Envisaging New Urban Futures for Kinshasa

This lecture addressed the tensions between life as lived on the ground by millions of urban residents in Kinshasa and the official attempts which are launched by the Congolese government to create a new -but exclusionist- urban environment. In order to illustrate this tension two concrete cases were introduced: a first case focused on current modes of ‘informal’ urban expansion and random occupation of space in the city. The second case dealt with the development of a new urban project, the ‘Cité du Fleuve’, which fully illustrates the official vision of Kinshasa’s urban future.status: publishe