Property for sale in Kinshasa

Talking about recent trends in Kinshasa's urban growth and trying to understand their causes is quite a challenge.

The city, which is probably the second largest in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of population (after Lagos), is indeed poorly known at present because of the decay of its supervisory bodies and therefore the lack of reliable data. Get more information on property for sale in Congo.

Views on the Kinshasa real estate :

Popular thinking tends to favour urban growth. Not wishing to remain tenants forever and looking for social status through the ownership of land, citizens go searching for plots in the peripheral areas. It is a very individualistic search but not an isolated one, because solitude is not valued and is even regarded with suspicion as being linked to witchcraft.

Once having found a plot and immediately made it his own, the citizen therefore wishes to be surrounded by neighbours, and the same goes for the settlement of the area some months or years later. After a protracted development period, with bouts of construction interspersed with long waiting periods, the difficult threshold to cross is when the first occupant settles in. After that the whole area is rapidly occupied.

It is interesting to analyse land tenure in the rural periphery of the city. Without necessarily being a reflection of the present state of social forces in the city, the differences between the present and what was observed in previous years indicate the way Kinshasa society has changed. The city is now mainly bordered by market gardens in the valleys or by properties for sale in Kinshasa belonging to prominent people.

Market gardeners control only small areas, which are of marginal interest for urbanization because of the level of groundwater. Cultivators are usually attached to their gardens, but are threatened by the encroachment of built-up plots and the consequent erosion, and are finally tempted to sell their land. Those who have procured property for sale have bought it from the former European owners or from local traditional chiefs or acquired it free of charge through the Zaireanization procedures imposed in 1973. It would appear that traditional chiefs have already been evicted from land subject to speculation.