An Urban Monitor as support for a participative management of developing cities


1 Background

1.1 Urban management in developing countries
In developing countries, cities are experiencing a real demographic explosion. Today they shelter more than 40% of the population of these countries and are subjected to the doubling of their size every twenty-five years on average, and every fifteen years in East and West Africa (UNCHS, 2001).

The decentralization policies, which are being generalized, are giving the main urban management authorities to the municipalities. However, with very limited means and unqualified staff, they are unable to handle all the tasks allotted to them. In such a context, problems arise: informal settlements, construction of the unoccupied land (agricultural zones, land reserves, land unfitted for settlements), poorly maintained and insufficient infrastructures and equipments, lack of waste and wastewater evacuation and processing, natural resources degradation, etc.

Numerous experiences have attempted to provide solutions to these problems. But following the analysis of the UNECA 1 (Fourie & Nino-Fluck, 1999), the success rate is low, either because the tools are not adapted to the field reality, or because the capable staff is missing for their implementation.

1.2 The city of Thiès and the project IMAP

Tab 1: Development indicators for the city of Thies

Thiès, the second largest agglomeration in Senegal in terms of its population, is a classical example of middle sized developing city, as presented in table 1. Being managed with an annual budget of two million euros (a hundred to a thousand times less than a European city of the same size), the town has at its disposal a staff limited to four executives: an administrator, an engineer and two technical managers. They are in charge of several crucial problems:
  • Firstly, a constant demand for new settlements, which is inducing a multiplication of the informal settlements, a strong land speculation, and that is degenerating after some years into a conflict with the surrounding rural villages;
  • A second conflict pits the city against the neighboring rural communities, due to the problem of city expansion that lacks consultation and transparency;
  • Concerning the environment, the nonexistence of any dumps and the accumulation of wastes on the vacant land requires an urgent action;
  • Finally, several town districts have become unhealthy because of the lack of wastewater evacuation systems and of the frequent flooding due to the deforestation of the surrounding hills.
In accordance with the transfer of authorities following the decentralization 2 , the mayor of Thiès has been able to tackle the urban management of the town. Under the pressure of the community associations, he has engaged a consultation process with the different stakeholders of the territory, for a participative and jointly devised planning of the city and its environment (project IMAP). This approach took shape in 1999 through the creation of a formal collaboration framework and through the starting of a participative urban management process between the public authorities, the community associations, the rural villages and the town districts. An order of the prefect and a collaboration agreement have institutionalized the partnership between the town, the neighboring rural community (Fandène), the NGO ENDA-TM, the Superior Polytechnic School of Thiès and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (Gaye & Prélaz-Droux, 2001). An originality of this partnership is in its working form: no central funding is available and each partner is intervening on its own resources, as detailed in table 2.


Tab 2: Partnership and funding

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