track is therefore interested in works that analyse experiences in the organisation of territories, ways of life and production, which go beyond zoning, sectors and linear exploitation; it questions what a “perma-culture”, applied to the fields of urbanism, could produce.

## TRACK 3

### RESOURCES HYBRIDIZATION

“Urbanizing in place” : some scholars<fnref n="13" /> propose to consider urbanization no longer as a linear process of land consumption but as a process ‘in place’, cumulative rather than extensive. This is clearly also an alternative to metropolization, in the sense that the latter corresponds to a mode of urban growth by sprawl, a priori unlimited, linked with the principle of constantly maintaining attractiveness.

This change of perspective implies keeping up the resources and grey energy that have been invested locally (infrastructures, cultures, constructions, work time, etc.), and valorizing them through circular approaches. Today, the application of the Zero Net Land Take directive (ZAN in France, Stop Beton in Belgium, etc.) raises questions throughout Europe, and one of the options announced (in the Flemish BRV, for example), is the hybridization of activities in the same space. On what scale is it fair to measure the “net” artificialisation balance? What should be considered as an artificialized area? How can we avoid the risk of suffocating already dense environments and blocking the development of others?

Another contemporary theoretical field that involves forms of hybridity is that of the commons. As described by Elinor Ostrom (1991), one of the sine qua non conditions for the sustainability of these self-organizing systems is the interweaving of actions (of appropriation, provision, monitoring, conflict resolution, etc.), but also the indistinguishable interweaving of everyone's interests, and the interweaving of several complementary resources in the same system<fnref n="14" />. Still, this

## TRACK 4

### HYBRID DISCIPLINES

Town planning has always been interdisciplinary; it is historically grounded in economic, geographical, and social sciences. In the 2000s, urban and landscape designers find themselves working on the same scales and frameworks, blurring their boundaries, which has already given rise to the ‘landscape urbanism’, movement that some have already defined as a ‘hybrid’ of the two disciplines. Today, we can expect tools from new fields - pedology, hydrology, forestry, agronomy, archaeology, etc. - to structure urban planning, for example according to soil types, their water permeability, their topographical situation, their fertility, etc. And certain contemporary research objects, such as energy, can themselves be considered as ‘hybrid’ objects, since they belong to different regimes (material, virtual, organizational, socio-cultural, political).

But it is also the working methodologies that are now being hybridized in urban studies, by mixing different practices that have always been epistemologically sealed off until now, such as research and design, but also artistic research (video, narratives), collective action (associations, activists), fieldwork (self-construction), etc. This transdisciplinarity can be expected to produce new results, which each separate approach could not have achieved in isolation.

This track welcomes then papers working on transdisciplinary researches, coping with complex territorial structures urbanisms (environmental sciences such as ecology,

<footnote n="13">13 Dehaene M. (2013), *Tuinieren in het Stedelijk Veld / Gardening in the Urban Field*, A&S/Books, Gent University.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Grosjean B. (2018), “La huitième condition : l’imbrication.</footnote>

<footnote>Usages du territoire dans les communs d'Elinor Ostrom',
*Les carnets du paysage* n° 33, Actes Sud, pp.131-143.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Holmgren D., Mollison B. (1978), *Permaculture 1 : A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlement*, Corgi Books, London.</footnote>
agronomy, forestry, water engineering) and/
or associating a variety of investigating prac-
tices, connected with action research, en-
gaging communities, participative processes,
etc. (social sciences such as sociology, an-
thropology, artistic research...).
TABLE OF CONTENT

I.a | Inhabiting urban rural hybrids

Towards a framework for village urbanism: the village imaginary as a guiding image for the praxis and discourse on the transformation of peri-urban villages in Flanders. (p.14)

Verbakel Ward, KULeuven (BE)

Manufactured Altered Alps (p.26)
Tettoni Mattia, IUAVenice (IT)

The monetisation of exchanges between city and countryside as an indicator of the urbanisation of Congolese territory. How is the urban phenomenon reflected in the case of Mbanza-Ngungu? (p.32)

Kapasi Lutete Joel, ULBruxelles, (BE)

Ruralization in urbanization in the Peasant Territories of Southern Mali: everyday life in Ségoukoura, Ségou (p.44)
Pietrobon Elvira, IUAVenice, (IT)

Critically Mapping the Micropolitics of Varying Notions to Land in Alshigelab (Janoob Al Hizam) (p.58)

El Jack, Khalda Imad Mubarak, KULeuven (BE)

I.b | Cross-borders territories: mobility, migrations

The Borderlands in the test of representation : life paths of Roms families in Lille's metropolisation (p.66)

Lassalle Roman, UCLouvain/Lille (BE/FR)

TOD against the context in cross-border metropolis? Visions and paradoxes in the case of the Great Geneva Agglomeration (p.81)

Guichot Flore, EPFLausanne (CH)

From lines and nodes to edges and dialogues in the dispersed territory. The case of former railway line 87 in the Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai (p.96)

Leemans Sophie, KULeuven (BE)

Rethinking extractive landscapes in cross-border areas (p.110)

Caravello Chiara, Uliège (BE)

I.c | Productive territories: circularity and conflicts

Manufacturing spaces in the Marais (Lille) and Heyvaert (Brussels) districts: hybridization and conflicts (p.120)

Scutari Ana, Ulille (FR)

The Walloon industrial sillon: a figure of 21stcentury (p.129)

Calò Alessia, UCLouvain (BE)

Designing (with) soil in circular built environment transformations (p.136)

Timmers Charlotte, KULeuven (BE)

Dalmine: From Company Town to Hybridized Productive Habitat (p.147)

Almeida Santos Anna Karla, EPFLausanne (CH)
## II.a | New insights into History: building and planning

*Construction History meets Planning History* (p.156)

Verstraete Robrecht, ULBruxelles (BE)

*The anarchist thread of urban planning history: Reconstructing the continuous influence of anarchist ideas on the history and present of urbanism* (p.162)

Kuzmanić Jere, UPCatalunya (ES)

*Immanent Monuments or transcendent instruments? Four Roles for Post-war Churches in Sustainable Neighbourhood Transition*. (p.173)

Ardui Charlotte, KULeuven (BE)

*Qualitative datascaping for historic cities in conflict: A grounded theory analysis for spatial sustainability*. Case of Jaffa, Israel. (p.185)

Potdar Komal, TUDelft (NL)

*Urbanisation as land consumption, commodification and parceling out: Hybridities in spatial occupation in Bukavu* (p.197)

Gulain Amani Mushizi, ULBruxelles (BE)

## II.b | Foodscapes: from farmlands to agro-parks

*Agricultural islands in Paris metropolis. An investigation into possible interactions and complementarities between urban and food landscapes* (p.210)

Thierry Axelle, ENSP Versailles (FR)

*Agro-social parks: an analysis of planning and design projects for Italian periurban areas* (p.223)

Salvador Antonio Jose, Politecnico di Milano (IT)

*Reintegrating Urban Agroecology in the Cape - An Urban Design. Investigation of Inclusive Landscape Strategies for Urban Food System Transformation in the Western Cape* (p.235)

Truter Georgina, KULeuven (BE)

*Plots on hold: hybrid landscapes in rural Tamil Nadu through ordinary farmland conversions* (p.244)

Frantz Marine, Univ. Paris1 (FR)

*Foodscapes: from soil to policies. Food as a design tool for landscape and territory* (p.252)

Ambrosi Amerigo Alberto, IUAVenezia (IT)

## II.c | Water urbanisms

*Imagining Public Space beyond metropolization* (p.260)

Begum, Salma, KULeuven (BE)

*Gradients of wetness: a wet experiment towards wet transition* (p.276)

Aragone Andrea, IUAVenezia (IT)

*Water & sand: chronicles of collective trajectories from the valley of Bumbu river, Kinshasa (DRC)* (p.286)

Manaresi Pietro, UCLouvain (BE)

*Developing Spatio-Temporal Mappings of the Polder Landscape in the Yangtze River Delta based on Educative Speculations* (p.298)

Lei, Wei, KULeuven (BE)

*Water as ecosystems driver for the Ecological Transition in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta*

Nguyen Sylvie, EPFLausanne (CH) (p.312)
II.d | Social actions : from sharing to appropriations

*Generative analogy for a collective action in urban design* (p.328)
Jung Hee-Won, ENSA Paris la Villette (FR)

*Rich, poor and mechanism of sharing's in Hyderabad city, India* (p.336)
Sirimalla, Shyam, EPFLausanne (CH)

*Social Relations and Landscape Transformations: Settling practices of Garhwali community* (p.343)
Zeba, Amir, KULeuven (BE)

*Countering the Ongoing Metropolization Process and Neoliberal Logics. Experiences of Dwelling and Cohabitation in the New Neighborhoods of Ain El Aouda, Morocco* (p.354)
Belkebir, Salma, ULBruxelles (BE)

III.a | Between soils and sub-soils : Mining landscapes

*Towards desealing as a widespread situated practice* (p.372)
Broggini Federico, Roma3 (IT)

*Urban soil assessment: exploring constraints and environmental benefits of soil transformation* (p.378)
Bossard, Alexandre, UCLouvain (BE)

*Formation, evolution and future of an architectural type – the mining habitat in northern France* (p.396)
Niemann Sebastian, UCLouvain (BE)

*Landscapes of Migration. Displacement and the ecologies of urban ruins in mining settlements. The case of Limburg, Belgium* (p.408)
Zani, Jacopo, ETH Zurich (CH)

III.b | Commons and nature

*Rewriting the urban commons. A sustainable approach to urban logistics* (p.418)
Fattorelli Samuel, IUAVenezia (IT)

*Visualising fluid territories: settling in and within shifts in the chars of Assam, India* (p.424)
Swagata Das, KULeuven (BE)

*Dakar is leaking. Mapping changes on the territory of urban drainage services through time* (p.443)
Van den Bruel Evelien, UCLouvain (BE)

*Hopeful environmental stories. Limits and contradictions of ecological restoration pilot-projects in the Venice Lagoon* (p.455)
Chouairi Amina, IUAVenezia (IT)

III.c | Socio-ecological movements and configurations

*Liquid Narratives: Exploring Socio-ecological Practices in Southern São Paulo* (p.462)
Lerchs Lucas, UCLouvain (BE)

*The open spaces of housing estates, as laboratories of the living* (p.475)
Baës-Cantillon Nathanaëlle, UCLouvain (BE)

*Co-creation of natural third-places in European cities: Community gardens in Krakow and Brussels* (p.487)
Téoule, Fanny, Jagiellonian University, Umons (BE)

*Contesting urban space: socio-ecological questions and the revisiting of the Brussels' counterproject* (p.499)
Inghelbrecht Eline & Pattyn Dries, KULeuven (BE)
I.a
Inhabiting urban rural hybrids

Towards a framework for village urbanism: the village imaginary as a guiding image for the praxis and discourse on the transformation of peri-urban villages in Flanders. (p.14)

Verbakel Ward, KULeuven (BE)

Manufactured Altered Alps (p.26)

Tettoni Mattia, IUAVenice (IT)

The monetisation of exchanges between city and countryside as an indicator of the urbanisation of Congolese territory. How is the urban phenomenon reflected in the case of Mbanza-Ngungu? (p.32)

Kapasi Lutete Joel, ULBruxelles, (BE)

Ruralization in urbanization in the Peasant Territories of Southern Mali: everyday life in Ségoukoura, Ségou (p.44)

Pietrobon Elvira, IUAVenice, (IT)

Critically Mapping the Micropolitics of Varying Notions to Land in Alshigelab (Janoob Al Hizam) (p.58)

El Jack, Khalda Imad Mubarak, KULeuven (BE)
# Towards a framework for village urbanism: the village imaginary as a guiding image for the praxis and discourse on the transformation of peri-urban villages in Flanders.

Ward Verbakel

Guest Prof. and PhD candidate KU Leuven, partner PLUSOFFICE

Supervisor Prof. Bruno De Meulder

Expected thesis defence: December, 2023

ward.verbakel@kuleuven.be

The village imaginary explores methodologies, representation and processes that are used in constructing collective visions by and/or with local actors to guide the village transformation. The constellation of the residential villages in Flanders, cannot be addressed from the perspective of the supposedly lost autonomous village, and its transformation and ongoing hybridization as peri-urban morphology requires an explicit village imaginary. Responding to the ideological dimension of villages identities (as opposed to the urban), and its implicit patterns of exclusion, urban design can bring to the forefront the guiding images that represent the context and aspirations of its current and future inhabitants. This guiding image operates as a double figure, rooting itself in the recognizable and rendering the possible attractive. It is one of the key elements of a framework for village urbanism resulting from a practice-based PhD research, articulated in two spatial components: the garden pattern and the village chatter.

## The ongoing transformation of peri-urban villages in Flanders.

In Flanders the urbanization of the rural population and the associated spatial transformation of villages into a peri-urban hybrid has been an ongoing process, that can be traced back to at least the construction of the densest railway network of the continent in the 19th and 20th century. But even in the preceding centuries the historically densely populated Flemish territory as a whole has undergone consecutive iterations of population growth and urbanization. These dynamics have produced an assemblage of urban patterns, scattered on the territory in a seemingly haphazard manner. The resulting loose and fragmented disposition of urban structures, various settlement types and landscape patches have produced a peri-urbanity that contains fragments of everything, in which the distinction between rural and urban is difficult to make. The rural urban hybrid is also described as a phantom metropolis (De Meulder 1999): a patchwork of elements such as villages, ribbon developments, allotments, business parks, infrastructure, landscape and so on, with major towns and cities never further than 30 minutes away, operating as a metropolis, but never taking on the appearance or intensity of one. Moreover, the rural urban distinction is an ineffective dialectic model for reading, conceptualizing, and intervening in this specific territory of peri-urban villages. The question put forward in this paper is whether a territory that has blurred the urban-rural delineation for centuries, also brings forth a specific urban design practice with distinct, context responsive design strategies, spatial concepts, methods, and vocabulary.
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

[fig.1] Zoom on the architecture of the ongoing village transformations in Kessel, Nijlen where new apartment buildings are nested next to old farmhouses. Source: BKP Nijlen, PLUSOFFICE, 2017, image by Pieter Vandenhoudt.

In the Flemish peri-urban condition, the village – both as spatial and societal construct, and in relation to both the rural and the urban – requires a closer look. The village is one of the more significant patterns within that patchwork, as a space, an idea, and a social construct, and able to relate to both the urban and the rural. While we can argue that the spatial component of villages in peri-urban Flanders has eroded over time, as an idea it lives strongly in the minds of people, practitioners, and policy makers, often in relation to a rural idyll. As a historical figure the village is deeply rooted in a rural context in which both the spatial, economic, and social logics accumulate in the concept of the autonomous village. In the contemporary peri-urban context, the village takes a more complex position, as part of a territory that over time has acquired multiple additional logics that coexist with and often dominate the rural system. Evolutions in societal structures have changed the village. What remains is a complex interplay between factual and imagined space of the transforming and transformed villages.

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

[fig.2] Two maps reveal the road infrastructure of the peri-urban condition of Flanders. The first shows the logic of major towns, cities, ring roads and major connections, whereas the second shows the dispersed logic of non-hierarchic small road network of the peri-urban territory. Source: BKP Nijlen, PLUSOFFICE, 2017. The villages of Flanders offer a substrate on which a particular urbanism is practiced. The hypothesis of the PhD research by Ward Verbakel investigating seventeen years of PLUSOFFICE urban design practice in about a hundred Flemish villages, is that Village Urbanism, can be approached as a subgenre of the domain of urbanism, with a reflection on the praxis and discourse
that emerges from urban design at the village scale. Setting itself apart from the dominant and conventional planning discourse in Flanders to evolve towards more dense and intense urban fabrics, urbanization and centralities, the Village Urbanism as emerging from the practice studied is deduced from the context responsive practice mentioned. It relates to a renewed interest in the intermediate environments in general and villages in particular as demonstrated by several recent international publications (Marot 2019, Koolhaas 2020, Fernandez Per 2020, Kajdanek 2021); as explored in initiatives by numerous Flemish actors that structure the debate in the field such as Artur and KU Leuven in the *Kempenlab Dorpse Architectuur* [Campine Lab Village Architecture], the *Vlaams Bouwmeester* [Flanders State Architect] with the thematic of *Dorpelijkheid* [Vilageness], the *Vlaamse Landmaatschappij* [Flanders Land authority] with their initiative on *Dorpse Ruimte* [Village Space]; as the topic of ongoing academic discourse (e.g. subtheme of the 2023 U&U symposium 'Beyond Metropolization, exploring new hybrids'<fnref n="1" />).

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>

[fig.3] One of the resulting images form the summerschool on Dorpelijkheid [Vilageness] organized by the *Vlaams Bouwmeester* [Flanders State Architect] who chose the villages as one of the research agendas of his mandate. Source: Summerschool Dorpelijkheid, September 2022, Vlaams Bouwmeester, co-tutored by Ward Verbakel.

**The autonomous village, the residential village, and the rural idyll.**

During the 21st century – and this applies to Flanders as much as to other western European contexts – urbanisation processes, the transformation of national economies and an expanding personal mobility have changed the meaning of villages for their inhabitants. “The consequences of the transition from a productivist order towards a consumptive order for the meaning of the village as a local context can be described as a transition from relatively autonomous villages towards villages with primarily a residential function. Changes in the wider society with respect to the dominant economic sector and changes in the mode of transport changed the scale of the productive and consumptive order and the ranges of economic, social, and recreational activities.” (Loopmans, Thissen 2021, p. 424). Maarten Loopmans and Frans Thissen warn us how powerful the reference frame of the autonomous village still is. When the last café closes, when the old school is sold or when the church is decommissioned, the inhabitants can respond with strong visceral emotions. A few decades ago, the village pump of Boutersem was moved from the centre

<footnote n="1">¹ The 10th Urbanism & Urbanization PhD symposium, taking place in Lille, June 2023, questions metropolization, as a hegemonic model. One of tracks of new hybrids put forward by the scientific committee of the symposium is titled Urban & Rural and explores the potential of mixed territories in dealing with climatic issues, related to soils (groundwater, food, fertility, short circuits, etc.).</footnote>
of the church square to the edge of the same square, an action that a local inhabitant tried to obstruct with a two-barrel hunting gun, although that pump had lost its function as drinking water provider since long<fnref n="2" />. The importance given to empty churches, the local school building, an old tree on a crossroad, an abandoned pastor house, a field chapel... are all recurrent examples of the strong sentiments and sense of loss that is associated with the disappearance of the autonomous village. This image of autonomy is also what directs specific investment and policy making as part of the urban design practice. Several villages have and still are commissioning public space projects to redesign the main street and village square. The intentions are noble and can help producing better quality public space, that allows for more bicycle users, trees, or permeable soils. However, the underlying assumption is often focused on the event potential of these spaces and the possible resurrection of consumption in bars, restaurants, and shops, and on the other hand on the assumed causal relation between number of residences, number of facilities and the quality of life. It builds on the idea that those functions are needed, desirable and must be locally embedded for the village to be viable, a logic tied to the persistent reference frame of the 'autonomous village'.

Another aspect is the desire and resulting policy to attract additional inhabitants to the villages by delivering permits to several apartment buildings being built at random throughout the existing fabric. Permits for these projects are almost exclusively motivated by the expected additional income and real estate tax they might bring, perceived as necessary by local administrations to keep their finances healthy. In a series of newspaper articles on the real estate tendency in Flanders titled *Betonwoede* [concrete rage], Ine Renson explains how a surge of apartments is flooding rural and peri-urban municipalities (Renson 2019). Statistical data for Flanders during the decade 2009-2019 indicates how the share of apartments in the total housing stock doubled from 6 to 12 percent in non-urban areas in Flanders (Ryckewaert 2018). The major critique on this phenomenon is that these buildings do not fit the village, lack spatial and architectural quality, and destroy what is perceived as the ‘image’ of the village. What that so called disappearing village is, however, remains elusive. The social and economic construct of the autonomous village where inhabitants spend most of their time, labour and resources belongs to premodern times. Meanwhile villages have developed in diverse types of residential environments within a regionalised world, where the act of making home is the dominant activity. Loopmans and Thissen argue how the decline in services and facilities is not directly related to numbers of residents, and secondly that the village characteristics have gained importance in how villagers evaluate their quality of life. This is an interesting observation especially in the light of the ongoing cycles of transformation where the focus on residential numbers (densification) and the need for new facilities (investing in commercial space, community spaces, sports infrastructure...) outshines most attempts to focus on qualities and defining characteristics (historical landscapes, heritage buildings, architectural articulation, safe walkways, viewpoints, materialization...). The meaning of the village has changed for its inhabitants during the previous century while research and policy – and design frequently too – tend to dwell on powerful images of villages past, obstructing adequate responses. A focus on the quality of life through the improvement of residential quality and a regional approach towards accessibility to services is more in line with the notion of the ‘residential’ village, according to the scholars. Within the practice of urban design, one can choose to invest time, energy, and resources in strengthening the village autonomy, one that may or may not exist in the present day, but one can also choose to focus on the residential aspect and target the quality of living.

When introducing the importance of quality of life in combination with villages, the rural idyll comes in to play (Yarwood 2005, Schucksmith 2018). The idealized image of the village as a small, close-knit community with direct links to picturesque and tranquil landscapes, is a major component of the rural idyll, in which people supposedly live in harmony with their surroundings and engage in meaningful authentic activities. This nostalgic image can refer to an indetermined past and the heyday of an assumed ideal societal and spatial model, one that fails to recognize other aspects of rural life in the village such as poverty, low quality of housing, mechanisms of exclusion, powerful elites, repressive normativity, restricted landownership... Rural life and the villagers are mostly cast as traditional, conservative, and non-diverse. And although diversity of rural and village

<footnote n="2">² Boutersem is one of the villages in the *Hageland* [hedge country] east of Leuven. This account of local oral history, perhaps a myth, was recorded on May 26, 2023 when Lowie Steenwegen introduced the local context of the village. This guided walk was part of the briefing to the selected design teams for a competition with the intention to redesign the church square.</footnote>
population in Flanders is increasing in terms of cultural background, income levels and education (Van Damme 2022), the dominant discourse in media is in line with the nostalgic conservative reflex in which the ‘newcomer is a threat to rural idyll’. The rural idyll can also refer to a future perspective, a desired vision on life, aspired by outsiders that have the luxury to imagine a more frugal life that only takes the picturesque aspects in to account and serves as a counterbalance to the challenges of urban life. The encounters with the villages throughout PLUSOFFICE practice, aligns with the observation that the rural idyll is persistent as an image and both forward and backward looking at the same time. It can be part of a design projection (e.g. a new meaning for an old fallow as village centre, a pedestrian or bicycle path along a historical important passage) or exactly what is holding back the potential for intervening.

Resistance to new developments and especially social housing projects illustrate how a perceived fear of the other and identitary politics are a large part of the projection on the village as a repository of ‘good’ and ‘authentic’ values. They come into play when major decisions need to be made on the transformation of public spaces, how densification can be guided, what architectural ambition apply and who can participate in the decision process. As long as the ongoing process of urban transformation continues to rely on the strong image of a village gone by, without being able to produce new imaginations that can incorporate the existing and new dynamics, the village that is reproduced remains ambivalent. Transformations guided by these residual imaginaries are not able to address the change in demographics, understand the shifted meaning of the village itself and consequently develop the urbanism that is needed to respond adequately to pressing challenges in these villages.

**The village imaginary as a design method.**

The village as physical form is still recognisable in the morphological study of the territory. As a social construct less so. The village does not operate as autonomous societal model, where production and consumption align. But as an image it lives strongly in the way we discuss and organise ourselves as a society, and dwells on powerful images of villages past, obstructing adequate responses (Thissen, Loopmans 2013). In order to explore methodologies, representation and processes that are used in constructing collective visions by and/or with local actors to guide the village transformation, the notion of the village imaginary deserves a closer look. The constellation of the residential villages in Flanders, cannot be addressed from the perspective of the lost autonomous village, and its transformation and ongoing hybridization as peri-urban morphology require an explicit village imaginary. While responding to the ideological dimension of village identities (as opposed to the urban), and its implicit patterns of exclusion, urban design needs to bring to the forefront the guiding images that represent the context and aspirations of its current and future inhabitants.
[fig.4] Cartography of the BKP interventions for the villages of Landen. Source: LANDenSTAD, PLUSOFFICE architects, 2012.

Since the early 2000s, borrowing from the Dutch planning practice, Flanders started to import the term 'Beeldkwaliteitsplan' (BKP) [Image Quality Plan] not as a way to imagine what new neighborhoods could look like, but as a tool to respond to existing images and the way their transformation can be guided (Verbakel 2008). The BKP adds a focus on spatial quality and the care for the resulting image of a new district or transforming fabric, on top of the more traditional zoning planning and regulatory restriction frameworks. Stimulated by the Flemish *Bouwmeester* and the Open Call procedure for government contracts, several important commissions were defined using the BKP terminology to address the urban challenges of small towns and villages. As young starting firm PLUSOFFICE won several of these commissions, for the village of Bonheiden (2005), 13 villages of Lommel (2008) and 13 villages of Landen (2010). Positioning themselves as a reflective practitioner, learning from these three major projects, PLUSOFFICE developed its own interpretation of the BKP instrument tailored to transforming villages, which continued to evolve in other projects such Eeklo (2015), Maaseik (2015) and Nijlen (2016). For the latter the municipality of Nijlen received the VRP Flanders Planning award in 2018 partly because for the innovative and integral approach spanning from participatory processes to vision and policy frameworks. In the village based BKP as practiced by PLUSOFFICE, two aspects of the imaginary can be detected. One relates to the qualities and the physical representation of existing village spaces through photographic analysis, cartographies, and historical sources. The second deploys the image as a tool to identify a potential future containing a common vision developed with – and sometimes by – inhabitants. Trying to avoid the limited understanding of the BKP as dealing merely with visual representation, a threefold definition surfaces<fnref n="3" />. IMAGE: a communal image that not only seeks visual improvement but supports a shared identity. QUALITY: the added value in multiple domains from win-win scenarios, where each intervention or project is a small step towards a larger vision, and a systemic approach towards more quality. PLAN: a heterarchical combination of multiple opportunities, outcomes, tools, and actions, that don't need to be realized as a complete set, but that become relevant by prioritizing and anchoring it within local policy and decision-making dynamics. With that definition a first attempt is made to describe an open system,

<footnote n="3">³ This definition was produced by the PLUSOFFICE team and its partners during the translation of the BKP studies for the villages of Lommel and Landen, to a comprehensive message for the interaction with inhabitants and local politicians. It was first published in a book LANDenSTAD published by PLUSOFFICE in 2014 as part of the final documents of the Landen BKP.</footnote>
that sets itself apart from the blueprint masterplan or closed regulatory framework of a zoning plan. It encompasses a certain relaxedness by focusing more on shared goals and aspirations than on concrete projects that may or may not be realized. Such an approach turns out to be a good fit for working in peri-urban villages which don't always have the means to follow through with significant investment in transformation projects but rely on responsive attitudes to what is ongoing. The BKP's produced in these cases all offer a framework to work in that is precise in the aspirations it holds, but open enough to respond to uncertain processes. Meanwhile it is important to recognize that the term BKP itself is up for debate as it became synonymous with a problematic reduction of architecture to the image it presents and not the qualities it contains<fnref n="4" />. To better understand the use of the visual tools in the creation of new village imaginaries, two major theoretical elements help to frame the PLUSOFFICE's approach and the debate around esthetics: the *image guide* (De Lauwe 1964) and the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (IROS) (Levinas 2007).

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>[fig.5] Temporary intervention demonstrating the potential of a new passage from a backside parking lot to the church square of Nijlen, as part of the participation during the BKP process, designed by PLUSOFFICE. Source: Image by Author, 2017.</figcaption></figure>

*l'Image Guide* [guiding image] is described by sociologist Chombard de Lauwe in a paper 'Aspirations, guiding images and social transformation'. He writes about societal aspirations that contain three interlinked elements: desires (a relation between the object and the self), hopes (directed towards a certain state and the values it holds) and expectation (which relates to potential realization and associated satisfaction that the results bring). Societal images can be seen as the overlap of several aspects: symbols and important perceived elements from the existing context, models suggested or imposed by society, and the intimate life of an individual. Important to note is that these images, even when assembled from open signifiers and blurred symbols, can exert attraction and when they do can be labeled as guiding images. "On the one hand, the representation is more rational, more logical, more elaborate, more conscious. The image on the contrary has a strong emotional coloring, it sometimes springs unexpectedly and can impose itself with force. Often, the unconscious plays an essential role there." (De Lauwe 1964) (translated by author).

<footnote n="4">⁴ This critique surfaced on several occasions during the Kempenlab Dorpse Architectuur [Campine lab Village architecture] organized by Ar-Tur and KU Leuven. Most explicitly during the online symposium on 21 Jan. 2021 one part of the group chats drifted towards the particular concern that the term BKP is too much focused on the visual and esthetic, while this paper argues that this is too narrow a definition of the term 'image'. A follow up round table and email conversation with key actors such as the former *Vlaams Bouwmeester* Leo Van Broek were organized to define better the concerns, and clearly distinguish the challenges that relate to planning (Where shall we continue to build? What densification is suited for the villages?) and when does architecture quality comes in to play (How does this architecture respond to social dynamics? How do we relate to local building traditions? Which typologies emerge?).</footnote>
According to De Lauwe, the guiding image is a mental representation of a particular place that shapes people's perception of that place and influences their behavior within it and the decisions on how to get there. The *Image Guide* operates as a double figure, rooting itself in the recognizable and rendering the possible attractive. For urban designers the guiding image and its influence on people's behavior can be used as a tool, in guiding the transformation of spaces with the aspiration to create more livable and sustainable communities that are responsive to the needs and desires of the local population. People's perceptions and expectations of the village as a place are shaped by cultural norms, social expectations, and historical traditions; and can have a significant impact on how they interact with the village space as built environment. Assuming these images align with the reality of these villages and stay away from the idealized image, because gap between the two could lead to disillusionment and a sense of dislocation.

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

[fig.6] Cartography of the villages in the Gete River valley reimagining the relation of those villages to two major towns Tienen and Sint-Truiden, and the interconnecting infrastructures of main roads and bicycle highway. Source: Samuel Klein, Pluk Van Brempt. Promotor Ward Verbakel, Master thesis studio “Lelijk Dorp: Dorpslinter”, 2020-2021.

A second theoretical element, related to the guiding image, is Ruth Levinas' IROS method when she describes the necessity of the utopian method in imagining potential societal models: "The advantage of utopian thinking is that it enables us to think about where we want to get to, and how to get there from here ..." (Levinas 2007). Clearly distinguishing the utopian method from the utopia as such, Levitas describes the components of this methodology. The first mode is archaeological, reconstructing from fragments the implicit qualities (physical, symbolic, political...) and thus facilitating a critical engagement and dialogue. The second mode is architectural, assembling alternative models that permit a holistic and long-term thinking. It is an invitation to combine the qualities of the existing in aesthetic terms with ambitious future potential and even the political. Both methods are closely related and conceptualize how by tapping into the cultural, physical and historical context of a place, the guiding image can create design ideas that resonate with the local community and reinforce a sense of direction and relation with place.

imaginaries are powerful tools, that can be used in problematic ways. In an attempt to understand the mechanism needed to re-Imagine the rural, not as an idyll but as a 'good place', Mark Schucksmith who specializes in rural studies and planning writes: "And here is a paradox: rural values are proclaimed as inclusive and neighbourly, and yet these can only be protected from corrosive urban values through being exclusive and drawing tight bounds." (Schucksmith 2018) While the moral dimension in the use of the term 'good place' is contingent on the community and is not the focus of this papers' reflection, Schucksmith does warn for an important pitfall when using the guiding image as a tool. Concerns that apply to transformation processes in general are methods of exclusion and the right to participate, which does not extend automatically to newcomers or minorities. Using only abstract, ethical, and pragmatic criteria to evaluate characteristics that make up the qualities of existing spaces or landscapes, and ignoring the social markers that make up these places, is a privilege belonging to a certain class. It highlights the importance to develop the village imaginary thoroughly and critically if they are to represent the aspirations of the village at large. The challenge in the redesign of the Bronplein, one of the follow-up projects of the Landen BKP, can be summarized as the collision between village imaginaries that
did not align. Rethinking the public domain for soft mobility and water retention versus the need for agricultural vehicles to pass and fill up with free spring water at the bottom of the square, led to a stammering design process; one that has taking up seven years so far with a third building permit in preparation for 2023. The importance of participatory processes given to most of PLUSOFFICE BKP projects, is a fundamental element of the guiding image method and even when done extensively is still no guarantee for success. Overall, the concept of the village imaginary is an important and contingent method for understanding how cultural constructs shape the perception of the built environment of villages, and how these perceptions can influence the behavior and transformation of space.

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

[fig.7] Selection of images illustrating the village imaginary discussions in the village of St-Lodewijk. A collage from the final dossier reimagining the church square, a participatory design and debate session with inhabitants; a drawing from a cocreation session with children from the primary school revealing the desire for open air swimming, play yards and lots of trees. Source: DNA van het Dorp Masterplan St-Lodewijk (PLUSOFFICE i.c.w. Omgeving, Voorland and Anyways) 2021.

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>

[fig.8] Diagram tracing back the evolution of thematic ambitions, intermediate discussion and the resulting 'DNA strains' throughout the masterplan creation process for St-Lodewijk, part of a series of village masterplanning trajectories commissioned by the Province of West-Flanders under the umbrella title *DNA van het dorp masterplan* [DNA of the village masterplan]. Source: DNA van het Dorp Masterplan St-Lodewijk (PLUSOFFICE i.c.w. Omgeving, Voorland and Anyways) 2021.
## Framing the imaginary in the praxis and discourse of village urbanism

In contrast to the top-down, centrally planned approach often associated with urbanism, the emergent village urbanism from PLUSOFFICE context responsive practice is more bottom-up and community-driven. It relies on a collaborative process involving residents, planners, and architects to design and implement solutions that are tailored to the needs and desires of the village. Following the guiding image explored as a method above, two additional lines of thought were detected in the framework of the ongoing practice-based PhD, titled ‘Constructing a practice on Village Urbanism in Flanders.’ In the following paragraphs there is only room to briefly touch upon these concepts, enough to allow a reflection on how they relate to the village imaginary.

<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>[fig.9] The garden pattern applied to the town of Spiere, integrating a redesigned church garden on the hill as the missing link of the Spiere River valley, which crosses the village underneath a main road and parking lot. Source: PLUSOFFICE architects, i.s.m. DELVA landscape architects, Spiere, Winvorm 2015.</figcaption></figure>

The ‘garden pattern’ as a potential paradigm for peri-urban rhizomatic layout – in the tradition of a pattern language (Alexander 1977) – invites to reimagine the transformation processes in villages dealing with densification, public space redesign and new developments of housing projects and services. It conceptualizes an alternative structure of gardens, passages and other green spaces, that does not operate as an armature or relies only on intensity of use and clarity of form. The garden pattern – both as space and fabric – links social, ecological, spatial, and ideological layers, and can be rather potent in incorporating societal challenges around short chain food production, practices of commoning, increasing biodiversity or water retention, constructing shared identities, or strengthening informal relations. The patchwork of gardens, their interconnections and the related built programs operate as a guiding image, rethinking one layer of a potential village imaginary. One that does not erase the loose-knit characteristic of the village morphology and evolves in a rhizomatic manner throughout the fabric. The garden is a well-suited image to explain the three aspects of the guiding image mentioned before. It can serve as a ‘symbol’ of the individual land ownership, and a major structuring element of the urban fabric that is held together with side gardens, backyards, and front lawns. It represents several ‘models’ of society, from the suburban dream to the self-providence of home-agriculture, or the rewilding of manicured gardens. And it is one of the go-to elements for ‘individual’ expression (with gnomes, garden sheds, gravel paths,
lourdesgrotten<fnref n="5" />...). The gardens realm is the place for simple interactions between village inhabitants passing by pathways, entering through the back yard, chatting across hedges, and wandering through adjacent small woodlands. Hence the garden pattern is a potential village imaginary that can provide a future possibility for the village to re-imagine itself, one that can inspire design, new activities, common stewardship, and much needed solutions within the ecological agenda in dealing with climate adaptation, water retention or biodiversity crisis.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>

[fig.10] Research models of the village architecture existing and imagined types developed in the thesis atelier which were organized as design research component of the Kempenlab Dorpsarchitectuur [Campine lab Village Architecture] set up by Ar-Tur vzw and KU Leuven. Source: Siemen Clerckx, Aurélie Van Calenbergh, Oskar Vanhulst, Promotor Ward Verbakel, Master thesis studio “Lelijk Dorp Rebooth”, 2019-2020.

The other line of thought interprets the murmur of architectural interventions as being practiced in the villages, as a sort of proto language for village architecture. As indicated in the opening paragraph the density, typology and scale of built interventions is in evolution throughout the peri-urban Flemish village. The architectural challenge that comes with it, is to find a language that is true to the new dynamics on the one hand, but still produces meaningful relations with the architectural practice of the context. ‘Village chatter’ is the umbrella term introduced for a collective vocabulary, tested dialogue and shared value system that offers an alternative and hands-on way to discuss and guide the architectural quality of what the transformation of villages should look like at the architectural scale. Used as a toolbox with figures, tactics, dialogue rules, references, and distinct roles for different actors, it has been published, exhibited, and tested in several workshops with local stakeholders (Verbakel, Wouters 2021). Operating like a language system the village chatter is another village imaginary playing into the importance of the physical characteristics as major component of the guiding image, while accepting the nature of the apartment building and linking it to larger societal responsibilities. It is the aspiration of these multivocal and plural architectural gestures to produce a village chatter. Maybe a stereophony, in the words of Roland Barthes, who writes about the characteristics of Tangiers in ‘The Pleasure of Text’:

‘One evening, half asleep on a banquette in a bar, just for fun I tried to enumerate all languages within earshot: music, conversations, sounds of chairs, glasses, a whole stereophony... through me passed words, tiny syntagms, bits of formulae, and no sentence formed, as though that were the law of such language. This speech, at once very cultural and very savage, was above all lexical, sporadic; it set up in me, through its apparent flow, a definitive discontinuity ... outside the sentence.’
(Roland Barthes, 1975)

The articulation of two spatial conceptual strategies, the ‘garden pattern’, and the ‘village chatter’ are part of the proposed framework for village urbanism resulting from a practice-based PhD thesis in preparation. They can be understood as the results of a ‘village imaginary’ method. As an emergent framework to guide the aspirations and spatial transformation of peri-urban villages in Flanders, it might, perhaps, offer a praxis and discourse of what a village urbanism could entail.

## Bibliography

Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M. and Jacobson, M. (1977) A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction. Center for environmental structure 2 New York: Oxford university press.
Barthes, R. (1975) The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill & Wang, pp. 49.

<footnote n="5">⁵ Throughout private gardens of Flanders and the Netherlands numerous replicas have been built of the cave of Massabielle near Lourdes France. During the second half of the 20th century access to cheap cement technology has led to a proliferation of such cave facsimiles in various scales for individual Virgin Mary veneration. While rapidly disappearing, hundreds remain and for some or the focus of preservation and inventory initiatives. ‘Gezocht: Lourdesgrotten groot en klein’ DeStandaard 9/7/2009, consulted online on 02/03/2023</footnote>
De Meulder, B., Schreurs, J., Cock, A. and Notteboom, B. (1999) 'Sleutelen aan het Belgische stadslandschap / Patching up the Belgian urban landscape', Oase: journal for architecture, 52 (1999).

Delauwe, P. H. C. (1964) 'Aspirations, Images Guides et Transformations Sociales', Revue française de sociologie, 5(2), pp. 180-192.

Fernández Per, A. and Mozas, J. (2020) Is this rural?: architecture markers in the countryside. a+t, issue 53
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain: a+t architecture publishers.

Kajdanek, K. (2020) ‘From the Milky Way’s Point of View, We All Seem to Be from a Village (Loesje)’ in Mazan, W. 2020, Trouble in Paradise, Zacheta – national Gallery of Art, Warsaw, pp. 52-67.

Koolhaas, R., Armstrong, R. and Therrien, T. C. (2020) Countryside, a report. Köln: Taschen.

Levitas, R. (2007) 'Looking for the blue: The necessity of utopia', Journal of political ideologies, 12(3), pp. 289-306.

Loopmans, M. and Thissen, F. 'Het Vlaamse platteland als woondorpennetwerk', Lokaal, (4), pp. 52-53.

Marot, S. b. (2019) Taking the country's side: agriculture and architecture. The poetics of reason 2 Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa.

Renson, I. (2019) 'We zijn onze dorpen in ijtempo aan het verknoeien.', De Standaard, 23 November 2019.

Ryckewaert, M. (2018) 'Woonwensen en het beleidsplan Ruimte Vlaanderen: de inertie van het woonaanbod stelt grenzen aan de stuurbaarheid van de woningvraag', Ruimte & maatschappij Vlaams-Nederlands tijdschrift voor ruimtelijke vraagstukken.

Shucksmith, M. (2018) 'Re-imagining the rural: From rural idyll to Good Countryside', Journal of rural studies, 59, pp. 163-172.

Thissen, F. and Loopmans, M. (2013) 'Dorpen in verandering'.

Thissen, F., Loopmans, M., Strijker, D. and Haartsen, T. (2021) 'Guest editorial: Changing villages; what about people?', Journal of rural studies, 87, pp. 423-430.

Van Damme, W., De Decker, P. and Leinfelder, H. 2022a. Narratives of diversity in the rural idyll: a framing analysis of Flemish written press.

Van Damme, W., De Decker, P. and Leinfelder, H. (2022b) 'Vreemd en geframed: Diversiteit in de landelijke idylle: Ruimte & menselijk gedrag', Ruimte, pp. 54-57.

Verbakel, W. (2008) ‘Van Ongeplande Kwaliteiten tot Planningsverbeelding’ A+, 212, pp. 52-56

Verbakel, W., Wouters, E. (2021) Toolbox dorpse architectuur. Mechelen: Public Space.

Yarwood, R. (2005) 'Beyond the Rural Idyll: Images, countryside change and geography', Geography, 90(1), pp. 19-31.
# Manufactured Altered Alps

*Mattia Tettoni*

Università Iuav di Venezia, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne EPFL

Supervisors: Paola Viganò, Federico Zanfi

Expected thesis defence: April, 2025

mtettoni@iuav.it

The ecological transition requires an unprecedented amount of raw materials, and new extraction perspectives in the Alps are underway to complete it. Since 2019, the Regione Piemonte has granted two Australian mining companies a licence to explore the presence of cobalt and associated minerals. It reverses the trend of relocating these activities in recent years and opens new debates around the territorial project.

The development of the Alps has been defined by exogenous phenomena that have changed physical, social and economic contexts. The city has imposed itself within the mountains, replacing the ‘natural’ and rural components to colonising them physically. Transit routes for international trade and the industrialisation of extractive processes favouring mining activities’ intensification, and the exploitation of hydroelectric power radically altered the Alpine landscape – rural and with an economy based on self-sufficiency.

## The paradoxes and contrasts of energy transition

In 2020, the European Union listed primary materials of ‘strategic interest’. It changed its mining policy to extract raw materials from local resources, reversing the trend of recent decades in which extraction was relocated to other parts of the world (Arboleda 2020, Hutton 2019). These materials are crucial to achieving the European Green New Deal, and the geographical concentration of extraction and refining poses a potentially serious risk to future supply (van den Brink et al. 2020).

Cobalt is a critical material in many sectors and an essential component of lithium-ion batteries<fnref n="1" />. In the next five to ten years, the industry that manufactures these products is expected to grow as much as three times, and the supply chain must also expand at a similar rate (Sun et al. 2019). In 2018, about 65% of cobalt was mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, specifically in the Katanga province in the south. Significant producers include New Caledonia, China, Canada, and Australia<fnref n="2" />.

China dominates the global production of refined cobalt, which accounted for more than 60% of the world's total in 2018. Current cobalt extraction in Europe derives from three mines in Finland, while refinement activities occur in Finland, Belgium, and France. Recent studies (Horn et al. 2021) identified 509 cobalt-bearing deposits and occurrences in 25 European countries. In particular, the Alpine Orogenic Belt is an up-and-coming area for potential cobalt-related minerals mines.

Exploiting this area would drastically alter the European role in cobalt extraction and Europe's position in the global supply market. The socio-ecological transition will require an unprecedented amount of raw resources.

## Collateral landscape

The development of the Alps has been defined by exogenous phenomena that have changed these territories' physical, social and economic contexts (Bätzing 2015). The city has imposed itself within the mountains, overlapping or replacing the ‘natural’ and rural components to colonising them physically with new buildings, infrastructures and land uses, establishing a “territorial machine” (Cavalieri, Viganò 2019). To reconsider, in a non-conflictual way, the relationship between the city and the mountain, the first one must not be understood as a centralised form but as an additional integral element of this complex urban system (Diener et al. 2006).

In their physical entity, the Alps are a dynamic organism on which anthropic activities have been concentrated for a few centuries but produced radical transformations. This work focuses on how external activities – such as extractive ones – have replaced rural processes settled over the years in the Piemonte, highlighting contrasts and problems derived from these processes. The depopulation phenomenon occurs through the shift of the Alpine population toward the valley floor, where the settlement of large-scale industry (Modica 2022), thus reversing the relationship between low-lying and upstream municipalities. This is the main element in changing the complex economic and social

<footnote n="1">¹ These types of batteries are used in many everyday devices, such as cell phones and laptops, but also medical equipment and electric cars and hybrids. Lithium-manganese cells are combined with lithium and nickel-manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) cells to extend their service life and specific energy.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² In this case, cobalt is produced chiefly as a by-product of nickel extraction.</footnote>
balances of traditionally rural areas such as many portions of the Western Alps. In other parts of the mountain territory, the emergence of the electric industry represented a confirming factor for new balances that were being consolidated, with a gradual abandonment of an economy based on self-sufficiency.

## Alpine mines, large infrastructural works and hydroelectric power exploitation

Mining influences the relationship between population, economy, environment and health, particularly concerning industrialisation and its consequences. Mining history is conventionally divided into two main phases: the “peasant miners” and the industrial phase. At the end of the 16th century, mining automation was early, developing more efficient techniques<fnref n="3" /> favouring the intensification of silver and gold mining and a centralised and properly industrialised organisation. Thanks to these features, mining was essential in that phase of European economic history, leading to demographic, environmental and economic changes resulting from the industrialisation of mining. Although on a smaller scale, cases can already be found in the early modern age in Alpine regions where a mining industry fuelled by substantial immigration of labour was firmly established as early as the first half of the 17th century, in places such as Alagna Valsesia and Macugnaga – Monte Rosa – it experienced substantial expansion, especially during the 18th century (Zanini 2016).

The Simplon Tunnel is an essential<fnref n="4" /> railway infrastructure in the Alps, connecting Switzerland with Italy. It was built to provide a direct rail link across the Alps, thus facilitating trade and passenger transport between the two countries. Construction of the tunnel began in 1898, and the work took about seven years and was completed in 1905 and officially opened in 1906. It immediately significantly impacted transport and trade, providing a faster and more reliable train route between Switzerland and Italy. It played a crucial role in facilitating the movement of goods and passengers and promoting tourism across the Alps. Temporary villages were built for the workers employed on the site and their families, who also came from central and southern Italy. Balmanolesca [fig.1] housed 8,000 inhabitants and provided services such as a school and a hospital. The village was destroyed by a flood in 1920.

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>[fig.1] Balmanolesca. Source: Associazione tutela del patrimonio storico della Val Divedro</figcaption></figure>

The current vision defines a relationship between concentrated and extended urbanisation, including the operational landscapes of resource production and extraction (Brenner, Katsikis 2020). Turin's metropolitan mountain is a relational space where economic, social and cultural characteristics derive

<footnote n="3">³ New drilling, drainage and ventilation techniques have been developed.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ The Simplon Tunnel is about 19,8 km long. It passes under the Simplon Pass, a mountain pass of historical importance located at an altitude of 2,005 m.</footnote>
mainly from interactions with the metropolitan area (Dematteis 2018). The first significant use of water resources in the western Alpine region resulted from the city of Turin's energy policy (Pavese 2007). An important demonstration of public lighting at a distance, conducted during the 1884 Industrial Exhibition, increased the market prospects. Lucien Gaulard won a special prize for the "best electrical transmission to Turin from the Alps" and attracted the attention of foreigners to the sub-alpine area (Calligaris 1993). At the end of the 19th century, the Ossola Valley entered a large electrical industry, accelerating the structural transformation process that had already begun with the extension of the mobility network [fig.2]. The importance and frequency of the large-scale works (Bolzoni 2006) wiped out the agro-pastoral economy and the mountain pasture system of the upper and lower valley, wiping out the income from forest land. The growth of the electrical industry profoundly altered the economic and social balances achieved for centuries in the Western Alpine arc (Calligaris 2004). Even today, the demographic crisis is concentrated in mountain areas. It leads to housing imbalances in the territory, with growth in the lower part due to the presence of active industries (Corrado, Sega 2019). Combined with connective difficulties, this leads to other phenomena of abandonment of portions of the territory.

Thinking of the Alpine environment as a common good can trigger a series of narratives and practices that reduce the right of local communities to exercise decision-making power over their territory (Debarbieux, Price 2012). The protests and associationism of the municipalities of Val Maira in the early 20th century demanded an energy policy capable of rebalancing the phenomenon of energy production for export, even in contrast to the economic interests of the companies involved. These practices concerned the energy infrastructure directly involved and the emergence of a collective consciousness that has influenced regional energy policies and landscape choices over the years.

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>[fig.2] Morasco dam construction process. Source: ENEL</figcaption></figure>

## Another modernity. Capitalism in the countryside and conservation processes of nature

The transformation of agrarian structures and social and economic changes can be attributed to the penetration of capitalist logic into rural areas. Emilio Sereni (1968) focused on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the countryside and the processes and dynamics that led to this transformation. By emphasising profit and market-oriented production, he argues that capitalism profoundly affected rural societies with the rise of commercial agriculture and the commodification of land and labour. The emergence of agrarian capitalism has had social, economic and political consequences on various groups, including small farmers, agricultural workers and rural communities. Through this analysis, the tensions and contradictions inherent in the capitalist transformation of the countryside emerge. The state's role and policies – again exogenous processes – shaped the agrarian structure and how rural societies adapted to and resisted capitalist pressures. Starting in the second half of the 19th century, in the face of the growing environmental impact of industrialisation processes and the tendency towards uncontrolled exploitation of resources, a greater interest in the rational use of natural resources and the protection of the environment began to develop (Armiero, Hall 2010). The early nature conservation movement was not an anti-modern
reaction to progress but substantially impacted traditional natural resource management methods<fnref n="5" />. Industrialisation created the conditions for unsustainable development, so the movement sought to preserve some 'natural' spaces and to initiate limited experiments in the rational exploitation of resources. However, it also often opposed the traditional models of resource use by local communities to replace them with new models deemed more scientific and rational in the name of landscape and environmental protection. From this perspective, nature conservation should be read as a question of balances of power and social conflicts over the management of resources (von Hardenberg 2011).

## New cycles(?)

The population of the Alps increased by a growth rate significantly below the European average<fnref n="6" />. The proportion of the people living in the Alps in the seven Alpine countries of Europe fell from 7.4% (1870) to 5.8% (1990) of the total European population (Bätzing et al. 1996), 43% of all Alpine municipalities have experienced a substantial decline<fnref n="7" />. The drastic population collapse has been significant in the region of the southwestern Alps, south of the line connecting Annecy, Aosta and Lake Maggiore, and in the Cuneo area and the Ligurian Alps. The collapse in these areas was partly caused by the lack of subsidies (or inadequate subsidies) for mountain regions in France and Italy; it is also the result of a large-scale weakness in the economy and infrastructure.

In this framework of low socioeconomic dynamism, the opportunity to generate new economies from resource extraction is generally welcomed. However, different studies (Auty 1993) argued that no direct correlation exists between a nation's resource wealth and economic growth. In the western Alps, cobalt is reported in the Alpine region of Piemonte. Seven abandoned mines formerly worked magmatic deposits are in the Ivrea-Verbano zone<fnref n="8" />, exposed during the Alpine orogeny. In 2019, a mining company was granted a license to explore cobalt, nickel, copper, silver and associated minerals at Punta Corna (2,960 m). The area is included in the territory of Usseglio and Balme, the two towns, characterised by severe depopulation, maintain an economy based on tourism, especially in summer, and agro-pastoral production. The mines have been exploited since 1753, and cobalt was used as a colour pigment. In the 1930s, when mining in the high mountains became too expensive, the site was closed.

Local authorities in Usseglio welcome the operation. In contrast, the municipality of Balme has approved an action against mineral exploration, seeking to preserve its territory. In December 2022, the license was renewed and extended to start a second exploration phase. In addition to this area, searches are conducted in Valsesia and towards Ossola Valley by another Australian company, but current resource estimates are yet to be available.

## Thinking of an alternative, hybrid urban-rural scenario

Paradoxically, the European Union's Green New Deal includes policies and programs that involve the expansion of mining - of non-renewable resources - with consequences for climate, ecosystems and local communities. These actions should always face negotiation processes based on an estimation of benefits at the national and local levels informed by the interpretation of the territory that these processes are disposed to alter. Evaluating if the impact on ecosystems and local communities is a social cost we are ready to address and if value extraction is still viable in interacting with the landscape. In this case, significant investment is needed in the research and development of cobalt-free batteries and cobalt recycling [fig.3] to improve the value chain and avoid replicating old exploitation processes. Territory must be considered as the result of the stratification of these different processes (Corboz 1985), and scenarios (Viganò 2010) must be proposed to respond to the climate emergency without further damaging the ecosystem and local communities.

<footnote n="5">⁵ The exclusion of certain land areas from exploitation processes and the organisation of the environment according to modes of production is considered more scientific (von Hardenberg 2011).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ The population of the Alps increased by 57% between 1870 and 1990, from 7 to 11 million inhabitants (Bätzing et al. 1996).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ In particular, an average of 44%, reducing the population by almost half.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Nickel, copper, and cobalt were produced from the late 19th century until the Second World War.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>[fig.3] Apple recycled materials, disassembly robot. Source: Apple</figcaption></figure>

However, paradoxes are triggered even in alternative scenarios based on renewable sources and self-consumption. In 2021, the Valle Maira and Valle Grana mountain associations set up Italy's first 'large-area energy community' – entirely public – to study and promote energy efficiency in the valleys, partly by reusing old, abandoned hydropower plants. Piemonte is considered one of Europe's driest areas<fnref n="9" />, where the Po River flows more than 40% below historical averages<fnref n="10" />. In autumn-winter 2021, there were 110 consecutive days without rain or snow. In December of that year, rainfall was 65% lower than in the historical series<fnref n="11" />. In the same valleys in the Cuneo area, there is a 25% deficit in water supplies<fnref n="12" />. Agricultural activities have worsened for the past two years because of drought and competition with hydroelectric power plants. Mountain agriculture and animal farming products must be considered essential resources for sustainable development in the Alps (Debarbieux 2020, Pettenati 2020) through preserving and transmitting local knowledge and reproducing traditional cultural landscapes.

<footnote n="9">⁹ In July 2022, a state of emergency was declared due to water shortages in Piemonte, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Emilia Romagna. In December 2022, the expiring measure was confirmed for one year, and Liguria, Toscana, Umbria and Lazio were added to the list of regions in crisis.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Measured by the World Meteorological Organisation, comparing rainfall data for 2022 with that of the last 30 years.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ It should be specified, however, that these regions have always been considered low in rainfall; as early as the 13th century, to make the best use of the water resource, the “ru”, small canals fed by the streams at high altitude through a network of pipelines and storage tanks, were constructed.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² In other parts of the region, the situation is also critical. In Crodo, the locality known for its springs, industrial production draws on its resources, which is one of many evidences of this situation. Viù, in the Lanzo Valleys, has to deal with emergencies using recharge tanks.</footnote>
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# The monetisation of exchanges between city and countryside as an indicator of the urbanisation of Congolese territory. How is the urban phenomenon reflected in the case of Mbanza-Ngungu?

Name of Author: Kapasi Lutete Joël

Affiliation: Université Libre de Bruxelles et Université Kongo

Supervisor: Leloutre Géry, Mukoko Samba Daniel

Expected thesis defence: Month, year

Email: joel.kapasi.lutete@ulb.be

This paper aims to understand the meaning of notion city in Sub-Saharan Africa through the case of a medium-sized agglomeration, Mbanza-Ngungu, located in the Kongo Central province, located on the route between Kinshasa (150 km), the capital of DR Congo, and Matadi (225 km), the access to the ocean for the whole country.

The medium sized African urban phenomenon is relatively less described, and its definition does require several shifts in focus. First, a historical shift. Mbanza Ngungu is historically a colonial settlement, which has therefore imported the name of the city into a territory that was previously structured differently. Over time, the African city has also experienced its own specific evolution, very different from other continents because occurring outside of the processes of industrialization and tertiarization. In this context, beyond basic services, the African urban economy is primarily linked to agricultural and charcoal productions for urbanized neighborhoods.

To address the concept of the city in this context, a second shift is necessary: looking to the phenomenon through the prism of urbanization. This perspective firstly allows to move from the morphological field to a more ontological approach, describing urbanization as a change in the state of the territory and practices, with the increasing monetarisation (Polanyi, 1944) and the emergence of mobility in daily life (Remy and Voyé, 1992), and then accepting urbanization as a generalized phenomenon (Brenner and Schmitz, 2014) that inseparably affects both urban or extra-customary world and rural or customary world.

The analysis will therefore focus on the characterization of the relationships and transactions between urban and rural lands to characterize the structure of the city of Mbanza-Ngungu based on an original cartography. This description will be made at several scales. First, it will trace the trajectories of the Mbanza-Ngungu inhabitants who go daily to operate the neighboring clan lands, either exercising their ancestral right of use as former members of the village, or monetizing this same right. The analysis will then focus on the localization, all around the city, of markets where the production is sold, leading to identifying the cores from which the urban extension is structured, pointing out both the agglomeration amplitude and that of its hinterland, indispensable to its economic functioning. Finally, direct exchanges with the capital, Kinshasa, will be described in order to insert the urban phenomenon of Mbanza-Ngungu into a metropolitan dynamic. This description will conclude on the need to approach the sub-Saharan urban phenomenon not as territorial entities distinct from a rural world, in its relationship to agriculture and silvicultural production on the one hand, and in a trans-scalar perspective, taking into account the relationship to large millionaire agglomerations on the other.

## Introduction

The description of city/countryside exchanges through their monetisation reveals the evolution of the Congolese territory, which in the province of Central Kongo is reflected in progressive and generalised urbanisation. It also provides an insight into the unique dynamics of cities in sub-Saharan Africa - whose development is weakly linked to industrialisation and tertiarisation - by questioning what a medium-sized city can mean. In the medium-sized town case like Mbanza-Ngungu, the changing relationship between urban and rural areas is socially and spatially transforming village land. This paper shows that this transformation does not generate a hybrid territory, a sort of rural-looking territory where urban behaviour is adopted, but rather that the whole of the agricultural hinterland of Mbanza-Ngungu is part of a single urbanisation phenomenon that is still largely undocumented.
Like other Congolese cities, Mbanza-Ngungu is historically a colonial settlement that was structured differently. These cities, 'some of which were recently created'<fnref n="1" />, represent land that was removed from the traditional yoke by the colonial system before being registered and governed by written law, the extra-customary centres. Customary land represents all the land that remained under the pre-colonial system, in other words, governed by customary law. In the Kongo social organisation, this land, which is still outside state control, refers to lands whose 'ownership is collective and acquired in accordance with custom'<fnref n="2" />. This collective ownership is defined by what Kamumfuekete in Lemaire and Genard (2017) describes as a traceability structure, bringing together all consanguines through their mothers, the clan. In customary land, unlike extra-customary land, some goods cannot be socially validated by the market.

Apart from the resulting distinction between those with rights - or consanguines - and allochtonous, referring to the extra-customary and the customary reflects forms of the relationship between society and space that make it irrelevant to differentiate between the formal and the informal. In addition, they allow urbanisation to be approached from an ontological standpoint, rather than from a morphological one. Urbanisation seen as a non-homogeneous global phenomenon (Brenner, Schmid 2014), societal (Remy, Voyé 1992) and increasing monetarisation (Polanyi 1944) illustrates, accompanies and stimulates, enshrining the city as a place of collective consumption (Harvey 1995, 2004) at different scales.

Based on a detailed description of exchanges by “tracking” (Leloutre, 2018), this paper reveals a new scale and a new structure for the growth of medium-sized cities, but also of the metropolis of Kinshasa, hitherto described through its peri-urban territories (Trefon 2004, Lelo Nzuzi, De Saint Moulin 2008, Lelo Nzuzi 2018). It looks successively at the urbanisation of the customary, the reverse commute and oriented markets.

h

## 1. The customary land urbanisationh

The urbanisation of customary land leads to socio-economic changes that reshape the relationships between social actors. This assertion is based on the observation that the intensity of monetarisation in customary societies is increasing in terms of market exchanges and the commercialisation of clan goods.

The urbanisation of customary society, in this sense, involves the rights holders in a process of acculturation, accompanied in some cases by a gradual abandonment of the traditional lifestyle. Increasingly, rights-holders themselves define certain norms of their existence in terms of customary law, with regard to values or practices that they consider outmoded. New activities are being created and certain pre-existing activities are adapting to the times. This situation, which can be likened to “modernisation” (Santos 1972), shows the way in which the elements of a spatial system remain unchanged or give way completely or partially to others. Modernisation highlights the mutations that can be referred to on a wider territorial scale - than that of the customary - which define its space on the basis of a set of temporally heterogeneous elements linked together. It is on this scale that the tension between normative and cultural internalization and critical distancing is defined, thus creating the personality and identity of rights holders. The entitled parties are constantly moving from what Jean Piaget (1964) describes as a state of lesser equilibrium to one of greater equilibrium. The incorporation of elements of external influences and the readjustment of action structures are the two major movements that are distinct, complementary and significant to the system of dispositions of an individual linked to a social trajectory.

It is in this context that the increase in the need to hold cash reduces the filters of accessibility to customary land. This is shown by the monetarisation of exchanges and the commodification of clan goods.

### 1.1. *Evolution of the monetisation of exchanges between the customary and urban worlds*

<footnote n="1">¹ Décret n° 13/026 conférant le statut de ville et de commune à certaines agglomérations de la Province du Bas-Congo, col. 130, JO, juin 2013.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² See paragraph 1 of Article 34 of the Constitution Journal Officiel - Constitution de la République Démocratique du Congo Amended by Law no. 11/002 of 20 January 2011 revising certain articles of the Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Congo of 18 February 2006.</footnote>
The 'monetisation'<fnref n="3" /> of market exchanges is one of the levers for intensifying exchanges with superficial links. It reflects the influence of money on non-monetised market exchanges that have coexisted with monetised market exchanges in the customary world. In these non-monetised market exchanges, which have also contributed to the fight against food insecurity in towns, the absence of equivalence through money has not always been a source of disagreement between the parties to the exchange. The rare disagreements have resulted in the exchange between the parties not taking place. However, it should be emphasised that the agreement between the parties that determines the exchange has not always reflected the preference of the entitled parties. In some cases, the agreement is simply a constraint arising from the lack of alternatives. Two forms of non-monetary exchange that are currently monetised illustrate this point: barter<fnref n="4" /> and sharecropping<fnref n="5" />.

Barter consisted of an exchange of goods produced on customary land for certain manufactured goods available off customary land, including sugar, salt, coffee, soap, seeds and clothing. Bartering, which coexisted with monetised exchanges, established a relationship of trust between the inhabitants of the customary land and the intermediaries involved in the exchanges, who were socially close to the inhabitants of the town. This reduced search time and avoided the problem of double coincidence. The exchange intermediaries are traders involved in the distribution circuit of clan goods between the farmers and the final consumers. The replacement of barter by monetised exchanges has reduced the importance of the social proximity of the parties to the exchange. Socially distant exchange intermediaries can now trade directly with customary inhabitants.

Sharecropping was a temporary transfer of the right to use land from the beneficiary of a village in return for a share of the produce of the tenant farmer, who was a non-native, i.e. outside the village clan. The access of non-natives to customary land depended on their expression of 'temporal stability and inter-situational coherence' (Rolland 2019), because the social peace of customary land depended on it. With the monetisation of temporary use of customary land, the personality of the non-native is no longer a priority. Who are you" has been replaced by "how much do you have". This frees allochthones from their production debt to the rightful owner. It also opens up the exploitation of customary land to any non-indigenous person with financial power who wants to exploit it. Visits to customary chiefs in July 2022 revealed that the annual right to use a plot of agricultural land in the villages surrounding Mbanza-Ngungu varied between USD 30 and USD 70 per hectare per year.

## 1.2. *The commodification of clan goods*

The commodification of clan goods blurs the differences between rightful owners and allochtonous. Clan goods that was traditionally reserved for the non-market exploitation of right-holders alone can now be acquired by non-natives. For example, fruit trees are used to gather fruit and caterpillars. And land is the basis for agricultural crops and many other socio-economic activities. These goods, protected against any form of alienation by custom, help to maintain the trans-generational link that underpins the collective interest of those entitled to them by differentiating between merchandise and goods that cannot become merchandise. The trans-generational link implicitly evokes the societal responsibilities of the actions of certain members of the present generations on past, future and present generations. The societal responsibility of the present generations in the custom of the Kongo universe refers to taking into account the interests of the beneficiaries of different generations in activities involving goods protected by custom.

<footnote n="3">³ The debate is not part of a historical approach to highlight the evolution of forms of money over time and their coexistence in specific periods, as in Blanc (1994), Fantacci (2005) and Kuroda (2008). Nor in an anthropological approach to describe a primitive or modern society (Polanyi, 1974) (Polanyi 1971) (Akin, Robbins 1999). Nor even to question Western societies using analytical grids that have been historically and anthropologically developed and validated in the light of Aglietta & Orléan (1998) and Théret (2007).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Barter is mentioned without discussing 'the existence of traditional currencies' (Edoumba-Bokandzo, 2001), or asserting that barter was once a widespread phenomenon in customary law. Nor is it a question of contrasting barter with monetarised exchanges to describe the economies of primitive societies where barter disappeared with technical progress (Hildebrand, 1864; Amselle, 1966 and Jones, 1976).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ The aim here is not to discuss the various consequences of this, but to see how customary land is becoming increasingly accessible to non-natives wishing to exploit it.</footnote>
This guarantees the beneficiaries of generations that are physically absent the same freedom of choice in terms of socio-economic organisation as the generations that are physically present.

The creation of markets for fruit trees and land is a form of alienation that breaks down the internal limitations of societies based on social, economic, anthropological and natural dimensions. By extension, it creates "all situations of dispossession of the individual in favour of external entities and loss of control over the aims of his activity. This ultimately deprives man - understood as the entitled person - of his very humanity, by assimilating him to an interchangeable cog deprived of control over himself" (Coulangeon 2020). In contrast to the monetarisation of market exchanges, the commodification of clan goods involves a reduction in the weight of customary roots, or even the gradual abandonment of customary values. The use of customary land is thus becoming accessible to any allochtonous who, depending on how the situation is interpreted, can make use of the clan goods reserved for with rights.

Beyond these analyses, one question remains. How has the need to hold money increased in customary societies?

## 2. The reverse shuttleh

The reverse shuttle refers to the movement of city dwellers to work on customary land. This situation defines the city as a place of residence and the various clan lands as a place of work. It highlights one of the types of employment that feeds and drives the urban economy, and hence the growth of the city, a phenomenon highlighted by the geographer Alain Dubresson (1999). Reverse commuting is not part of a logic of "labour market adjustment between territories" (Deschamps, Descours, Cohen-Solal, Jacquot 1991). It reveals the forms of city development. In some cases, integrating the reverse commute into the lives of urban dwellers is an alternative to the lack of job opportunities or filters in the city, and a choice in others. In other cases, it is a choice. 'Visits to traditional chiefs, commuters and city dwellers in between, as well as non-participant observations'<fnref n="6" />, show that urban commuters still travel to their clan lands on foot. It concerns both men and women, the older of whom vary in age from 15 to 60 for those entitled to live in town, and from 19 to 55 for allochtonous.

<footnote n="6">⁶ Carried out in the field from June to August of 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>[Fig 1]: Trajectories of urban dwellers to rural areas by Joel KAPASI on the basis of field data.</figcaption></figure>

By mapping the journeys of 37 commuters on four roads, we can distinguish between two categories: commuters and in-between city dwellers. Commuters are single-residence city dwellers. Their home-to-work commute is a daily round trip to villages within a radius of around twenty kilometres. In-between city dwellers are bi-residential commuters. The home-work commute is not a daily round trip. The clan land becomes a secondary residence without leading to residential migration from the town to the village in the long term. This secondary residence may change when the activity of the urban dweller moves from one village to another. So a commuter can become an in-between city dweller, and vice versa. In-between city dwellers live in villages located beyond an 18-kilometre radius of the city.

The reverse commute, understood as a journey between home and work, implicitly calls into question the work of urban dwellers, whose location - in customary terms - seems to play little part in the choice of where to live in the city. The idea is that the forms of work generated by urbanisation cannot be reduced to legal and statistical categorisations. Thus, a positive link can be established between ongoing urbanisation and work growth.

## 2.1. *Choice of residence in the town of Mbanza-Ngungu*

The location of commuters' place of residence in the city is independent of the distance-related commuting time. It is linked to the specific socio-economic situation of each household. A profile of urban commuters who work on clan land shows that plot owners have less choice than tenants.

Homeowners live on their inherited or purchased plot. Choosing a residential location other than their property would be too expensive for the household.
For tenants, budget constraints, household composition and social ties are among the factors that determine their choice of residential location in the city.

The budget constraint refers to a trade-off between limited income from commuter activities and the acquisition of goods and services. Tenants prefer affordable housing. The semi-structured interviews conducted in June 2019 revealed that the cost of rent ranged from $17 to $62<sup>7</sup>. The cost of rent depends on the neighbourhood, the number of rooms in the dwelling and the possible social ties with the landlord.

Household composition refers in particular to the age structure of its members. According to our fieldwork, there are households with children under the age of 12 that take into account the proximity of their home to a primary school when deciding where to live. Proximity to the school means that children can travel to and from school under the supervision of a member of the household, requires less physical effort from parents and children, saves time and makes it easier to keep track of children. It is one of the guarantees of safety that is needed in the face of the various risks that can be caused by the circulation of motorised rolling stock or urban delinquency embodied by gangs made up of idle young people. Proximity creates a close relationship between the school and the parents, which means that children are obliged to follow their parents' instructions and work hard to avoid any bad reports being made to their parents about their behaviour.

In this case, social ties are self-organising, providing a form of local social protection that complements that organised by public institutions. Among other things, they determine attachment to specific residential locations in the city. Fieldwork reveals that attachment to a particular district (or avenue) of the city is a consequence of the residential fixity of households that can be counted on and for whom they are counted. As a result of geographical proximity (living in the same neighbourhood or avenue) and/or different interactions over a long period of time, the individual can mobilise them to deal with life's hazards and certain daily needs (needing salt, sugar, soap or food and services: running the laundry). The social ties between these households and the individual support the individual's specific emotional ties with his or her neighbourhood (or avenue). These households belong to different professional categories. If these households change location, the individual may choose to locate his or her home by looking for geographical proximity to one of these households. This observation was made among residents of the town who were born and grew up in Mbanza-Ngungu.

## 2.2. *The daily activities of the city dwellers in customary land: their work*

The daily activities of customary urban dwellers help to transform the territory according to their interpretation of the situation in order to find the means to participate in social life and express their personality. Urban dwellers who work on customary land cultivate the land or produce charcoal between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. or to mediate exchanges between 12 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Urban production on clan land is akin to outsourcing production from the city to clan land. Outsourcing urban production is a process that enables the city to build up its supply for local markets and other cities. It can be related to the surface area of arable land available in the customary system, to sociological links to clan lands and to economic relationships with urban space. Furthermore, the outsourcing of urban production is helping to reshape the peasantry and reduce urban violence. Like idle youths who are members of urban gangs, farmers are able to offer their labour to commuters' farms in return for payment. This reduces the time they have to work on their own account. For any given village, the distance travelled to produce is greater than the distance travelled to mediate trade. This is illustrated by the mapping of journeys by urban activity on clan land.

<footnote n="7"><sup>7</sup> at the rate of 1965 Congolese francs to the US dollar</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>[Fig 2]: reverse shuttle mapping by activity by Joel KAPASI on the basis of field data.</figcaption></figure>

Unlike production outsourcing, exchange intermediation takes place between production and final consumption. It consists of buying agricultural produce from farmers (peasants or urban dwellers) on the various agricultural feeder roads in order to resell it to other exchange intermediaries or households in town. Trade intermediaries include urban dwellers who identify themselves as "mamas manoeuvres" within the various associations. On the one hand, these associations are vectors of sociability which, to a large extent, lead to social transformations in which economic relations between actors are embedded. These associations, which take into account the social concerns of individuals, far from political projects, overcome the various social segregations based in particular on clan, religion and political affiliation. On the other hand, this is a type of urban work where men lag behind women.

### 3. Oriented markets

Oriented markets are markets that sprang up spontaneously around ten years ago at the edge of the conurbation, and which play a part in the urban economy at both local and metropolitan level. They are located at the end of a specific agricultural feeder road, hence their name, "oriented" towards a specific clan land. These territorial dynamics are also illustrated in the transport of clan goods, TBC for short, which cannot be reduced to a purely technical matter. The appropriation of public roads reflects a conception of how to make and live in the city that follows on from the ability of urban dwellers to work on their territory in redefining their environment according to their own interpretation of situations. It is in this context that spontaneous uses are superimposed - on the specific locations of public thoroughfares - on previously conceived uses in specific locations of thoroughfares.
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>[Fig 3]: Some of the places where spontaneous uses are superimposed on planned uses in the context of the urbanisation of Mbanza-Ngungu. Map base ADP-2022(ULB) modified by Joel KAPASI on the basis of field data.</figcaption></figure>

Oriented markets and warehouses are indicators of the comparative advantages that the city derives from trade, mainly with the metropolis of Kinshasa. The warehouses occupy a central geographical position in the town. Charcoal produced in the customary way is transhipped there, stored at a price, exchanged, and loaded exclusively for Kinshasa. Oriented markets are located off-centre in the city. They are crossroads between the main road or artery of the town and the agricultural feeder road, where a variety of clan goods are traded, mainly for local and Kinshasa demand. And secondarily to other cities. More specifically, with the construction of the outlying districts, certain oriented markets have undergone an evolution in the reconfiguration of centre-periphery relations, without changing the role of the established markets, in other words the older markets managed by a public authority. In addition to goods produced on clan land, manufactured goods are now traded on these markets. In addition, the mapping of specific markets shows that the choice of their location in the years of their appearance was determined, among other things, by the accessibility of the TBC. By bringing urbanised areas closer together, it contributes to the urban socio-economic dynamic by transforming the city's public spaces and influencing its urban structure.

### 3.1. *The transport of clan goods*<fnref n="8" />

The transport of clan goods highlights the creation of multidimensional wealth by broadening the functions of public spaces. It is therefore an ideal framework in which to make a breakthrough in the concept of "terripreneurship" (Kapasi 2020)<fnref n="9" /> as the foundation of the social and solidarity economy. The emergence of these TBCs has transformed the crossroads between the city's main artery and the N1 into a fixed parking

<footnote n="8">⁸ On-site investigations (J. Kapasi)</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Kapasi (2020) conceptualised terripreneurship as the grip of the territory on the creation, perception and incitement to exploit the business opportunity, on the setting of the price and on the location of the exchange on the public highway. In particular, price setting was a function of social link.</footnote>
area, the oriented car park. This situation, which can be seen in the vicinity of the central market, is the work of the permanent TBCs. It is made up of second-hand cars and new motorbikes for the journey from the town to the customary place. And second-hand vans for the Mbanza-Ngungu Kinshasa route. Transport of clan goods from Mbanza-Ngungu to towns other than Kinshasa remains occasional and on request. It should be noted that the permanent use of motorbikes and cars for transporting clan goods in Mbanza-Ngungu dates back to 2012 and 2009 respectively. Motorbike transport is suited to the generally impassable agricultural feeder roads. The motorbike and the car have replaced non-motorised transport, which was the interface between the customary place and the town of Mbanza-Ngungu, but also between the oriented and instituted markets or the final consumers.

As the foundation of the social and solidarity economy, terripreneurship reveals dimensions that broaden the spectrum of territorial influence by combining market and non-market logics to create multidimensional wealth. This can be seen in the following ways :

- a pattern of action to create economic activity subsequent to hoarding, new money or lack of income. Terriprendre cannot be limited to economic and financial aspects. This overturns the perception of social classes by reducing the strength of hierarchy and competition. This situation contributes to the basis of a democratic society that gives every individual freedom of choice, regardless of their family background, life history or socio-professional situation.

- The anchoring and investment of gains in the economy of the city district as essentially entrepreneurial approaches in response to local problems in which the profit of terripreneurs results from the maximisation of social utility. Terriprendre is a way of committing oneself to a socially legitimate cause that contributes to the well-being of the population of urbanised areas by meeting their unmet or poorly met needs. One example of this is taking account of the living conditions of TBC applicants when setting transport fares. In this case, the terripreneur can be likened to Hassan Zoual's homo situs (2005).

- The perception of urban public space as a catalyst for the associative phenomenon reinforces the idea of a democratic society by helping to strengthen the ability of terripreneurs to respond to the complexity of their environment. A link can be established between public space and cohesion, despite the tendency of urbanisation to create an increasingly individualistic society.

## 3.2. Mbanza-Ngungu space-time through the transport of clan goods

The Mbanza-Ngungu time-space illustrates the breakthrough of the terripreneurship concept by highlighting the shift in social control of the same space at two different times: Mbanza-Ngungu during the day and Mbanza-Ngungu at night. Unlike Mbanza-Ngungu by day, Mbanza-Ngungu by night is the time-space of a set of behaviours on the fringes of the regulations - on the road traffic of transporters - but which, considered collectively, benefit the societies of Mbanza-Ngungu as well as those of Kinshasa. Profiling these landowners shows that their rationality in transporting clan goods stems from the complex relationships they maintain with the Mbanza-Ngungu area.

In the city by day and by night, the terripreneurs are bosses or chauffeur-bosses. This distinction outlines the professional reconversion that results from terripreneurship and its links with the gendered division of labour in the social order.

The owner is the owner of rolling stock who hires a driver - and in some cases a conductor and/or a mechanic - to put it into service. This category, made up of both men and women, has been identified among politicians, pensioners, the self-employed in general, public service employees and companies.

The owner-driver is both the owner of the equipment and its driver. These men were self-employed, employed by an international organisation or had no income before acquiring the rolling stock. This is the
case for farmers, coal miners and mechanics, who acquire rolling stock with their own money or by
accumulating hoarded money. Some give up their initial activities to devote themselves to transport. Others
make a trade-off between their initial activities and working in transport. On the other hand, young people
with no income, still living with their family, who, out of trust, acquire rolling stock from a trader under an
unwritten contract. Under this contract, the young person with no income undertakes to pay the purchase
price in instalments over a fixed period. Trust is therefore a guarantee of solvency that is independent of
the life trajectory of the parties involved, enabling them to "do what they want to do". This type of contract,
which lasts only six months, is still common practice for motorbikes, which are one of the components of
the daytime city.

In the daytime town, the TBC operates between Mbanza-Ngungu and the surrounding customary lands. In addition, all the offices of the various public services are open 6/7 days. This form of transport, used by both rural and urban dwellers, is also characterised by compliance with the highway code and possession of the minimum documents required to operate. The rural residents live in le coutumier, while the urban residents live in Mbanza-Ngungu. The urban dwellers come from a variety of professional backgrounds, unlike the rural dwellers, who work solely on their land. These TBC players join forces to claim and legitimise the use of a purpose-built car park. It should be noted that the associative phenomenon, without distinction of space-time, makes it possible to standardize the practice of transport.

In the city by night, on the other hand, the TBC runs from Mbanza-Ngungu to Kinshasa. This transport,
which takes place when all the public service offices are closed, does not respect the traffic lanes. Some use
LED projectors as lighting systems. The drivers are urban dwellers and people from Kinshasa. Living in
Mbanza-Ngungu, the urban dwellers come from different professional backgrounds. The people from
Kinshasa, on the other hand, are business intermediaries or have been between Mbanza-Ngungu and
Kinshasa. Also, some politicians who lived in Mbanza-Ngungu before their mandates. These transport
operators join forces to claim exclusive use of a designated oriented car park.

Conclusion

The urbanisation of the town of Mbanza-ngungu is part of a complex dynamic that goes beyond the
question of administrative boundaries at the sub-national level of the country. This calls for a shift from
territorial policies to policies that can take on inter-territorial dimensions, principally, in our case,
metropolitan dimensions.

The urban phenomenon of Mbanza Ngungu makes it possible to reformulate the terms of the definition of urbanisation in the Congolese or even sub-Saharan African context. Firstly, in its ontological dimension, showing that urbanisation goes well beyond the built-up area, but manifests itself through changes in social relations, with the emergence of mobility in everyday life and social diversity, as emphasised by Jean Rémy and Liliane Voyé, and the mobility of capital, with the monetarisation of exchanges, as defined by Polyani.

This plurality of forms also refers back to the notion of urbanisation as a global phenomenon, a concept
dear to Brenner and Schmid, perfectly illustrated here by the strong relationship between the urbanised
economy of Mbanza Ngungu and the metropolitan dynamic induced by Kinshasa. The location of oriented
markets also demonstrates the specific role of the city - understood here as the built-up area - as a place of
collective consumption, as emphasised by David Harvey. Finally, urbanisation is a place for the
accumulation of capital (Sassen 2016), even if this capital circulates in a different here. And, in the light of
Alain Dubresson (1999), agriculture is an integral part of the urban economy, with, as a corollary, the whole
chain of related values and services.

Identifying these different dimensions enables us to begin to examine the issue of planning this urbanisation,
or in other words, the challenge of internalising the externalities associated with urbanisation (Leloutre
2022), which requires an understanding of the scales and dynamics underlying the transformation of the
territory. The medium-sized towns of Central Kongo absorb part of Kinshasa's demographic surplus while
helping to supply it. This is where the morphological dimension comes into play because it is their scale, in direct proximity to the vatas, that enables them to produce a surplus for the metropolis. On the other hand, it is this activity that gives structure to the developing neighbourhoods on the edge of the city, via the oriented markets that are gradually becoming retail markets. This justifies the city's seemingly chaotic structure.

Furthermore, distinguishing the territorial dynamics at work in the city invites us to examine the metropolis from the point of view of the city outside the metropolis. The question remains: how far can the metropolis be analysed through the lens of a medium-sized city?

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# Ruralization in urbanization in the Peasant Territories of Southern Mali: everyday life in Ségoukoura, Ségou

Elvira Pietrobon

IUAV University of Venice
Chiara Cavalieri, Domenico Patassini, Paola Viganò
Expected thesis defence: September, 2024
epietrobon@iuav.it

Inhabiting a territory in Southern Mali is a continuum of movement to the rhythm of the world's transformations. In Ségoukoura, in Ségou, Mali (West Africa), this gesture relates to processes of ruralization and urbanization. The peasant perspective allows a counter and decolonial orientation to grasp these specific modes of living. The space of the city is investigated from the practices of everyday life that manifest themselves in artifacts, symbols of a subsistence relationship to the land. The work of life reproduction adapts to the possibilities of the contemporary city by bringing together the perspectives of the rural and the urban and of the global and the local in an open-ended relationship. Ségoukoura thus becomes a tale to interpret the relationship to the world and its transformations through the gesture of living.

## Peasant perspectives on inhabiting a territory: a counter/decolonial narrative

For over a century, the inevitable decline of the peasant world has been announced. Yet, beyond the fortress of the old continent, family farming remains the most widespread form of agriculture, producing 80% of the world's food (FAO 2014).

In Mali, West Africa, to speak of peasantry is to refer to culture. This culture defines a way of inhabiting the territory that eludes the laws of the neo-liberal market, especially in its relationship with the land. It is linked to a family economy of subsistence and community, open to commercial production, but whose essential purpose is the reproduction of life and dwelling. Reproduction is understood as the direct and fundamental satisfaction of human needs beyond the mere production of goods (Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999), based on peculiar interactions between capital, land, labour and knowledge (Van Der Ploeg 2018). Similar to the peasant economy model that the Russian agronomist Chayanof theorized in the 1930s (Chayanof 1966), in Mali, private and individual land ownership struggles to transcend the cities' zones of influence (Bertrand 2021) and the work of the land, which employs the majority of the population, is not waged<fnref n="1" />.

The territories between the capital Bamako and the city of Ségou in southern Mali are historically, and still today, among the most densely populated in the region. Here, major transformation processes are underway: the population growth, the quickened development of Bamako, as well as the increase in motorization, match the widespread availability of mobile communication networks and solar energy. Despite these signs of apparent homologation, it is not possible to compare the emerging settlement forms with the ‘megacities region under construction’ that one can find in the nearby Gulf of Guinea (Choplin and Hertzog 2020). In the area between Bamako and Ségou, as well as in the rest of the Sahelian hinterland, the expansion of a few large cities inserts itself into a pattern of territorial settlements linked to the peasant villages that stud the flatlands [fig.1].

<footnote n="1">¹ In 2017, 29.9% of the 'urban' working population were employed, compared to 5.1% of the 'rural' working population. In 2017, Mali had 18.786.996 inhabitants of which 74.8% are considered to belong to the rural *milieu* (INSTAT, 2017).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_24.png" /><figcaption>[fig.1] Map of agricultural land use, hydrography, roads and settlements in the main waterways' basins between Bamako and Ségou. Source: elaborated by the author.</figcaption></figure>

Along the national road that links the cities of Bamako and Ségou, peasant villages (dougou) alternate with pluvial cultivations, grazing, hunting and harvesting areas (kungo) and slight depressions of the ground where rainwater is collected (ka). The village (dougou) keeps a certain level of autonomy, particularly in terms of food production, and it represents the economic and social unit that weaves the net of local geographies together along the paths of the seasonal impluvium waterways (ka). There, the water table is closer to ground level and the waterways' shores are suitable for cereal cultivation (Benjaminsen 2002).

In West Africa (as in other parts of the African continent), to name peasant culture means first of all to recognize its existence and the way it defines specific 'territorial figures'<fnref n="2" />, images of the spatial-ecological frames in which living is immersed. On a more general level, taking a peasant perspective means looking at ongoing transformation processes holistically, without sectorising the different aspects of living. As Maria Mies explains, commenting on her work 'The Subsistence Perspective' (1999) from which this article is directly inspired: "We aren't speaking of a subsistence economy, but of a subsistence perspective. That is to say, it's not an economic model, but rather, a new orientation, a new way of looking at the economy. That means something entirely different. It doesn't just apply to the economy, but also to society, culture, history, and all other possible areas" (2005).

In the second two decades of the 21st century, assuming a peasant perspective means referring to social movements such as 'La Via Campesina' defined by some authors as 'new ontological politics', "la cui posta in gioco classica, quella relativa alla questione della produzione e della distribuzione della ricchezza sociale, si articola con la possibilità di produrre una differente natura storica" (Avallone, 2015, p.23). This also echoes 'critical agrarian studies' which are "simultaneously a tradition of research, thought and political action, an institutionalized academic field, and an informal network" (Edelman, Wolford, 2017, p.962). Like LVC (La Via Campesina), they position themselves as "politically engaged, pluralist and internationalist" (Borras, 2023, p.476).

<footnote n="2">² By territorial figures we mean the conceptual representations that interpret the conditions of the existing in relation to the structuring elements of the territory with reference to Paola Viganò reflection on the tools of the project as a "forma specifica di interrogazione della realtà" (Viganò 2010).</footnote>
If we look at inhabiting a territory in West Africa from a peasant perspective, we recognize a space
made up of interweavings and knots of different nature in which the fundamental dualisms are
articulated around "de ce qui est ouvert et de ce qui est fermé, de ce qui est visible et de ce qui est
invisible, de la vulnerabilité et de la durabilité" (Mbembe, 2023, p.43)<fnref n="3" />. In this context, discussing
rurality and urbanity acquires a relative value. In a pluralist perspective, or rather of pluriverse, "les
cultures de notre époque vivent plusieurs temps different mais en subissant les mêmes
transformations, les mêmes influences" (Glissant, 1990, p.83). This means questioning the
assumption of overcoming the opposition between urban and rural "by the extension of urbanism
to the entire territory" (Corboz, 1983, p.15) as a consequence of the disappearance of the peasantry
as such (Corboz 1998) and the percolation of market laws into every aspect of life, of the *vivant*.
This article proposes a peasant perspective to reflect on settlement transformation processes in
Southern Mali. The neighbourhood of Ségoukoura in the city of Ségou is considered a case study.
The space of the city is investigated from the practices of everyday life because these represent the
main terrain of social change (Federici 2018). The 'southern urban theory' has expressed on several
occasions the need to examine the practices and imaginaries of the everyday with reference to the
'hyper generative dimension of daily life' (Pieterse 2009; Mbembe, Nuttall 2004; Simone 2004).
"Daily life, like language, contains manifest forms and deep structures that are implicit in its
operations, yet concealed in and through them" (Lefebvre, 2005, p.2). When considered from a
peasant perspective, this language is, in the first place, an ecology, where ecology is understood as
the place of coexistence made up of many opaque membranes that protect what's different and
make relationships work (Glissant 1990). These relationships define "a space of flows, of flux, of
translocation, with multiple nexuses of entry and exit points" (Mbembe, Nuttall, 2004, p.351). On
the other hand, if we consider the territory as the horizon of reference (Corboz, 1983), these
relationships appear as well anchored to the soil towards which they turn a fundamental form of
dependency for the purpose of subsistence.

The artifacts of everyday life: symbols, spaces and land

Ségou is a city on the right bank of the Niger River about 200 km north of the capital Bamako. The city has seen its population grow exponentially over the past thirty years. The latest available official population figure is 135.000 (INSTAT, 2009), compared to 90.000 in the late 1980s (INSTAT, 1987).

Ségou is a historical city: it was the capital of the Bambara kingdom of Ségou until 1861, when El Hadji Oumar Tall<fnref n="4" /> conquered it. At that time, Ségou was a 'multiple capital' (Sow 2021) made up of four villages, the four Ségou: Ségoukoro (koro, old), Ségoubougou (bougou, hamlet), Ségoukoura (koura, new) and Ségoushikoro (shi koro, the old shea tree). When French settlers arrived, a town centre was defined at the village of Ségoushikoro and the settlement lost its historical multipolar feature. Since that time, the city began to expand in a radial manner. Today, Old Ségoushikoro is the commercial centre of the city with its baked brick colonial buildings, the harbour and the light installations of the large weekly market (sougouba).

Ségoukoura contains three settlement fabrics. The oldest is the village of Ségoukoura, which dates back to around 1750. It has maintained its original morphology defined by a density of dwellings shaped by courtyard clusters with a variable, non-orthogonal geometry. In Sègoukoura, as in other city villages, people continue to build above the same wall layouts. Sometimes they use concrete blocks instead of traditional mud bricks, but they preserve the salient heritage features in terms of typology and morphology.

There is only one plot whose walls do not border the others. This is the Bouarè family's house. The Somono, the fishermen, live in the northern part, and the Bambara, originally farmers, in the southern part. There is no clear delimitation, but, even today, there are two *dougoutiki* (village chiefs), one on each side. The Bouaré family is one of the two families, together with the Coulibaly,

<footnote n="3">³ In 'La communauté terrestre' (2023) Achille Mbembe refers to the Bambara culture. The Bambara are peasants who speak the language of the same name and inhabit the study territories between Bamako and Ségou. Mbembe considers their culture as one of 'l'Afrique ancienne', forgetting, perhaps, that Bambara peasants still inhabit this world.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ El Hadji Oumar Tall from the Fouta Toro region in present-day Sénégal started a jihad towards the Mandinka and Bambara regions around 1850. He went as far as the conquest of the Islamic kingdom of Macina in today's Mopti region in Mali. The Toucouleur Empire he ruled resisted until the French occupation in 1893.</footnote>
who has access to the social role of Bambara *dougoutiki*. Madou Bouaré from the large Bouaré family (*douba*, *dou*-family *ba*-big) kindly opened the doors of his home and guided us through the walls, symbols and objects of his daily life.

In the Bouaré courtyard, there are four *gwaw*, housing units consisting of bedrooms in which three of the Bouaré brothers live with their wives and children as well as a widowed sister. They are all built in *banco*, mud bricks, with cement plaster and a sheet metal roof; apart from Madou's house, which has mud plaster and a wooden structure roof covered with straw and earth. There is also an imposing concrete block building. However, the building is uninhabited and its construction is financed by a brother who lives in Bamako. There are also three sheds for a dozen sheep, a pigeon house, a ruined building inhabited by rabbits, and three outdoor toilets. To enter the courtyard, one must pass through a vestibule. Next to the rooms occupied by Madou together with his two wives and children, there is a large vestibule made of concrete blocks. This is the place where the village council meets to discuss issues affecting the community together with the *dougoutiki*. At the corner of the boundary wall stands another one, reserved for women on ceremonial days.

Bricks, wooden planks, scrap metal, and other useful materials are arranged in different corners of the courtyard. Roofless mud buildings are left to become piles of sand, while animals roam around. Everything is subject to possible change, apart from the two vestibules and the new building, a symbol of recent wealth [fig.2].

<figure><img src="image_25.png" /><figcaption>[fig.2] In the Bouré *douba* courtyard, Ségoukoura village, January 2022. Source: photo by the author.</figcaption></figure>

In the centre of the courtyard is the well where all the *gwaw* (households) draw water. Three concrete bricks, or three laterite stones, symbolize the place where the fire is lit for cooking. Nearby is always a mortar and *calebasse* or recycled plastic bowls.

The house of the Guindo family, meanwhile, is part of the settlement fabric of Ségoukoura résidentiel. This area is called *billiontiki* (one who has billions) by locals because the plots are the most expensive in the city. They are designed according to a late 1970s plots plan that included 1200 m² plots, 12 m wide roads, and 2400 m² public spaces at a distance of 200 m. The plan provided for the cadastral subdivision of the land and connection to the water and electricity network. However, it did not include the installation of sewage infrastructure or paved roads.
Today, the majority of the population consists of families who live as caretakers in empty houses or on not yet built land. The owners hold the land titles for speculative purposes and, apart from the Europeans who left a few years ago, it remains difficult for locals to rent the available houses.

Chaka Guindo immigrated with his wife to Ségou from the *Pays Dogon* about ten years ago. After several moves, he ended up in Ségoukoura and now lives on one of these large plots of land. Together with his wife and three children, he occupies an enclosed space of 12 m² made of concrete blocks and a sheet metal roof. He built a terraced space at the front covered with *karatà*, the straw with long intertwined stems. Spinach, grapevines and a few flowers grow on the branches supporting the terrace roof. Next to it, an enclosure for sheep and rabbits, and around it a few fruit trees and aromatic plants. Under the *karatà* roof, there are wood stove, bowls, a mortar and water jerry cans filled from the well on the other side of the courtyard. In the corner, a television connected to a satellite dish and powered by solar energy.

Chaka learned to farm with his family in a Dogon village. He has a precise knowledge of reproduction and fertility methods. Unlike most Bambara gardeners in Ségou, he does not use any kind of pesticide and prefers his own seeds. Chaka spends most of his time working in the garden of his house. Since he received the money to buy two solar panels and a pump from his previous employer, at least 600 m² of the courtyard are cultivated all year round [fig.3]. The family is self-sufficient in food, except for cereals, such as rice and millet, which are bought with the sale of garden products and with the income from Chaka's occasional work.

<figure><img src="image_26.png" /><figcaption>[fig.3] In the Guindo family garden during the rainy season, Ségoukoura résidentiel, August 2022. Source: photo by the author.</figcaption></figure>

In front of the front door stands a heap of dry leaves, branches and *gnama*, rubbish that Chaka waters down to make *nogo* (compost). Chaka also collects *nogo* in the public space next to his house. This is where the neighbours often deposit their rubbish and animals come to ruminate and defecate. Chaka prunes the trees in the public space before and after the rainy season and stores the wood for cooking. He uses the soil in the public space in front of his house to grow *sho* (beans) or *tiga* (peanuts) during the rainy season.
Sacks of onions grown all year round and potatoes, peanuts, maize and beans grown during the rainy season hang in the terrace. In October 2022, Chaka harvested 50 kg of beans of which he saved the seeds and sold the leaves as fodder, a meagre harvest of maize and potatoes, and 150 kg of peanuts of which he sold 50 kg and saved 20 kg as seed for the following season.

The Guindo family's garden changes throughout the year: plants grow and die, wood piled up dries, is burnt or becomes compost. New light constructions are set up and removed. The family home itself is in obligatory change: it may have to be left free from one day to the next if the owner asks for it. Every form of life in its various stages contributes to the reproduction of living without distinction between the decorative and the utilitarian: instruments of distant manufacture are juxtaposed with those of ancient model forms.

Ségoukoura is crossed by a paved road. South of the road, on the opposite side of the river, Bagadadji was built in the early 1970s. The name is derived from Bagdad. Like the neighbourhoods of Medine, Missira, Hamdallaye, and Dar Salam, it alludes to Arab-Muslim culture. The Bagadadji plotting was planned to relocate the inhabitants of the village of Ségoukoura, whose houses had suffered severe damage following an extraordinary flood that has remained in the collective memory without a precise date. Lots of 625 m² surrounded by 12 m wide orthogonal roads and public spaces of 3.600 m² were allocated to families. However, the large families (*douba*) remained in the old village: only a few family units (*gwa*) moved and some land was sold. A few years later, part of the plots were assigned to military officers.

Near the public space, where the daily market attended by the whole of Ségoukoura is located, sits the home of the Djire family. The Djire family living there consists of five *gwaw*, all members of the same Somono family from the village of Ségoukoura. In the village by the river, there is still the court of the *douba*, where Bagadadji's Djires go for celebrations or other purposes. Vieux Djire today works as a tailor and his workshop is located in one of the buildings in the plot. Together with his younger brother, he runs the business with seven electric sewing machines. In front of the entrance, there is a covered and enclosed terrace where customers wait their turn. Near the door, a jar is filled with water for passers-by.

Between 2019 and 2022, the years in which the surveys were conducted, the courtyard changed considerably. New lemon and guava trees were planted and the old papaya tree was replaced by new ones. The wood stacked in a corner was used to build a roof with *karatà*. Where there used to be a sheepfold, a concrete block warehouse has been built. The sheep are still there and when they are not left to graze in the street, they rest in front of the pigeon house [fig.4]. The five *gwaw* use a common outdoor toilet. A well is located in front of the shared kitchen-storeroom, where other building materials, including many mud bricks, are gathered. The fodder for the sheep is stored on top of the warehouse roofs. The Djires retrieve it from relatives in the old village, who are still fishermen and use pirogues to cross the river and collect straw on the opposite bank.
<figure><img src="image_27.png" /><figcaption>[fig.4] In the Djire family courtyard, Bagadadji, December 2021. Source: photo by the author.</figcaption></figure>

In Bagadadji's house, there are no *daba*, the tools for hoeing, nor stocks of beans or peanuts. One does not cook with wood as the Bourés and Guindos do but with coal bought in the neighbourhood. There are no vestibules. Access to the courtyard is between mud-brick rooms with cement plaster and a sheet metal roof. The gestures of drinking and fetching water from the well, eating from a shared plate while sitting on a low stand, cooking with the back bent over a *daga* (pot) at the fire of a low cooker, filling the plastic teapot to go to the outdoor toilet: all this is linked to a way of living defined by movements shaped under new influences, yet reliant on an ecology defined by the balances between the land, the source of all that is living, space, where “le vivent se compose sur la base d'un potentiel de variabilité, d'élasticité et de plasticité chaque fois changeant” (Mbembe, 2023, p.42), and artifacts which, like symbols, are “ustensiles de la vie..leur role [est] d'aider les humain à établir un pont entre leur propre 'réfection' et la réfection du monde” (Mbembe, 2023, p.23), in other words, to inhabit.

## Peasants without barns or a city of women

Along the road that separates Bagadadji from the village of Ségoukoura and Ségoukoura Residentiel, a wide range of activities take place. In the transect corresponding to the residential area, the road has an average width of 35 m. The two paved traffic lanes are approximately 6 m wide, bordered in several places by slight depressions in the ground where rainwater collects. Household waste (organic waste mixed with plastic bags) is deposited here, animals graze the grasses and shrubs that grow, and what remains is collected as brushwood to light the cooking fire. Along the road, a large public space of about 30.000 m² separates the residential area and the village. This space is occupied by a *grabal*, a livestock market where wood, coal and fodder are also sold, and a station for *katakatani*, two-wheeled public transport vehicles with trailers. The population density in the village is higher than in the residential area. The width of the road reduces to about 20 m and the numerous activities leave no space for buffer zones.

Craft and commercial activities are the same, but their frequency is different. There are activities carried out in segments of courtyard dwellings with extensions on the street by means of sheet metal or *karatà* shelters. These include handicraft activities such as welders, mechanics, carpenters, tailors, cobblers and barbers; commercial activities such as hardware shops, stationers, electronics
shops, second-hand clothes shops, plastic tool shops and grocery shops with basic consumer goods. There are also two bakeries and a pharmacy.

The remaining activities are carried out on public ground using sheet metal kiosks, *karatà* or sheet metal canopies, or a simple stall. These activities follow a variable timetable to meet neighbourhood needs. They mostly sell fresh vegetables that come from the gardens along the Niger River cultivated by village families. At break times, these are supplemented with products bought at the market, products that may come from the villages surrounding Ségou or from Europe. This is the case with onions and potatoes, which for a considerable part of the year are imported from Holland by multinational companies like Dacomex. The other stalls sell daily rations of basic necessities such as powdered milk, sugar, loose cigarettes, bags of Lipton or Chinese green tea, single-dose packets of Nestlé Nescafé, Maggi cubes, single-dose bags of soap powder, soap bars or loose nappies. Along the way, bulk gasoline is sold in recycled glass bottles [fig.5].

<figure><img src="image_28.png" /><figcaption>[fig.5] Flows and living around the *goudron* in Ségoukoura Source: elaborated by the author.</figcaption></figure>

The *goudron*, the street of Ségoukoura, appears as the variegated and fluid space of what Abdoumaliq Simone calls ‘popular economies’ (2019). “‘Popular economies’ refers to the variegated, promiscuous forms of organising the production of things, their repair, distribution, use, as well as the provision of social reproduction services that simultaneous fall inside and outside the ambit of formal capitalist production” (Simone, 2009, p.618). The logics and the time that define them are baroque, mottled (Gago 2018), and in their action ground “the ‘neoliberal reason’ (a supposed norm of pure mercantile calculus) is appropriated, ruined, transformed and relaunched by those who are supposed to be only its victims” (Gago, 2018, p.31).

Plastic packaging waste at the roadside emphasizes “the integration of households into new networks of capitalist production” (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1991, p.73). Everyday approaches to global market rules reveal how trade and craft are defined by the sharing of needs on a neighbourhood scale, the needs of oneself and one's *sighignogow* (neighbours, literally those who sit together). Where the sharing of practices and spaces is no longer possible as extensively as in spread-out villages, interactions accelerate and the dimension of the everyday acquires a reference value.

The satisfaction of the neighbourhood's needs interacts with the flows of the street. This intersection displays “the ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces,
persons, and practices” and how “these conjunctions become an infrastructure - a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city” (Simone, 2004, pp.407-408). At Ségoukoura, it is not only these conjunctions that are involved in the process of reproduction, the foundation of daily life. This process comprehends the set of activities that reproduce life and the ability to work day after day. For the most part, it is performed by women (Federici 2018). “Le femministe hanno dimostrato che la vita quotidiana non è un complesso generico di eventi, atteggiamenti ed esperienze in cerca di un ordine. È una realtà strutturata, organizzata attorno a un processo specifico di produzione, la produzione di essere umani, e il suo epicentro il lavoro domestico e i rapporti di genere” (Federici, 2018, p.159).

The rhythms and necessity of the reproduction of everyday life shape the space and time of the city. Beyond the flexibility and unpredictability of exchange opportunities, women's work anchors the city to the soil, the movements of the sun, and the flow of the seasons. It is guided by a peasant language. The act of eating, for example, is not fixed by conventional timetables, but rather by the cooking rhythms of unprocessed and unpackaged ingredients available in open-air shops at certain times of the day. In Ségou, a town of more than 150.000 inhabitants, there are no supermarkets: shared temporal and spatial references guarantee the sustenance of the *gwaw* (households) with the least possible energy expenditure.

Women in Ségoukoura cook in the *daga*, the recycled aluminium pots with convex bottom, as their sisters do in the villages. They lower their backs in the same way so as not to burn their eyes with the smoke from the fire. They shake the *calebasse* with firm movements to leap out rice or bean peels. They spin a small *calebasse* inside a larger one to wash the rice. As Achille Mbembe notes, writing about traditional Bambara culture, “savoir-faire et objets étaient considérés comme des gages de vie”, within the manner of “faire monde en se mouvant et en résonance avec les forces du vivant” (Mbembe, 2023, p.45). In the concreteness of these gestures, which are by no means trivial, present and daily needs intersect with a peasant temporality traceable in the signs of its territorial spatiality.

Reliance on everyday life implies a necessary relationship between the space of reproductive work and sociality. The domestic space where women cook for several hours is separated from the street, but not isolated from hearing and sight. To buy fresh or dried ingredients, each morning the women of Ségoukoura go to the market in Bagadadji and spend their *prix de condiments* there. In the morning they wash their clothes at the river or with tap water and often leave them to dry on the ground: the midday sun will soon dry them [fig.6]. They go to the neighbourhood mill to grind millet or maize and can look for some products in the grocery shop no more than 100 m away; or, they can buy from the street vendors who stop in their yard. They often engage in punctual trading activities, such as selling food at certain times of the day prepared in roadside stalls near their homes.
<figure><img src="image_29.png" /><figcaption>[fig.6] Morning laundry and gardens along the Niger in Sébougou, Ségou, December 2021. Source: photo by the author.</figcaption></figure>

In general, space is divided into degrees of openness towards the outside or protection towards the inside. From the bedroom, an intimate and inaccessible space, one quickly advances to the living room or terrace, the courtyard, the street in front of the house, and the paved road. Women move between these spaces punctually and conscientiously according to a map of the resources they have access to through pre-established relationships. One example is women's accessibility to medicinal plants, regardless of whether they are planted along the road or in a courtyard. Domestic space does not define a separation since, according to the peasant perspective, every activity intended for reproduction is work: through work, I inhabit the territory and relate to what is life.

Public space, that is, everything that is not part of the domestic space, is called *foroba*. *Foro* is the cultivated field, *ba* means big. In the peasant territories of southern Mali, *foroba* are the fields of extensive rain-fed cereal cultivation. The *foroba* are collective family fields managed according to the social customs of the village. They are not enclosed: the *douba* families have the right to cultivate in certain areas, but the fields are accessible to different actors depending on the season. The land traditionally belongs to the spirits of the subsoil and not to those who step on it.

Ségoukoura *foroba* is, beyond the goudron line, a permeable soil. There are paved zones, but bare soil is continuity. Most grey water is drained from outside toilets into open ditches on the street. During the rainy season, the passage of vehicles digs up areas where water stagnates, creating traffic problems and the multiplication of mosquitoes. As everywhere in the city, the 12 m wide unpaved roads that cross Ségoukoura do not respond to urban decorum. This is reserved only for a few paved roads. Rather, the dirt streets reveal the intimacy of domestic and neighbourhood reproductive cycles[fig.7]. The city's *foroba* changes over time: in addition to the different activities that punctually occupy it, the transit flow changes course after each rainy season. In less densely populated areas such as Ségoukoura Residentiel, flocks graze and, during the rainy season, *tiga* (peanuts), *shɔ* (beans), *gombo* (okra) or *da* (hibiscus) are cultivated. Preference is given to low plants over cereals grown in village *foroba* because, as Madou Coulibaly explains, in the city it is not recommended: someone could hide among the stems.
<figure><img src="image_30.png" /><figcaption>[fig.7] Three sisters on the roads of Bagadadji, January 2020. Source: photo by the author.</figcaption></figure>

## Ruralization in urbanization in Southern Mali: spaces of possibility

Abdoumaliq Simone devoted much of his thinking to placing African cities in the world. “The ‘worlding’ is more than simply a state of being ‘cast out’ into the world as the ‘homeless’ or the marginal. Granted, there is little autonomy African societies can currently exercise in terms of ensuring a sufficiency of resources and participation in international economic transactions. Yet, African cities continue to be places of experimentation for engagement, the terms of which are not exclusively fixed or determined in advance” (Simone, 2001, p.22). People’s effort would be to create a plurality of alliances and opportunities to relate the everyday, local dimension with an ‘elsewhere’ that retains a sense of ‘open-endedness’ (Simone 2001). In this gesture, the inside, as opposed to the outside, acquires, according to Simone, a symbolic and spiritual dimension and configures “geographies that are off the ‘map’” (2001, p.25), as described by Filip De Boeck in his tales of Kinshasa (2014).

For Achille Mbembe, the encounter between local and global assumes, in turn, the figure of the interweaving: “la conscience de cette imbrication de l’ici et de l’ailleurs, la présence de l’ailleurs dans l’ici et vice versa, cette relativisation des racines et des appartenances primaires et cette manière d’embrasser, en toute connaissance de cause, l’étrange, l’étranger et le lointain.. de domestiquer l’infamilier, de travailler avec ce qui a tout l’air des contraires - c’est cette sensibilité culturelle, historique et esthétique qu’indique bien le terme ‘afropolitanisme’” (2010, pp.180-181). For the philosopher, Johannesburg is the most manifest laboratory of *la façon d’être monde* of African cities (2010), and ‘afropolitanism’ a poetics of the world forged at “l’interface de l’autochtonie et du cosmopolitisme” (2000, p.16). Mbembe is bringing his broader reflection ‘À propos des écritures africaines de soi’ (2000) into the city’s spaces. A tradition of reflection on ‘identity’ in its double political and cultural dimension that finds its roots in the brutal encounter of slavery and colonialism. ‘Identity’ is here critically confronted with the idea of ‘universal’ and then of humanity. Ségoukoura is a very different place from the inner-city Johannesburg portrayed by Simone (2004) or the cosmopolitan capital Mbembe refers to (2010). Ségoukoura in Ségou, on the banks of the Niger River, is the place where “les représentations africaines de soi” (Mbembe, 2000, p.16) are
forged at the interface between the forest lushness on one side and the desert sands on the other. It faces the river that unites and flows to the distant Atlantic Ocean shores. It is a land of the Sahel, in other words, a place where the “pensée de l'enchêvêtrement et de la concatenation” (Mbembe, 2010, p.66) is above all an aspiration of the peasant populations that inhabit it. Aware, like any other, that “n'existe pas d'alternative à la modernité”, their “travail pour l'universel” (Mbembe, 2010, p.28) consists in materially creating spaces where processes of ruralization meet those of urbanisation. Ruralization can be understood as “the processual, more-than-residual, and geographically-variegated socio-spatial dynamics of contemporary human engagements with rural land, livelihoods, and lifestyles” (Gillen, Bunnell, Rigg, 2022, p.3). This intersects with the construction of the *dugouba* (city, literally large village), “a complex, multifaceted and sometimes contradictory process” (Murray, Meyers, 2006, p.3) in which the diversification of labour and the extension of housing density lead to intensive exchange relationships, as in the paved road of Ségoukoura.

Yet it does not happen as ‘hybridization’. Glissant himself distinguished ‘hybridization’, the calculated outcome of a process, from the ‘creole’ encounter whose results are always different and unexpected (1990). It does happen in a way that leaves a constant possibility of encounter.

Terry McGee's seminal work in Southeast Asia highlighted how settlement transformation processes in the 'Third World' could follow a different itinerary to the Western model (1971). At the time when the city-territory debate was consolidating in Europe and North America as an actual extension of the urban, McGee framed the term *desakota* (*desa*-village, *kota*-city) to describe the spatial and morphological intertwining of urban and rural in the city development regions of South East Asia (1991). However, McGee's most significant contribution may have been to recognize ruralization as a process and its role in the transformations of living. In his early studies on rural-urban migration, McGee investigates social processes, rather than spatial and morphological patterns, and asks the question “how can this factor of ‘ruralization’ of the cities be incorporated into the typology of urban model?”, since "when a city...has a high number of features which are characteristically rural...this does not mean that the features of an urban style are affected, but it does mean that any static model of urbanism must be changed" (1971, pp.55-56). Fifty years later, while the ‘extended metropolis’ of Southeast Asia is still being investigated, debate continues on new analytical frameworks to bridge the gap between urban and rural studies (Ghosh 2017; Gururani 2020; Roy 2016).

In the African context, the city-territory debate has contributed to the definition of a new scale of study (Dorier-Apprill, Domingo, 2004). This has been particularly focused on the peri-urban, where the dilution and spread of settlements lead to a blurred distinction between urban and rural in terms of space occupation and land management (Buire 2014; Jaglin, Didier, Dubresson 2018; Sawyer 2014). In particular, the multipolar character of urban expansion has emerged in different parts of the continent (Denis 2015) challenging a simple core-periphery binary (Pieterse 2019). However, a question still remains between the images of an 'Africa's urban revolution' (Pieterse, Parnell 2014) and the problematic nature of translating locally an urban-centred thought on the city.

In ‘The Ruralization of the World’, Krause proposes an alternative to the “intellectual imperialism of the urban” (2013, p.234). According to Krause, “only when we ruralize the way we think, can we fully disaggregate the different distinctions that have been subsumed under the categories of urban and rural, and think about the different ways they can be put together in forms of social settlement. Only from this perspective can we examine the different ways they are put together again as part of contemporary socio-spatial transformations” (2013, p.234). Studies such as those by Gillen, Bunnell and Rigg echo this position (2022). Inspired by McGee, their work on/from the Global South seeks to form “new dialogues and ways of thinking in human geography” (2022, p.14). They argue that from this placement “ruralization takes the rural-urban binary not as a set of oppositional categories but a relationality” (2022, p.13).

Ségoukoura in Ségou contributes to the discussion by emphasizing that the subsistence of reproductive labour linked to peasant practices is a necessary condition for this relationship, this potentially unfinished encounter, to be possible. These relate to the urban and the rural, as they relate to the local and the global, to what is open and what is closed, to what is visible and what is invisible; as they relate to an idea of identity and humanity: they take different forms shaped by the possibilities of the contemporary world. The four perspectives of the urban and the rural, the global
and the local meet here in a radical and original way, disrupting the analogies between globalisation, depeasantization and capitalism.

Present-day peasant practices hold a clearly structuring role at the scale of southern Malian territories (Pietrobon 2021). Ségoukoura in Ségou suggests that they could fulfil this role at the scale of the city too. The peasant perspective allows us to consider these spaces of possibility and encounter as tools for the construction of a prosperous and decolonial future.

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# Critically Mapping the Micropolitics of Varying Notions to Land in Alshigelab (Janoob Al Hizam)

Khalda Imad Mubarak El Jack

OSA Research Group, KU Leuven
Viviana d'Auria
Expected thesis defence: January 2025
Khaldaimadmubarak.eljack@kuleuven.be

Where the urban and rural meet in settlements such as Alshigeilab, arise varying notions of land and ways to govern it. A once agropastoral village situated on the riverbank of the White Nile south of Khartoum, Alshigelab had been subjected to the Village planning and Incorporation schemes administered by the Sudanese Land Department in the late 1980s. Although the department's objective of "bringing the village into the urban" could be seen in widened roads and formalized tenureship documents for some, what has risen in the aftermath of these schemes is a more complex hybrid of dynamics that speak to the relations fostered between inhabitants and the lands they inhabit. Through a series of mapping workshops conducted with local organizations and community members, the paper aims to investigate how overlapping claims have transformed customarily owned agricultural land along the riverbanks into densely populated settlements and the spatially manifested social contestations that have risen because of it. By doing so, the paper offers a critique to these schemes four decades later, foregrounding not only the contestations, but the networks of solidarity that have been shaped in the interstices of state-led positions. As such, it contests the dominant view of the peri-urban landscape as a site "awaiting to become urban", but as a territory where resistance and solidarity are re-shaping what constitutes the urban.

## On Land

Oftentimes, discourse around land in urban areas is associated with municipal legal frameworks of tenureship that at a minimum constitute who owns it, plot sizes and regulations on how buildings are to be constructed on it. However, these universalized standards (which surely differ from one urban area to another) leave little room to understand and take into consideration the multiplicity of meanings attributed to land by its various inhabitants. This discrepancy comes into particular attention where the urban and rural meet, a dichotomous relation that many urban and geography scholars have strived to un-dichotomize. In the context of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, this relationship between the urban and rural may be read through the lens of land and the various notions attributed to it by the populations inhabiting the region south of Khartoum. As shown in the quote above, to many, the notion of *ard* goes beyond legal frameworks. It brings to the surface attributes of generational history, legacies, culture, and belonging, transcending the ownership of a single plot, to the stewardship of what lies beyond it. However, these varying attributes do not exist independent of one another, but rather they overlap to create complex inhabited landscapes that are in constant tension, giving rise to different ways in which the *ard* is inhabited, taken care of, and governed. They exist in a state of in-betweenness, as framed by Franck et al. (2021), whereby, in a context of rapid urbanisation such as Khartoum, "the question of belonging and otherness" emerges from "the issue of access to land".

Through a series of fieldwork visits to Alshigelab in the summer of 2021 and a critical mapping workshop held with the youth of the settlement conducted in January to March of 2023, the idea of land and how it is governed appeared to be central to the settlement's varying community formations and disputes. In this paper, three of these notions will be highlighted, situating them within a broader network of actors and overlapping ideas of land and governance that surfaced.

## Collective Critical Mapping as a Methodology

Between January and March 2023, the Mapping to Action Training Workshop <fnref n="1" /> was organized, primarily focusing on capacity building and community empowerment in Alshigelab. It was initiated as a response to the momentum of its youth-led neighborhood resistance committees (NRC) who

<footnote n="1">¹ Find out more on the Mapping to Action training programme on the project website here - http://mappingtoaction.com/</footnote>
have proactively engaged with local and international organizations to facilitate a variety of projects for their neighborhood over the last 3 years. These focused on medical training, better NRC organization and securing aid for families impacted by the unprecedented floods of 2020, filling in the void left by the government for immediate action. This particular call evoked the need to better understand the complexities of overlapping land uses that are central to Alshigelab's internal disputes and communal formations. It is for this reason that the program offered an introduction to critical mapping through a series of lectures and action-based fieldwork. The research draws from Iconoclassistas' (est. 2006) practice of critical mapping as a collective methodology that seeks to critically draw out networks of influence on space relationally.

Through the program, we worked *with* community members to draw out past and present lived experiences, policies, landscape, and spatial logics, layering them to better understand their influences on one another. The collective consisted of a team of organizers, trainers, researchers, and community facilitators, working with 45 participants (28 young active inhabitants of Alshigelab and 17 young researchers and local organization members from the broader Khartoum region). Participants worked in guided groups of four under the collectively deduced themes of (a) Coexisting with floods in Alshigelab, (b) Natural resources of Alshigelab between the past and present, (c) Health reality in Alshigelab, and (d) Multiplicity of public spaces in Alshigelab, offering a series of co-constructed maps that foregrounded multiple layers shaping the settlement. This training in critical mapping required a continuous process of deconstructing the idea of the map; what it looks like, who can make it, and what information it has the potential to hold. Its role continuously shifted between a tool for dialogue and a medium of representation. Although it was made clear to us early on that asking about land ownership was off limits, a complex topic too sensitive to be explicitly addressed, it implicitly surfaced amidst discussions in all four themes, entangled with layers of healthcare, public use, and climate-driven ecological transformations.

<figure><img src="image_31.png" /><figcaption>Overlapping notions of land & emerging networks of solidarity</figcaption></figure>

Source: author as interpreted from fieldwork in Alshigelab in July-August 2021

## Alshigelab

Alshigelab, a settlement that exists on the eastern riverbank of the White Nile south of Khartoum, is an example of where overlapping notions of land have come into fruition since the introduction of the “Village Incorporation and Planning Schemes” introduced by the Ministry of Planning in the early 1990s. Where the settlement now exists as a collection of seven neighborhoods, sat three agropastoral villages, spread across the landscape, and inhabited by descendants of the Hassaniya family and ethnic group. The three villages became the cores from which the newly formed neighborhoods grew, expanding eastwards towards *Shari' Al Jabal* (Al Jabal Road), that connects
northwards to Khartoum's city center, and southwards to the Gezira state. The paper uses the following three narratives to understand the micro-politics of land in this settlement through the varying forms of relations old and new inhabitants, as well as civil servant workers from the land department, have attributed to it.

## From stewardship to ownership in an urbanizing context

The Village Incorporation & Planning scheme implemented in Alshigelab in the early 1970s had two main objectives as indicated by the Ministry of Planning; to 'bring the village into the urban' by introducing electricity and water lines into the village which entailed a tradeoff reducing the size of inhabited areas to widen roads and assigning title deeds (shahadat bahth) to these inhabited areas, documenting their size and demarcating them into plots; to replan the spaces between villages which were in the past customarily owned grazing lands for cattle. As the influx of people rose into Khartoum due to political unrest in other parts of the country in the 1970s, 80s and early 2000s, these spaces were sold by the Hassaniya through *hiyaza*, a tenureship form which constituted a personal exchange between old inhabitants and newcomers, on the way towards receiving full legal tenureship. An interview with a resident of the Al Khor neighborhood in 2021, one of the village cores that was expanded, highlighted that although he had bought his plot in the early 1990s through hiyaza, he is still struggling to attain full ownership of the plot to this day. The process of "formalizing" land ownership through state-led understandings of land in a context where land had been customarily owned for a century before, lay the groundwork for a complex morphological transformation of the urban/rural in this area, creating social tensions between those considered asyad al ard (stewards of the land) and ghuraba (foreigners). For some, the ownership of this land is a legacy, for others, a way to legitimize their presence in Khartoum, and for both, a sense of security against forceful evictions in the face of a city that continues to expand.

"We told them [the locality government] that they couldn't build a taras here, but they did anyway, and now the water is trapped"

<figure><img src="image_32.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_33.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_34.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_35.png" /></figure>

## Local knowledge & land beyond the inhabited

Set atop this complex socio-spatial backdrop, the unprecedented floods that impacted Alshigelab and other settlements along both the White and Blue Niles in August 2021, brought into light the underlying tensions created at the intersection of land, water, and ownership. Tensions rose, not only between the Hassaniya and the new landowners who were sold lands in precarious areas close to the Nile's edge, but also between them and the local municipality. The coexistence of the Hassaniya group with water for the past century has given them a knowledge of the landscape they inhabit. Mobilizing collectively on an annual basis, inhabitants protected their settlements, cattle, and agriculture through the construction of the taras (sand barricades), which were carefully curated each year in response to the seasonally rising water levels. The rapid increase of these levels in
August 2021 and years thereafter, required emergency response, however, as tractors filled with sand sent from the local municipality made their way to the riverbanks of the Nile, local knowledge of the territory were dismissed, and sand barricades over two meters high, were constructed at manfas al Nile (a naturally formed wide canal which is where the Nile would normally expand into). The implications of this dismissed local knowledge of the territory is still seen today, where the sand barricade has not completely broken down, and water has been trapped. This has impacted the livelihoods of farmers who typically farm in this landscape during dry season, as well as the use of the space for social activities as it once was. Here we see how land, even in the uninhabited, and its varying degrees of wetness is a source of tension between those who hold knowledge of this relationship, and bureaucratic structures that disregard them.

<figure><img src="image_36.png" /></figure>

Source: (above) google earth edited by author (January, 2021), (below) Ammani Soodhabe, Mohammed, Fudailoula, Mohamed Mohamed Agath, Alwa Abdalrahman Al Nour, Yisara Alwandi Mohamed, Ezzedine, Amra Almed, Ezzu Rahma, Abdella, Adem Yusuf Idres, Magdy Mohamed Kassar, Mstazr ibmed Saïd Almed (February, 2023)

## Legitimization through social contracts

Through the critical mapping workshop conducted, it became evident that the legitimization of one's stewardship over land does not only exist within the formalized frameworks of varying tenureship statuses documented on paper, but also exist through verbal social contracts that are both fluid and transient. The riverbanks of the White Nile along Alshigelab are occupied by customarily owned agricultural lands passed on from generation to generation within the Hassaniya family, public spaces known as the bahar dotted with tea ladies serving tea and shisha, and clusters of fishermen who appear and disappear every six months from the landscape. Unlike the farmers who also permanently reside in the village, many these fisherman groups are from elsewhere, traveling north to Alshigelab seasonally living and working on the edges of the Nile. Their days are driven by the fishing schedule, oftentimes setting out in boats during the night, and sleeping or heading to the market by day. As an extension of this social contract, before the fish is taken to the market to sell to the wider Khartoum population, those in Alshigelab, particularly those living close by, arrive at the riverbank with their baskets between 8h to 9h to select from the fresh catch of the day for free. For both fishermen and farming communities alike, cultivating the land and river is driven by an intricate knowledge of seasonal cycles and networks that extend beyond the settlement, it impacts how they settle and follow an alternative annual cycle to others who inhabit the urban.

## Janoob Al Hizam – From the situated to the territorial

The land dynamics that overlap in Alshigelab do not exist in isolation, however, its location in Janoob Al Hizam gives room to contextualize it within a broader peri-urban territory which has undergone rapid transformation since the early 1970s. Janoob Al Hizam (south of the belt) gets its popular name from Al Hizam Al Akhdar (the green belt), a forest in the flat landscape that
demarcated a southern edge to Khartoum's colonial city, atop which now sits a military complex, sewage treatment plant, industrial area and residential neighborhoods. The Hizam has, and continues to, play a significant role in the urbanization of the Sudanese capital. Tucked between the Blue and White Niles, the territory which exists south of it where once existed a landscape of grazing lands, agropastoral villages and agricultural lands, now is home to a complex peri-urban landscape that is home to a myriad of expanding agropastoral villages, privatized agricultural lands, residential neighborhoods, squatter settlements and the remnants of internal displacement camps. For some, the choice (or lack thereof) to live far from their workplace in Khartoum's city center – 45 minutes to 2-hour drives away – is due to the rapid commodification of land and real estate around them, making it accessible to a select number of the city's inhabitants.

Over the last four decades, similar patterns of growth to Alshigelab have been experienced in over 15 villages (Ministry of Planning 2014) across the Janoob Al Hizam territory. The implementation of village incorporation and planning schemes have given rise to contestations over land, its distribution, and its governance, transforming them from spaces of collective customary ownership to individual plots. Studies in nearby villages (Elamin 2013, Casciarri 2021, Assal 2015) mostly located along the riverbanks of the Blue and White Niles, have showcased how the conflicts around land that have risen at the scale of a settlement, are embedded within larger “conflicts over resources nationwide, population growth, land-grabbing” (Assal 2015), all of which have given rise to emerging forms of urban governance that can no longer be subverted by a universal understanding and governing of land in this urban context.

**Khartoum's Continuously Shifting Present – An opening**

It is difficult to reflect on Alshigelab and Janoob Al Hizam without discussing the ongoing armed conflict which has ravaged through the country, particularly Khartoum, since April 15, 2023. Where once lay the center of Sudan's administrative capital and home to over 7 million people, now lies the remnants of destructed public service buildings, homes, public spaces, and streets. This is not to say that it is over, rather far from it. Each day that passes, news is shared from the ground, primarily through Twitter posts and WhatsApp communication, of heavy artillery but also platforms for mass mobilization by civilians caught in the crossfire. The conflict, headed by the country's two armed forces, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support forces, has led to the displacement of over 1,000,000 of Khartoum's inhabitants, as reported by the IOM (May 2023). For those who have been able, financially, safety has been searched for in states around the country, or across national borders, into Egypt, South Sudan, Chad, and Ethiopia. Private homes forcefully abandoned by their owners are now being looted, inhabited, and used as sniper positions or makeshift prisons for those abducted by the armed groups.

In addition to the various destinations listed above, many have also found safety in the many settlements of Janoob Al Hizam. Reuniting with family members or living with strangers on their way to states south of the capital, the notions of land in this territory once again continue to shift and change, now introducing the precariousness of inhabitation in a time of war. In the case of Alshigelab, various members from the RSF have rented, forcefully occupied, and bought land over the last 40 days, embedding themselves within the settlement. As national archives and land records in government buildings are being looted and burnt to the ground, and as the urban is a constant state of movement, it leaves us to question what will happen in the aftermath of the war with regards to the legitimacy of claims to land in the various settlements of Janoob Al Hizam and Alshigelab? What will be of the various relationships constructed by inhabitants to the ard over the decades? Will there be room to reimagine state-led understandings of land that stem from the multiplicity created by those inhabiting it?

**Bibliography**

* Ali Yahya, Rogaia Yahya. "Documentation of Village Planning and Organization Works, State of Khartoum".
* Ministry of Planning and Urban Development, *State of Khartoum* (2014). (translated from Arabic)
Assal, Munzoul. “The Question of Identity in Sudan: New dimensions for and Old Problem.” *The Maghreb Review* 34, no. 2 (2009): 181-194.

Elamin, Nisreen. “The Miskeet Tree Doesn’t Belong Here: Shifting land values and the politics of belonging in Um Doum, central Sudan.” *Critical African Studies* 10, no. 1 (2018): 67-88.

Sikainga, Ahmad Alawad. “Urban Society in Colonial Sudan”. *Oxford Research Encyclopedias, African History*. (2017). 1-18.

Steel, Greet, Abukashawa, S. Hussein, M.O. “Urban Transformations and Land Governance in Peri-Urban Khartoum: The case of Soba”. *Tidschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie* 111, no. 1 (2019): 45-59.

Franck, Alice, Casciarri, Barbara. “The Expansion of Greater Khartoum and the Incorporation of Agricultural and Pastoral Production Areas: Creating In-Betweenness, Disrupting Territories”. In *Alice Franck, Barbara Casciarri, Idris Salim El-Hassan* (eds.) *In-betweenness in Greater Khartoum: Spaces, temporalities and identities from separation to revolution*. (2021). 29-52.
I.b
Cross-borders territories : mobility,
migrations

*The Borderlands in the test of representation : life paths of Roms families in Lille's metropolisation*
Lassalle Roman, UCL/Lille (BE/FR) (p.66)

*TOD against the context in cross-border metropolis? Visions and paradoxes in the case of the Great Genava Agglomeration* (p.81)
Guichot Flore, EPFLausanne (CH)

*From lines and nodes to edges and dialogues in the dispersed territory. The case of former railway line 87 in the Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai* (p.96)
Leemans Sophie, KULeuven (BE)

*Rethinking extractive landscapes in cross-border areas* (p.110)
Caravello Chiara, Uliège (BE)
# The Borderlands in the test of representation : life paths of Roms families in Lille's metropolisation.

*Lassalle Roman*

Affiliation : ULille, UCL

Supervisor : Bénédicte Grosjean (ULille), Chloé Salembier (UCL)

Expected thesis defence: September, 2025

roman.lassalle@uclouvain.be

The evolution of our contemporary borders is leading to tangible changes in our societies, both in terms of their increasingly diffuse characteristics and their differentiated impact on individuals. Current migration phenomena and the challenges posed by borders are constantly calling into question our relationship with the world. As we follow the journey of a Roma family in the Lille metropolitan area, a number of clues come to light. Borders manifest themselves in the form of a social filter that generates distinct 'border trials'. The places occupied by these migrants from Eastern Europe appear to be a consequence of borders in socio-spatial practices. Defining and naming these places means not only giving them an existence, but also becoming aware of the multiscalar and diffuse aspects of the territory of exile.

Out of respect for the families and to protect their privacy, the names of the people mentioned in the article have been changed.

## Introduction

### A personal journey

*Origin of the research and definit ions of terms*

The origin of this reflection can be traced back to a number of journeys during which I travelled along various borders. The border of the Kaliningrad enclave, the border of Transnistria, the border between Serbia and Croatia, the border between France and Belgium - whether on foot, by bike or in a kayak, I've been fascinated by these landscapes, these encounters with the border people, with whom I've learnt so much [fig.1]. These places with their distinctive contours produce landscapes in their own right, and the stories and memories of the people who live there all seem to be part of a single territory, that of the border. So, it's no coincidence that we talk about "border dwellers", people who live in the "in-between", in a world governed by its own rules, a world between worlds.

It was this attraction to these very particular social and spatial landscapes that inspired my desire to enrich my perception and understanding of these places. How can these places be represented? How do you reveal their dynamics, their thickness, their contours or their multi-scalar aspect? How do you give them a presence in the world that can at least partly convey the reality of the lives and journeys that mark out these places?

The aim of this research is not to define what a 'border' is, either as an administrative line or as a political object. Georg Simmel describes the border not as "a spatial fact with sociological consequences, but as a sociological fact that takes on a spatial form" (Simmel, 1958-1918). Thus, the border is a sociological fact that influences and produces spatial forms, while having significant effects on society. The focus of our research is therefore more on the consequences of these administrative lines on people's experiences, life stories and spatial forms. These consequences take diffuse and multiscale forms, and require reflection on the means of revealing and representing them, particularly through media such as cartography and film.