In our video, the issue of property. First, we are going to mention tradition. Customary land law. In the customary norm of land law, the land belongs to the collective. There is a land chief who distributes land, but under no circumstances can the land be privatized, so it belongs to everyone. In this state of things, man is but an usufructuary. There is no financial transaction, He cannot buy or sell but he can benefit from the land. It was the customary norm, and when the colonial administration imposed its rules land administration was centralized, it was no longer the land chief but the colonial administration who was the owner of all of these lands. It's the administration that is then going to distribute, give titles. So we went from a collective ownership to a private ownership, and we obviously go from community management to centralized management. Where once there was a customary occupation of land and then colonial property provisions, we have today a property use system that is extremely diverse. We have both private property but also registered lease, lease in the form of a cooperative, there are still customary occupations and then there is a whole intermediate that goes from property and the most strict title to land to the totally informal occupation with between the two, all of these intermediate phases that exist. We are not going to detail the board, it's in the attached documents, it's up to you to take the time, for those who wish, to look carefully at what it contains. So when we discuss land legislation We must ask only one question, to whom does land belong to? It can be to the state, the collective or to a private entity. It's to whom does it belong, so we are discussing the right, who holds the right poses three problems: the question of tenure, the question of identification and the question of recognition. It's not simply a matter of being an owner, it's also about the others knowing that you are the owner. It must also be registered. I must also be able to keep my property rights throughout the years and not have someone else appropriate them. This seems in a certain context extremely strange to speak of this type of thing, but in the African cities this is an everyday problem. Land tenure. I have a property, how will I be able to keep my property as long as possible? Now, some findings on real estate, so in Sub-Saharan Africa we have a strong horizontal growth. Why? Because real estate, is less expensive than multi-floor buildings. At the same time, there is a process of decentralization that means that the territory has to be cut up and we realize that we have new perimeters of intervention, that each collective has a new perimeter with a complete redefinition of property rights. There is a significant retreat of the state, which is slowly disengaging, in regards to rights, not necessarily in regards to finance, we have owners, who have their piece to say, not only about the role of the state and public collectives, but the final owner, the final user, whether owner or not, of the remainder, is an important element of the equation. There is an extremely difficult ground management, we notice that even though the customary law has been abandoned in the urban perimeters for decades now, it still endures today, if we begin the story of property in Douala we realize that even today one of the biggest problems is the issue of customary law. We have territory development that is problematic, why problematic? Because, really, no one is interested, we take themes, we take the issues in a completely different way however we don't identify them as being territory development issues. So there it is, when we are discussing property. We have looked at some issues, that we are unable to manage. So this means that urban sprawl continues, this means that the city develops without there being a strict management on behalf of the public collectives or of the state on the ground and as a result, we must ask ourselves the question: What to do about it? Should we anticipate, or should we adjust? Here we are looking at a case study, on a hypothesis, where you can choose. Anticipation is extremely difficult, there are few examples where this works. We are almost always adjusting. Why? Because the social practices, because the demand, because the demographic pressure are in every case much more rapid and much stronger than the reaction of the administration, be it centralized or decentralized. So we are unable to anticipate things, and we are constantly taking adjustment measures, in any case, at the property level. The urban slum, the poor neighborhoods are an extremely striking example of these thematics, that is to say that we let it happen, why? Because there was no other possiblity than to let it happen and once the slum is in place, once, often, that it becomes solidified, we try somehow, to build roads and to plan the land development, to give titles to people, to create parcels in the poor neighborhoods. Anticipation would be in the form of sub-divisions but we saw earlier the sub-division is often planned for good reasons but also for very bad reasons. Finally, there are some other big property issues, when we project in the future, forecasting issues, it is knowing how these resources are going to be managed, as we imagine that these resources have an end, that we are going to try to understand and imagine, how are we going to be able to continue to parcel out while knowing that one day we will need, to reduce in any case, maybe not stop, but reduce the rapid progress of sub-divisions. There is also the question of finances also, since it's one of the big urban economies, that of property, knowing what the mechanisms are that would allow to recuperate one part of this surplus land value that is created by property. There it is, quickly described, some property issues. All these things, we will not have the time to go in depth about the issue of property, we could do a whole MOOC about property in Africa, the connection between modern law and customary law, without a doubt is not the goal, the goal is only to put forth some questioning, some problems that we've identified, and to say well here, we have issues with property, which is first and foremost a speculative issue. So there are huge financial issues when discussing property. It is for this reason that property is one of the biggest, even the biggest problem of the African city.
