The week begins with Doula, We wish to welcome the participants from Doula. Today the African city grows mainly by its subdivisions. Even though the authorities focus on the resorption of precarious housing, the large majority of city dwellers, the future residents of African cities, are going to arrive in subdivisions these next few years. However, the issues of subdivisions, the quality of living conditions which we are putting in place in the outskirts of the city is absolutely never discussed. We are going to see these issues this week, not the main issues of the debate, but the question of knowing how to build, step by step, a quality subdivision. The challenge of planning a subdivision is not only technical but it's about understanding a social and environmental object as well as understanding the networks the geometrical aspects or even economic profitability. So we will lay the groundwork this week of a reflection on how to produce a quality subdivision, where people live, work and have leisure activities. We will see for example the impact of the layout, the drawing, the design, on the costs, but also the correlation that there is between the level of service and cost of the plot. We will show some standards, by paying attention to explain and to say that the standards change with time and places. The construction norms in 1950 in Dakar weren't the same as in Raahein as in Abidjan, and Abidjan in 1960 certainly didn't have the same norms as today, I'm intentionally mentioning Abidjan as an element of demonstration because it' a a textbook case for urban planning and construction standards. President Bouani had high-tech building in his political program. If standards change, building techniques as well. Let's imagine the telephone, for example, first of all, without telephones in certain subdivisons, in the subdivisions no doubt the richest and oldest, we have begun to put a telephone network, installing electricity wires so as to eventually not at all, with the advent of mobile phones, have need of these wired telephones and we are little by little not even imagine that we could put telephones in the subdivisions. Finally, whether the subdivision be public or private, the two exist, it's necessary to carry out all of the reflections that we are going to carry out now. We will talk about the issue of needs. For whom, for how many people are we going to make a subdivision? We will talk about the issue of potentialities, what are the potentialities of the site? We will look at the issue of program, each subdivision has a program that must be defined beforehand, and then we will the issue of the layout or of the indicative planning. So this week we will have, after this video, this short introductory video, a first video on the issues of defining the subdivision, the block, the plot, then on the basic principles, principles that must generate spatiality of the subdivision, a second video on how to make the networks profitable, how to make a subdivision profitable, then we will see a step by step video, meaning that step after step, stage after stage, we are going to see how to build a subdivision, and finally we will have some examples taken from here and there in African cities to see the differences that we can have between Khiali, Dakar or Ouanda. There you have it, this week's program.
