Spatial dynamics and urban governance issues of the Touba model (Senegal)

Résumé

Urban sprawl remains a cross-cutting issue in almost every city in the world. It takes the form of various processes relating to levels of development, geographic and temporal scales, political wills. In African cities, notably the example of Touba in Senegal, sprawl accentuates the urban divide, promoting social and spatial segregation, land pressure, inflation and land disputes putting the city in a big planning dilemma since several decades. In fact, the peculiarity of Touba is that it is a religious city (capital of Mouridism), the second city of Senegal and is located on a land title whose crossing of its limits is underway. This article, based on observation, the quantitative / qualitative method and the analysis of socioeconomic data correlated to participatory mapping, sets itself as the main objective of determining the factors, issues and consequences of spatial spreading on the model. governance of the religious city of Touba. The results made it possible first of all to see that the unoccupied, undeveloped plots swell the land base to almost 30% of the urban space; then, they show that the centralized governance model around the general caliph and the subsidiarity of the State, in decision-making in matters of governance is the source of the many failings and gaps observed in the planning of the city of Touba; and finally, they show that informality is a resource and opportunity for development in Touba but, at the same time, it is an obstacle to the sustainability of the governance model.