Land Governance and airport infrastructures in Senegal: Ethnography of social spatial reconfiguration

Dr Lamine Doumbia (RS Mobilities)

Date: 27.04.2023
Time: 12 pm
Venue: S66 RW I, 1. OG, Uni-Bayreuth | Zoom (Please click) 

ABSTRACT:

This lecture is based on ethnographic empirical fieldwork data on land governance in Senegal with the particular case study of the former International Airport Léopold Sédar Senghor of Dakar, which was closed to the public commercial flights in December 2017. It was replaced by a new one at around fifty kilometres from Dakar. The former airport was originally opened in the 1940s in an area, which was then outside Dakar city center, but which has been increasingly urbanised since then. Blaise Diagne International Airport (AIBD) in Senegal is the first and biggest Senegalese civil airport that has been relocated from the capital Dakar to a nearby small town Diass. Throughout this fellow lecture, I use land conflicts and evictions of various kinds as an entry point to describe and analyse the discourses, mimicry and endogenous practices of the social actors involved in the continuous and consistent shaping of land tenure linked to public infrastructures building, mobility and the reconfiguration of spaces and people.