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- Title
The Trajectory of Bamako’s Peri-Urban Transformation: Exploring the Actors’ Logic and Survival Strategies of Village Kabala, Mali, Africa.
- Authors
Babu, Abhilash; Cisse BARRY, Hamadou Amadou; ASSEYDOU, Mohamadine
- Abstract
The term “peri-urbanization” refers to the process through which cities are forced to expand into surrounding territories. The onset of economic globalisation, liberalisation, and transnational corporations’ migration from core to peripheral countries in pursuit of cheap labour and resources, together with the population growth brought on by both internal and foreign migration, are the driving forces behind this phenomenon. The village of Kabala, in the rural commune of Kalabancoro, southwest of Bamako, Mali, has experienced rapid urbanization and the resultant urban sprawl, as in other African countries. This has resulted in the transformation of the land and social relations. It has led to the disappearance of agricultural land in favour of buildings. It also led to a conflicting and collaborative relationship between the customary institutions and modern apparatuses of governance. Land has been transformed from a source of livelihood and survival to an object in the commodity market. Faced with the anarchic urban sprawl of the village boundaries, the local people express their concern about transforming their land. The study has been placed within the analytical frame work of “Space” proposed by David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, which enables the capture of the larger political and economic drivers of peri-urban spaces and the creation of diverse subjectivities at the local level. The study concludes that anarchic urban sprawl creates hegemonic peri-urban spaces in which the local inhabitants have to acquiesce to the modern state apparatuses of governance, but not without opening a space of liberated life for those the traditional institutions have historically controlled.
- Publication
Gandhi Marg, 2023, Vol 45, Issue 3, p301
- ISSN
0016-4437
- Publication type
Article