Chef de travaux, Département de Géographie-Sciences de l’environnement, Faculté des Sciences, Université Pédagogique Nationale (UPN), BP 8815, Kinshasa 1, RD Congo
The commune of Lemba was formerly called commune of the evolved because inhabited by cadres who formed a class of intellectuals and civil servants. It was furnished with houses of the ONL type or stylish houses, roads, equipment, infrastructure... in planned neighborhoods (marked nowadays by self-production and self-construction).
Today, where infrastructures exist, they are poorly maintained, poorly sized by the rapidly growing population with intermunicipal mobility difficult to control.
Nowadays, urban planning standards of constructability, principles of habitability in plots, principles of hygiene and environmental protection, principles of migration and rural exodus, etc. that allowed positive models to live in neighborhoods, are no longer known and respected by populations. This is what has irreversibly tipped towards negative models of living in all plots of the commune of Lemba in particular, and the city of Kinshasa in general.
Populations are increasing without taking into account any communal or urban restrictions relating to inter-municipal mobility, rural exodus and natural increase. These increases create housing needs that impose an anarchic pace of house construction that characterizes the compactness of all living environments that have already reached their limits in plot spaces, living environment. The compactness in progress throughout the municipality is irreversible, it is at the root of multiple vulnerabilities (social, physical, and environmental) that do not allow the inhabitants to benefit from the ecosystem services generated by the various municipal resources (parcel spaces, urban trees, rivers, communal soils...) in «suffering» and losing speed.
At its origins, the commune of Lemba was made up of the planned. Free and intertitial spaces were planned for the future development of the town (respect for easements of watercourses and traffic lanes, protection of reserved green spaces, municipal wasteland, land for the construction of housing, etc). Since independence, the city of Kinshasa has not been governed by any sanitation plan. It was a time marked by the absence of regulations relating to land use (constructability standards, town planning standards, envirronmental protection standards, housing standards, etc.) This is what justified self-construction in all municipalities. The occupation of non aedificandi areas has sometimes been carried out with the complicity of local, urban, political and customary authorities throughout the city of Kinshasa.
The occupation of spaces by the inhabitants has taken place without taking into account urban planning standards for construction, environmental protection and housing. This engendered negative inhabiting patterns of building, inhabitingand living.
The models of living determine today, in the minicipality, the compacteness which translates in its own way the negative morphological and functional diversities in all the districts. They characterize most of the plots which have more parcel space and effective means of Kinshasa to menage rainwater, which has made all closed living environments characterized by difficult accessibility conditions, with the absence of termsanitation fears.