Assignment, Week 7

1. How do factors of migration, movement and transportation affect your city?
2. Using Google Earth, mark the nearest airport, rail and bus/taxi hubs, market (commercial center) and political center of your city. Measure the distance from the airport, rail station and bus/taxi hubs to the commercial center using Google Earth. Provide a screenshot of Google Earth with each of these points marked.
3. Continue to rectify the African city plans assigned to you (2–3 cities). Provide screenshots of these rectified maps on your blog.

Migration is a big issue in Bangui, mainly because it just keeps growing. This has been the case since the early 20th century, as discussed in earlier posts, but the reasons have changed. During the colonial era, it was the prospect of finding work that brought tens of thousands of workers from the countryside to Bangui’s cramped peripheries (Villien et al. 43–44). Today, to some extent, that factor still exists, but an additional draw is the fact that Bangui is the only part of the country over which the national government has any semblance of control. Everywhere else is perennially unstable, rendering the capital—whether by mythicized view or objective comparison—a desirable alternative.

Movement is difficult, as are many other things in Bangui. The city has a public transit system which consists of green buses and yellow taxis, all of which are known for being dangerously overcrowded due to deficiencies in fleet size and poor maintenance (State Department 2012). The city’s main bus station is the Gare Routière, 2.14 miles (3.44 kilometers) from the Central Market. Buses leave from here to go to other cities and towns like Bouar and Ndélé (Gheos).

Subway? Light rail? Freight trains? Don’t be silly. The nearest rail station is 355 miles (571 kilometers) away in Bondo, D.R. Congo (U.N.). Most raw materials are transported to Bangui by truck, then put on boats and transferred downriver to Brazzaville, then brought to Pointe-Noire by rail before going on to Europe, Asia or North America for refinement (C.I.A.). River transport is probably among the better-developed domains of regular movement in Bangui, as it provides large-scale transport of raw materials and ferries across the Ubangi in the absence of a bridge.

Bangui has the country’s only international airport, Bangui–M’Poko, which has one of the country’s two paved runways. BGF (its I.A.T.A. code) is a recent construction—it is not shown on a regional map from 1963, though information about its exact date of construction is not easily available. The 1963 map shows a military airport occupying the area around what is now the National Assembly a few miles outside of the city center. This appears to have been completely demolished and replaced by the new one, which is 5.11 miles (8.22 kilometers) northwest of the city center and has a longer runway (Zarhy 25).

The pushpins are, starting at the top, Bangui-M’Poko International Airport; the Gare Routière (bus terminal); the Palais Presidentiel (political center, surrounded by other government buildings); and the Marche Central (commercial center). To find a train station, follow these directions: From the city center, walk to the river and take a ferry across. Drive 93 kilometers southeast on the gravel-paved N23, make a sharp left and follow the N6 for 832 kilometers, then turn right onto the N4 for another 123 kilometers until you reach Bondo. Alternatively, charter an airplane.

Maps

I have continued with my rectification. I rectified two more maps of Libreville, shown below. These were really hard, because there weren’t too many solid reference points I could use. Both, from 1964, showed very little development and lots of dense forest. Currently, one of the two areas has been completely incorporated into metropolitan Libreville—and the other is still dense forest. I’m not sure which was harder to rectify. I ended up having to use coastlines (which looked like they had changed a bit) as references for both, but they came out O.K.

References

“Bangui.” Gheos World Travel Guide. 25 March 2012.Web. 25 March 2012 <http://gheos.com/atlas/index/place.php?Bangui>.

“Central African Republic.” The C.I.A. World Factbook. 21 March 2012.Web. <https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ct.html>.

“Central African Republic: Country Specific Information.” Travel.State.Gov. 2 March 2012.Web. 25 March 2012 <http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1085.html.

Democratic Republic of the Congo. New York: United Nations, 2011.

Villien, François, et al. Bangui, Capitale d’un Pays Enclavé d’Afrique Centrale : Étude Historique et Géographique. 4 Vol. Talence: Centre de Recherches sur les Espaces Tropicaux, Institut de Géographie, Université de Bordeaux III, 1990. Print.

Zarhy, M. Les Centres Urbains et Régionaux de la République Centrafricaine. Jerusalem: Institut de Planification et de Développement S.A., 1963. Print.

Assignment, Week 6

1. Continue to rectify the African city plans assigned to you (2­–3 cities). Provide screenshots of these rectified maps on your blog.
2. Select two of the additional cities you have rectified and compare them with your city from the vantage of spatial differences. Illustrate your findings with screen shots and other images.

The map-rectifying is going well. Predictably, my plans for high break-time productivity largely collapsed, but I did find myself with some free time last night to work on maps. I have now completed five out of my twelve: four of Douala, Cameroon, and one of Yaoundé, Cameroon. Screenshots below:

The southwest corner of Douala, closest to the harbor, was presumably the colonial “European” sector; it now has the majority of the city’s infrastructure, including government ministries, hospitals and embassies. See the interactive map here.

Moving east, there are still well-planned blocks, but few place-markers other than “École,” suggesting a colonial-era, now upper-class, residential area. Rectifying this map was made more difficult—and more useful—by the presence of no fewer than seven clouds obscuring the satellite image. See the interactive map here.

To the north of the previous map is also a large residential area, but a different color—literally. I don’t have a legend, but it seems as though the mapmakers drew any colonial or European-style buildings in red and everything else in gray, which is consistent with the color of the planned neighborhoods in the other maps and the much more chaotic ones here. Note that a marketplace, a couple of missions, a police station and a railway stockyard on this map are also red. See the interactive map here.

This northern part of the city looks like a commercial area, judging from the mixture of red and gray buildings. There are also large areas of undeveloped land, maybe parks or golf courses. See the interactive map here.

This is a map of central Cameroon, including the city of Yaoundé (center-left). It was a breeze to rectify, since it had latitude and longitude markers; they were not precisely accurate, but enough so that I didn’t think it worth it to refine any more. Yaoundé, from what I can see, has undergone unchecked sprawl in a large part dictated by the topography of the region (hills and plateaus and such); in this way it reminds me of Kigali. (See the white billowiness behind the map there? Well, it must have been overcast in Yaoundé that day.) See the interactive map here.

Douala is known for its sprawling, underdeveloped slums; most of them are not shown in the four maps I rectified, and there are probably a lot more of them now than there were when those maps were drawn in 1963. In this way, it shows a similar contrast between the decaying neatness and spaciousness of the former European city and the expanses of ramshackle slums to what is seen in Bangui. It is not quite on the same magnitude, though: Douala’s worst squatter-like slums are far away from the city center, and the remnants of its European city are fairly large; in Bangui, the European city was very small, and the completely unplanned settlements start just outside the city center. This is probably related to Douala’s longtime importance as a port city, as opposed to Bangui’s obscurity due to its remoteness. Additionally, Douala is simply larger: its population is well over 2 million, whereas Bangui’s is ambiguously at about 700,000. Interestingly, similar proportions of their respective countries live in them: 10.7% of Cameroonians live in Douala, and 12% of Central Africans live in Bangui (source).

Another unusual parallel between Douala and Bangui relates to their shared location on rivers—Douala at the mouth of the Wouri River, and Bangui a good distance up the Ubangi. One of the first things I notice about the first map of Douala I rectified is that the coastline that existed in 1963 is vastly different from the one shown by the recent satellite image. This could either be the result of landfilling or sedimentation, and possibly a mixture of the two, but there is simply a lot more land—and developed land!—in Douala now than there was 40 years ago.

The 1963 roadmap overlaid onto very recent Google satellite imagery: notice that, though the streets match up perfectly, the coastlines are completely different. See the interactive map here.

This happens in Bangui too—though on a smaller scale, and I’m fairly certain that it is all sedimentation (curve in the river and all that) and no landfilling. I mainly just notice that the same islands in the Ubangi river are shown as different sizes on every new map I try to rectify. The map-warper hates me for it.

It’s hard to compare Yaoundé with Bangui with so little detail on the map I rectified. The main thing that I notice is that Yaoundé’s expansion, as I noted in the above caption, seems to be much more determined by topographical variation than Bangui’s; it is true that Bangui’s sprawl is limited by the river to the south and a hill to the east, but other than that it has essentially radiated out evenly in all directions. Yaoundé, on the other hand, is not built on a body of water and has expanded in all directions—but to varying extents, apparently contingent upon the prevalence of hills and plateaus.

Assignment, Week 5

1. Upload and rectify an early plan of your city. Analyze core differences between this early plan and the current city plan. Mark these differences and provide related screenshots. What, if anything do these changes convey about difference and identity in your city?
2. Select one article from an early newspaper addressing your city and discuss its main themes. Source: Historical Newspaper Project.
3. Begin to rectify the African city plans assigned to you (2–3 cities). Provide screenshots of these rectified maps on your blog.
4. Discuss briefly the subject(s) you would like to address in your final paper on your city.

A plan of Bangui from 1930 looks much like a plan of central Bangui today (Villien 41). To some extent, this is to be expected, as streets are generally stationary. What is unexpected is that, looking at Bangui then and now, it becomes clear that very little urban planning has taken place since that map was drawn.

Bangui’s city center has hardly changed at all since 1930. Images: Villien 41, Google Maps

In 1930, Bangui consisted of a European city with spacious boulevards and soundly constructed buildings, and several African “feeder” villages which sprang up around it to provide workers for European households and enterprises—or simply because people thought they had more of a chance in the city than in the country.

The feeders grew and grew over time. Soon, they dwarfed the planned city and butted right up against it. The French response was minimal: a map from 1963 shows a few more thoroughfares extending out into the urban sprawl, but no planning within the villages, which quickly became squatter settlements (Zarhy 25). Since 1963, aside from the construction of a civilian airport, there appears to have been no planned development in Bangui whatsoever. Meanwhile, the sprawl has continued unchecked, spilling over into the neighboring province as what paved roads existed fall into disrepair, building up to a planner’s perfect storm.

The white spaces to the north and west of the city center on this 1963 map were and are filled by unplanned squatter settlements.

Consistent with the de facto French policy of ignoring Equatorial Africa to the extent possible, Bangui received minimal coverage in newspapers before independence, except when mentioned as a stopover for daring explorers or as the end of multiple promised French railways that never materialized. Two events, however, did receive some amount of coverage.

The first was a widely reproduced letter from French explorer Pierre Sauvorgnan de Brazza, who had been appointed to assess conditions in various parts of French Equatorial Africa in 1905, in response to criticisms of rubber-harvesting in the Congo Free State. He visited Bangui and the region, and “found the conditions … intolerable,” though “[e]verything was done to hide the true state of affairs” (The Colorado Springs Gazette).

The accusations against the French administration—that local populations were forced to gather rubber at gunpoint, frequently flogged to death and imprisoned until they starved—were similar to those leveled against King Léopold in the Congo, and similarly true. One particularly distressing study has found a direct correlation between rubber production and bullets used on harvesters in one part of the Equatorial Africa. Luckily for the French, de Brazza died on his way back to France, and his complaints were forgotten (Hochschild 280–281).

So-called “red rubber,” however, did go out of style after its devastating effects in the Congo Free State were documented. It was reinstituted, however, when World War II necessitated a surge in production of raw materials. Mandatory gathering resumed, much to the chagrin of the victimized populations (Villien 42). An article in The New York Times from 1942 reports that “ ‘the 1942 rubber output is three times as large as last year’s,’ ” and connects this to the leadership of Charles de Gaulle without so much as mentioning that the rubber harvesters had no choice in the matter (The New York Times).

French Equatorial Africa as a whole spent its entire existence being ignored, and even after independence its component states have only managed to make headlines because of famines, civil wars or especially repressive dictators. For my final paper, I plan to address that neglect and its consequences. In particular, the most troublesome legacy of the colonial era in Bangui is the dichotomy between the planned city and the proliferation of unplanned slums. Good urban planning could have softened the impact of this “rural exodus,” as the French called it, but nothing of the sort materialized. In my paper, I will tentatively address the successes and failures of any French responses to this problem, and how urban sprawl continues to threaten Bangui today.

Maps I’ve Rectified

In addition to this blog, I have been assigned some maps to upload and warp over satellite imagery. We then put them on a cool web app called WorldMap, where they will be aggregated with other maps. I have been maintaining a section with maps of Bangui, which I don’t think I have mentioned here yet. I encourage you to have a look; the U.R.L. is http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/oubangui.

The maps which I have been assigned are as follows: four of Douala (Cameroon), one of Yaoundé (Cameroon), three of Libreville (Gabon), one of Brazzaville (Rep. of Congo) and three of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). These are to be rectified and uploaded throughout the semester. So far I have done two of Douala, screenshots of which appear below. With the first one, I am very satisfied, but weird stuff started happening with the second.

I’ll have to redo that second one later. To see these maps in all their interactive glory, go to http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/oubangui and scroll over to Douala, Cameroon.

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References

“Economic Gains Sharp in Africa: Sees Free French Gain.” The New York Times, sec. News: 12. Print. 10 May 1942.

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Print.

“Mission to French Congo Finds Bad State of Affairs.” Colorado Springs Gazette: 2. Print. 27 Sep 1905.

Villien, François, et al. Bangui, Capitale d’un Pays Enclavé d’Afrique Centrale : Étude Historique et Géographique. 4 Vol. Talence: Centre de Recherches sur les Espaces Tropicaux, Institut de Géographie, Université de Bordeaux III, 1990. Print.