the same background. The shaded zone is the urbanized area as identified visually according to the criterion of density and contiguity of the built-up area. It extends beyond the boundaries of Bamako District. Beyond the shaded zone are the peri-urban areas and the rural hinterland.

# **5.2. The spatial segmentation of modes of access to land**

The main purpose of the survey is to explore how land has been accessed in and around Bamako over a several-year period in order to identify modes of access to land in terms of tenure and possible tenure transitions, accounting for the dynamic of the land delivery system (See figure 4.1). A period of three years only was chosen in order to ensure sufficient quality of responses to retrospective questions in our cross-sectional survey. According to the land delivery system described in Section 4, households may access land in the following ways:

- a. Purchase of land from a customary owner, which may or may not involve a monetary transaction (see subsection 3.1);

- b. Allocation of a land plot through the public and para-public land delivery channel (see sub-section 3.2);

- c. Purchase of a land plot in a land development ( _lotissement_ ) made by a formal private developer (see subsection 3.3);

- d. Purchase of a land plot on the formal or informal secondary land markets (see sub-section 4.1).

To analyze the data collected, we classify modes of land access by using the following categories:

- i. Purchase of land on the private land market (whether formal or informal), lumping together categories c and d which cannot be systematically distinguished with our data;

- ii. Public allocation of land (where plots are obtained directly from a public authority), corresponding to category b;

- iii. Purchase of customary land (i.e. where plots are transferred from a customary owner by means of a monetary transaction), corresponding to a subcategory of a; and

- iv. Non-monetary customary access to land (where customary land is obtained in exchange for a symbolic payment of kola nuts, sometimes including a chicken as well), which corresponds to the other subcategory of a.

It should be noted that just as our sample may not be representative of the universe of all transacted plots over the study period, it might also not be representative of the relative sizes of the different access modes. The survey nevertheless illustrates the diversity of the ways households access land and upgrade their tenure in Bamako and its surroundings, which is the main focus of our study.<sup>56</sup> The different types of transactions that we document tend to occur in distinct areas. This is shown on Figure 5.1 below which plots the geographic co-ordinates of our sample’s plots by land access modes.

The spatial patterns of land access modes are rather clear-cut. Although plots that were obtained under the private and public land access modes are spread out throughout the study area, they occupy relatively central locations. In contrast, plots obtained from customary owners are located further away from the city center. Monetized and nonmonetized transfers of customary land occur in outer rings of the peri-urban area and rural hinterland. Most interestingly, whereas the median monetized customary transaction occurs 32km away from the city center, nonmonetized customary transfers are found in a peri-urban ring with a greater median location of 37 km. This pattern corroborates previous observations made by social scientists on the “emergence of land markets” fueled by urban expansion and the conversion of customary land in peri-urban areas in Africa (see Durand-Lasserve 1998, Rakodi & Leduka 2004, Wehrmann 2008).

> 56 The composition of our sample is as follows: non-customary plots that were privately transacted (68%), plots publicly allocated (3%), customary plots sold for money (20%), and customary plots exchanged according to custom (9%).

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