Our neighborhood in Dakar looks like it has been bombed.
The coworking space for IDinsight’s newest office is tucked away in a neighborhood called Mamelles, a 5-minute walk up sandy streets from the nearest tarred road. The massive heaps of rubble, large holes, and families squatting in half-made buildings seems to indicate a sense of disorder, entropy. The truth is surprisingly opposite; Mamelles is rapidly developing and in-demand for new housing.
Two factors contribute most to the difference between the reality and appearance of the place. First, credit constraints hamper the pace of development. If you’re trying to put up a three-story housing unit in Mamelles, you dig out a foundation and bring in big stacks of cinderblocks to show that the place is yours. Then, you wait for two weeks or two years until you have the money to put up the outside walls. Bit by bit, the place goes up, and a decade later you might start seeing return on investment. In the meantime, the open-walled edifice provides housing to whoever wants it.
The second factor is a lack of the big capital goods and infrastructure you need to put buildings up fast. The common method of transport for large objects is a horse-cart; manual pulleys are used to shift building supplies on the sites; and most of the rest is done by hand. When you have nothing but a shovel to shift a two-ton pile of rock chunks, you’re probably going to leave it where it is for as long as you can.
And yet- and yet- this fascinating city grows, cinderblock by cinderblock. In 10 years, Mamelles might have tarred roads, and all that they imply. And man, I’ll be glad that I was here to see it at its bombed-out best.
