(by Alé Badara Sy, Urban Planning Expert, President and Founder of CRU)
Clarifications for the attention of the Ministry of Territorial Collectivities
Several considerations come into play in defining what a city is in Senegal, depending on the position of the structures concerned. It should be noted that prior to the new territorial reform of 2014, which took place under Act 3 of decentralization, there was no consensus definition of the city. Indeed, depending on the strategic position, interests, the various state structures in charge of the development of territories, namely the services of urban planning, land use planning, local authorities and statistics have each given, according to the logic of the sector, « sectoral » definitions of the city, most often, based on demographic and political criteria. Today, the latest territorial reform has reinforced the vagueness of this notion because of the institutional changes and territorial recomposition brought about by universal communalization. This calls into question the absence of real coherence and consultation in the definition of public policies.
Two essential elements need to be clarified with regard to the concept of the city: on the one hand, the need to agree on and stabilize the rate of urbanization in Senegal, and on the other hand, the need to have a coherent and up-to-date reading of the national urban framework and the functional hierarchy of cities.
It is therefore urgent to standardize the conceptual framework, particularly by making the definition criteria consistent.
The General Code of Local Authorities (1994) considers a city to be « a pooling of the competencies of several municipalities that are territorially homogeneous ». In this respect, the concept is more akin to an inter-municipal grouping, because here, and without this being specified in the aforementioned Code, the cities are all made up of several « small » municipalities. It is therefore a slight change from the definition in the former Code (1996), which defined it as consisting solely of district municipalities.
As for statistics, only demographic and administrative criteria are used. It can be noted in the Final Report of the General Census of Population, Housing and Agriculture (RGPHA) of September 2014 that « in Senegal, the definition of urbanization refers tò that of the commune. Thus, the urban environment is constituted́ by all the localities erected into a commune, regardless of the number of inhabitants. Thus, the urban population is that which resides in the communes ». If no clarification is given to this idea, one could think that the urbanization rate is 100% given that today, in view of the latest territorial reform, the communes extend over the entire territory.
For the services of Urbanism and Territorial Planning, is considered a city any localitý whose population is superior or equal tò 5,000 inhabitants (urbanism) or 2,500 inhabitants (territorial planning)
