Coping with the urban sprawl: family changes in the area of Bamako (Mali)

The transformation of sub-Saharan African families underlines the slowness of demographic transition in the Sahel countries. Many studies have highlighted the role of marriage and high levels of urban fertility, while African families experience diversified residential patterns nowadays. The impact of rapid urban growth and a young urban-born population are determinant factors of this social change. However, studies lack spatial information and the perspective to analyse increasing territorial differentiation. Above all, they lack broader maps at the scale of large agglomerations whose economic functioning has been liberalised in a few decades. This paper seeks to fill this gap for the capital of Mali by following the shift of housing and mobility constraints towards the metropolitan peripheries. Using survey data and the latest censuses, it measures contrasts arising in households' constitution and residential cohabitation. Various variables characterise families between the two processes of densification and urban sprawl. Within the district of Bamako, the opposition of central and peripheral spaces gives way to a new typology of neighbourhoods according to other criteria than their age and density. However, it remains structural in the surrounding district, where several hundred localities show a gradation of Bamako's influences, more often than the two other spatial models examined for the metropolis.