The history of cities is doubly useful: it clarifies the transformations of an entire country and the regional contrasts that must also be accounted for in order to understand what is happening.
This volume presents a thorough record of the cities of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using a solidly multidisciplinary approach, Léon de Saint-Moulin has integrated the best quantitative and qualitative data into a vision that elucidates the most important dimensions of social phenomena and blazes a trail through a wide range of issues. His thinking goes from the ‘micro-scale' of national space, to the ‘macro-scale' of neighbourhoods, and to the intermediary scale of relations between cities and their immediate environment.
On the historical front, the author shows that Congolese cities are not colonial creations. The space of Central Africa had long-distance organization and important poles before colonization, which reorganized them for its own profit. Today, new mine exploitation and the spread of motor and air transport has relegated somewhat the once majestic route of the river. The DRC is developing especially its urbanization of the southern plateaus, but a new urban axis is also emerging from Uvira to Bunia and beyond. By reading this book, the reader in some ways visits one of the largest building sites in human history.'