Relationship Between Urban and Rural Areas in the Urban Growth of Mbanza-Ngungu

Abstract

This paper aims to understand how the Democratic Republic of Congo western part is becoming urbanised through the case of the medium-sized city of Mbanza-Ngungu, in the Kongo Central province, located on the road between Kinshasa (150 km) and Matadi (225 km), the gateway to the ocean for the whole country. To achieve this, the research cross urban mapping with a city's economy study. More specifically, it’s about understanding finely the link between market gardening and charcoal production in village areas directly accessible from the city and urban development. In this, the research is in line with the city economic approach , linking urbanisation to the wealth accumulation (Harvey 1985, Sahel and West Africa Club, 2002; Halbert, 2021), on the one hand, and in that which, in the sociological field, considers urbanisation not so much as a physical fact —built space— as a social and ontological reality —urbanisation as behaviour— (Remy and Voyé, 1992), all within the overall framework of thinking about urbanisation as a planetary phenomenon (Brenner and Schmitz, 2014) which indissociably affects the so-called urban and rural lands. The paper will therefore show the direct link between the desire to live in the city and the need to continue exploiting village land. An original cartography will be used to describe the structure of Mbanza-Ngungu at several scales according to space-time. Before exploring exchanges with Kinshasa through the prism of urban exchange sites, this description will analyse the trajectories of the inhabitants exploiting rural land.