Assignment task: Algiers and presumably elsewhere in Algeria, the result has been a relaxation, if not often collapse, of modernism, and a growing tolerance of laissez-faire activities, not just on the part of impoverished squatters but also a middle class beginning to search for a more privatized and property-orientated way of life in the city.
The other model that emerges from a dysfunctional transition to independence is observable in what had been the Belgian Congo. Without rehearsing the unfolding of events there from 1960, one can first point to a quick and poorly planned push to independence by the Belgian regime, which seems to have anticipated very little change at the socioeconomic level7 and successful continued dominance through divide-and-rule tactics. Instead, mutiny and rebellion quickly began to tear the country apart and destroyed the tissue of neocolonialism as conceived in Brussels. Later massive areas of the Congo went into revolt in the hopes of a more genuine 'second independence', while ineffectual and weak governments ruled in Léopoldville, renamed Kinshasa.
Eventually Mobutu succeeded in consolidating a new system of sorts. In this chaotic series of events, many aspects of the highly-articulated extractive economy virtually disappeared together with basic social services and most of the fairly large Belgian population. However, Katanga copper, together with growing diamond mining, sustained a famously corrupt state. Much wealth was funnelled through Kinshasa in consequence.
The consequences for urban demography were very dramatic. Kinshasa itself, both as a source of what wealth there was and as a place of refuge, grew spectacularly and dramatically. With a population of 400,000 at the time of independence, much of the growth took place in the following several years; today Kinshasa has an estimated population of five million and upwards. By contrast, many of the country's important provincial cities such as Elizabethville a.k.a. Lubumbashi, the main centre for copper mining, and Stanleyville a.k.a. Kisangani, the great river port in the centre of the country as a whole, have grown only very slowly and have far below one million populations. The only real exceptions are those places that have profited from continued mineral extraction or have successfully harboured refugees from rural dislocations and conflict.
At the same time, while Mobutu presided over the construction of the predictable sports stadium and a few other durable prestige projects we could