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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to see the liminality of urban constructions, as a form of potential dispossession, by looking at the conditions of production of urban formalities and the forms of control by the state to which they give rise.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at how urban formalities (such as construction permit) are negotiated on a daily basis between citizens and the State around the production of buildings in the African urban environment. The aim is to show how the mechanisms of production of these formalities and the forms of control (by State agents) to which they give rise, create in short, medium and long temporalities, conditions of social dispossession. Such experiences are increasingly observable in Cameroonian cities where demolition operations multiply year after year. Our reflection is based on a case study conducted in the city of Douala with different municipal administrations, construction actors (contractors, owners), citizens victims of demolition and civil society actors. The results of this research show that: a) state regulation of construction activities implies, through urban formalities, a social contract between state and citizens ; b) The latter inscribes the buildings constructed in a complex regime of legality that on the one hand legitimizes different modes of construction in the city, but locates, on the other hand, many buildings and their residents in a form of liminality ; c) This liminality emerges as the product of a differentiated relationship of constructions to different forms of protection and risk; d) Understanding the liminality of urban constructions, as a structuring effect of the modes of urban regulation by the state, involves going beyond binary oppositions such as formal/informal, legal/illegal, authorized/unauthorized that are most often used to analyze housing precarity in the context of the global South.