Keur Massar and Sacre Coeur

Keur Massar is a developing suburb just a few miles outside of Dakar which, much like many other places in and around Dakar, was nothing but a small desert settlement just five years ago, but is now a sprawling forest of concrete houses. It was exciting to see the rapid development taking place in the town, especially as we had more of a personal connection to it as it is the site of Nafi's future home. Her home will be one of many that are rapidly being erected around the town, and will cater to her and her family's needs, giving them a more secure place to live than Goree as they are free from eviction at the whim of the government.

Sacre Coeur is a district in Dakar a veritable stone's throw away from the airport in which we landed and first set foot in the country (for many of us, the continent). This district is home to Fallou, a former adviser to the former Prime Minister of Senegal and current professor. His home, on the contrary to Nafi's, is already fully built and developed and the district in which it was built is already built up and inhabited, though still developing. Sacre Coeur is similar though to Keur Massar in its swiftness of development, having once been a thinly-populated desert region (Fallou's home being one of the only developments on the land) and now a sprawling mass of wall-sharing houses.

From our own observations and from what we've gathered from the information we received from Nafi and Fallou, we gained some valuable insight into the development of Dakar and Senegal at large. A cursory glance at both Keur Massar and Sacre Coeur, along with a knowledge of the differential trends in the development of the two areas, would show that the areas in and around Dakar are developing very rapidly, where the geography, society, and economy of certain areas come about one-hundred-eighty degrees in degrees in about a decade; entire neighborhoods exist, families make livings, and cultures develop in areas where not but a few years ago, there was only a few homes, some isolated families, and miles of desert land. However, this development seems to be moving much too rapidly and unsustainably. It seems that the goal for many of these areas is mainly to throw as many houses up as possible in as short of a time as possible. In Keur Massar, one can see this by the sheer number of houses that seemingly span miles of open land. In Sacre Coeur, this is evidenced by the loopholes that are exploited in HLM and SECAP policies, where the government loans a house to low income people, who then pay off the loan quickly in order to knock down the loaned house and build their own. People seem to just want to build houses and don't have much regard for the long-term consequences. In Keur Massar, standards and regulations are very loose, as the houses don't have any zoning regulations in place, and don't even have plans for waste water management. In Sacre Coeur, the government buildings are essentially being wasted as people never actually live in them and only knock them down to build new ones.

These problems can be stemmed to the government, which needs tighter standards and regulations and enforcement thereof. We'll talk about it in class because I'm being kicked out of the wifi room right now.