Making the Non-City and Casting out the Unwanted: The Cases of Conakry (Republic of Guinea) and Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire)

Conakry and Abidjan were built by the French colonial administration between the 1920s and 1930s. Both cities grew out of a former conglomeration of small villages and coastal towns where the indigenous populations had to be displaced, symbolically or physically, to realize the colonial project of making the city. Furthermore, in these urban regions of West Africa, colonial processes historically shifted endogenous urban nodes from the hinterland to coastal areas to meet the needs of colonial administration and trade routes to Western metropolises. These processes had a profound impact on urban infrastructure and planning, the effects of which are still felt today. One of the main effects of the colonial era was to divide cities along racial lines, with the colonial city reserved for whites and the indigenous city—"la ville des indigènes” in Fanon's terminology of the French colonial regime—abandoned to Africans. These trends continued after independence and during the post-colonial period for the young republics of Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire, where the cities of Conakry and Abidjan had to deal with the unwanted, i.e., people, ideas, social movements, and urban imaginaries, contrary to the historical colonial logic of city-making characterized by control of territory, goods, and population flows. This presentation is based on a comparative study of eviction policies in the cities of Conakry and Abidjan, which illustrate the colonial filiation and post-colonial continuity in the process of making the city that resembles a non-city. This non-city-making process is based on the urban alienation of formerly colonized populations, who find themselves in charge of urban planning and casting out the unwanted.