Literatura académica sobre el tema "Anarchic urbanisation"

This article describes the ideological outline of a broad doctrine called green anarchism. Green anarchism is one of the branches of anarchist thought, which has gained popularity in modern times, as evidenced by numerous Polish and foreign scientific and popular publications concerning the history of ecological anarchism and the emergence of radical ecological circles that share some of the values which form the basis of the classical anarchist schools (anarcho-communism, anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-individualism and anarcho-syndicalism). Ecological anarchism is a collection of many minor doctrines, philosophies and lifestyles referring to the fight against capitalism, which destroys the natural environment, the apotheosis of freedom, and the promotion of specific diets (fruitarianism, veganism, vegetarianism). The ideas of the co-founders of the green anarchist school are sometimes hostile to related factions and other doctrines (conservatism, nationalism, fascism). The article discusses the ideological profile of the three most popular and well-developed trends in ecological anarchism: anarcho-veganism, anarcho-primitivism and anarcho-naturism. Additionally, it presents excerpts of the works and views of the precursors of this rich political thought (such as Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau), the sources of which can be found in the 18th century. The aim of this article is to show that green anarchism is a political thought which has a rich history and is constantly being developed on many continents. It is a critique of contemporary phenomena, such as globalisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, and the destruction of nature resulting from the activities of corporations associated with certain industries.

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the consequences of urban environmental degradation on the well-being of Spanish miners. It is based on analyses of differences in mortality and height. The first part of the paper examines new hypotheses regarding the urban penalty. We take into consideration existing works in economic theory that address market failures when analysing the higher urban death rate. We explain the reduction in height using the model recently created by Floud, Fogel, Harris and Hong for British cities. The second part of the paper presents information demonstrating that the urban areas in the two largest mining areas in Spain (Bilbao and the Cartagena-La Unión mountain range) experienced a higher death rate relative to rural areas as a consequence of market failures derived from what we term an ‘anarchic urbanisation’.

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of DIY design practices at a skatepark in London, UK. The skatepark is presented as an urban commons, offering a framework for DIY infrastructuring that contrasts top-down and inequitable urbanisation processes. Three key themes emerge from the fieldwork that demonstrate the capacities and limitations of DIY design. Firstly, DIY practices are viewed as “learning-by-doing”, wherein skateboarders not only learn how to construct a skatepark but also an array of vocational and soft skills. Here, DIY’s qualities of low barriers to participation, multidisciplinarity, and low risk of failure foreground a rich environment of vernacular knowledge exchange that underpins the research methodology of this paper utilising skatepark construction as object-orientated, research-through-design. Secondly, DIY design is found to support a community of practitioners that transcend the space as just a skatepark, incorporating a community garden, collaborative theatre project and arts-based workshops that transcend male-dominated histories of DIY skateboarding cultures. Here, Participatory Design (PD) notions of ‘infrastructuring’ mirror an emergent and open-ended design process that supports inclusive socio-material worldmaking. Thirdly, DIY design practices influence the ways in which the space is governed, in which there are found to be contradictory notions of “prefigurative politics.” Here, the space is argued to be inclusive and anarchic yet centres agency around notions of “core skateboarding” that reinforce masculine hegemonies. Collectively, this paper argues that DIY design has the potential to serve as a worldmaking agent underpinned by a unique set of values and modes which are well-suited to times of uncertainty, flux and crisis, yet highlights the necessity for critically engaging with the politics and practices of both DIY and skateboarding communities.

In Cameroon, the environmental profile is increasingly marked by anarchic urbanisation, which is strongly illustrated by the discharge of waste into the aquatic environment, leading to pollution. Indeed, the tributaries of the Mfoundi and Mefou river basins have nowadays become dumping grounds and receptacles for all kinds of waste, leading to the degradation of water quality and a reduction in biodiversity. This study aims to evaluate the effect of anthropogenic pressure on the biodiversity of benthic macroinvertebrates in three rivers of the Mfoundi basin (Ebogo, Abiergue, and Ako’o). For this purpose, some physicochemical parameters were measured according to standard methods, and benthic macroinvertebrates were collected according to the multihabitat approach. To this end, the physicochemical analyses revealed that the waters of these different streams are slightly basic and poorly oxygenated, with a saturation rate of 9.725 ± 11.74% and significant organic pollution. Biologically, a total of 5793 benthic macroinvertebrates divided into three phyla, eight orders, and more than thirty families were collected, with a population dominated by the order of insects and a low level of diversity dominated by pollutant organisms such as the Chironomidae, Lumbriculidae, and Physidae, which are saprobionts and saprophilous organisms. A redundancy analysis indicated that the main groups of benthic macroinvertebrates obtained were related to the gradients of the physicochemical parameters measured. The Shannon–Weaver diversity and Piélou equitability indexes showed the low diversity of the organisms within the different courses and their low equipartition, mainly due to the saprobiont and saprophilous groups that dominate the population. The exogenous inputs due to the increase in the population of the city of Yaoundé, which dumps its waste into the waterways, have major repercussions on the quality of the water and the population that abounds in this environment, particularly the benthic macroinvertebrates, which are an important link in the monitoring of water quality.

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. 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Depuis sa création en 1849, Libreville a connu une urbanisation non planifiée et non coordonnée. Au fil des décennies, cette urbanisation anarchique s'accompagne de déséquilibres environnementaux et soumet les citadins à de nombreux risques écosystémiques. L'urbanisation anarchique, son univers de production et les risques écosystémiques engendrés sont l'objet de cette recherche. Des questions peu abordées au Gabon sont soulevées : comment, par qui et pourquoi l'urbanisation anarchique est-elle produite ? Que révèle cette forme de production de la ville ? Dans quelle mesure la production de l'urbanisation anarchique contribue-t-elle à l'accroissement des risques écosystémiques ? Les réponses sont formulées suivant quatre axes. Dans un premier axe les changements d'occupation des sols dans la ville ont été identifiés, caractérisés et analysés. Les outils de télédétection et SIG utilisés ont permis de produire des cartes d'occupation des sols et des cartes de risques. Un deuxième axe étudie les relations nature-société à Libreville, et met en évidence les perceptions de la ville et de la nature, tout en identifiant les bienfaits que tirent les populations de la nature, et les risques écosystémiques auxquels la population est exposée. Le processus d'urbanisation en cours à Libreville a été caractérisé et analysé dans un troisième axe. Ces deux derniers axes s'appuient sur l'enquête de terrain par entretiens semi-directifs, les récits de vie recueillis auprès des populations et des acteurs locaux. Dans le quatrième axe, un regard prospectif a été porté sur Libreville à l'aide des cartes de simulation de l'occupation des sols. Les résultats de cette recherche montrent une expansion rapide, importante et déstructurée de l'emprise urbaine de Libreville et ses environs, accompagnée d'une déforestation importante de la région, principalement au nord. La dynamique observée dans la ville est le résultat d'un cercle vicieux : occupation anarchique des sols, accès à la terre de gré à gré, spéculation foncière, absence de contrôle foncier par l'État et laisser-faire, etc. Ces résultats montrent une perception généralisée de la dégradation de la nature et des pratiques de conservation et de protection, tant des citadins que des décideurs, une réduction de la biodiversité et témoignent de conflits citadins-nature. La dégradation et l'importante déforestation des mangroves et la construction des maisons sont les principales causes avancées par les enquêtés. Ainsi, les changements d'occupation des sols, et les impacts sur la nature, conduisent à l'augmentation des risques écosystémiques d'inondation et d'érosion côtière, perçus différemment selon l'âge, la localisation, le statut professionnel, etc. L'érosion continentale est très peu perçue comme un risque ou un problème, en dépit des résultats cartographiques montrant des zones exposées. En tant que coproduction des populations et des acteurs locaux, les divers acteurs trouvent un intérêt à l'urbanisation non-contrôlée. Des routines structurent la coproduction de l'espace : des campements précaires, des routes et pistes ouvrent la voie à l'urbanisation et la déforestation, etc. Une absence de synergie, des conflits de compétences, une décentralisation insuffisante, une gabegie financière et une politique à outrance marquent également cette urbanisation anarchique. Dans un scénario de laisser-faire, la modélisation prospective de l'occupation des sols montre, une réduction importante de la végétation dense dans les espaces protégés. Dans un schéma de contrôle, en revanche, elle montre une conservation de la quasi-totalité des zones protégées. Ces situations, qui renseignent sur l'avenir de Libreville, posent des questions sur la gouvernance urbaine et environnementale au Gabon. Alors, est faite une tentative d'analyse des possibilités de changement en s'appuyant sur des modèles de villes en Afrique et dans le monde, tant sur les aspects urbains qu'environnementaux
Since its creation in 1849, Libreville has experienced unplanned and uncoordinated urbanisation. Over the decades, this anarchic urbanisation has been accompanied by environmental imbalances and has subjected city dwellers to numerous ecosystem risks. This research focuses on anarchic urbanisation, its production universe and the resulting ecosystem risks. Questions that are not often addressed in Gabon are raised: how, by whom and why is anarchic urbanisation produced? What does this form of urban production reveal? To what extent does the production of anarchic urbanisation contribute to the increase in ecosystem risks? The answers are formulated along four lines. In the first axis, land use changes in the city were identified, characterised and analysed. Remote sensing and GIS tools were used to produce land use maps and risk maps. A second axis studies nature-society relations in Libreville, and highlights the perceptions of the city and nature, while identifying the benefits that the population derives from nature, and the ecosystemic risks to which the population is exposed. The urbanisation process underway in Libreville was characterised and analysed in a third axis. These last two axes are based on fieldwork using semi-directive interviews and life stories collected from local populations and actors. In the fourth section, a prospective view of Libreville was taken using land-use simulation maps. The results of this research show a rapid, significant and unstructured expansion of the urban area of Libreville and its surroundings, accompanied by significant deforestation of the region, mainly in the north. The dynamics observed in the city are the result of a vicious circle: anarchic land occupation, access to land by mutual agreement, land speculation, lack of land control by the state and laissez-faire, etc. These results show a widespread perception of nature degradation and conservation and protection practices by both city dwellers and decision-makers, a reduction in biodiversity and evidence of city-nature conflicts. The degradation and extensive deforestation of mangroves and the construction of houses are the main causes put forward by the respondents. Thus, changes in land use and impacts on nature lead to an increase in the ecosystem risks of flooding and coastal erosion, which are perceived differently according to age, location, professional status, etc. Continental erosion is very little perceived as a risk or a problem, despite mapping results showing exposed areas. As a co-production of local populations and actors, the various actors find an interest in uncontrolled urbanisation. Routines structure the co-production of space: precarious settlements, roads and tracks pave the way for urbanisation and deforestation, etc. A lack of synergy, conflicts of competence, insufficient decentralisation, financial mismanagement and excessive politics also mark this anarchic urbanisation. In a laissez-faire scenario, prospective land-use modelling shows a significant reduction in dense vegetation in protected areas. In a control scenario, on the other hand, it shows a conservation of almost all the protected areas. These situations, which provide information on the future of Libreville, raise questions about urban and environmental governance in Gabon. An attempt is therefore made to analyse the possibilities for change based on models of cities in Africa and the world, both on urban and environmental aspects