Land for Sale. Transactions, Inequalities, Mobilizations. Dialogues from the Peripheries of African Metropolises

The peripheries of African metropolises are today one of the main fronts of global urbanization. In a context of some of the fastest urban growth in the world—where the continent's built-up area has nearly doubled since 1990 and close to one billion additional urban residents are expected by 2050—the rural outskirts of cities are becoming strategic spaces where major transformations in land ownership and land use are taking place.

These two-day workshops, organized at the conclusion of the ANR METROLAND project, aim to revisit the main findings of four years of collaborative research devoted to these transformations. Based on fieldwork conducted in the peripheries of Nairobi (Kenya), Dakar (Senegal), and Bamako (Mali), the project shows that the production of habitable land and housing involves a plurality of actors with unequal capacities and diverse interests. Transactions, subdivisions, re-legitimation of rights, and plot reconfigurations are key mechanisms driving the accelerated commodification of peri-urban land.

Structured around thematic roundtables, this workshop provided a space for collective discussion on contemporary urbanization dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa: land markets and value chains, the sociology of property, socio-spatial inequalities, conflicts and mobilizations around land, and the habitability of these transitional territories. The workshop was held with simultaneous English-French interpretation.