This is the old United Nations University website. Talking about recent trends in Kinshasa's urban growth and trying to understand their causes is quite a challenge.
The city, which is probably the second largest in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of population after Lagos , is indeed poorly known at present because of the decay of its supervisory bodies and therefore the lack of reliable data.
The international media have reported the crisis at its climax. In particular, the events of September , marked by soldiers' extortions and plunder by those who took advantage of the situation, contributed to the destruction of part of the productive services and the wealth of knowledge accumulated on the city and the country, while revealing the state's bankruptcy.
But this bankruptcy had been in the making for a long time, with services in total chaos for years and data from the census questionable. Although it is difficult to proceed in a classical manner with the scientific analysis of such an urban set-up, understanding Kinshasa's situation is, however, crucial, because it seems to be a forerunner of what one can begin to detect elsewhere in Africa and maybe the rest of the world.
How can a city of this size and deprived of supervisory bodies keep on operating? What is the future of a capital city whose growth was based on the presence of a state that has now collapsed? Is there going to be a massive urban exodus before a gigantic redistribution of the population? Can the city survive the actor that gave birth to it and maintained it despite repeated and sometimes violent reactions from peripheral regions such as the successive revolts in the rich mining area of Shaba?
