The origins of the conflict lie in an ambitious housing policy. In 2012, the Ivorian government launched the Presidential Emergency Program, fulfilling a 2010 campaign promise by President Alassane Ouattara to build social and economic housing for low-income households, defined as those earning no more than 400,000 CFA francs per month. The program marked the state’s return to direct housing production after decades of withdrawal; between 1960 and 1980, the state had financed, promoted, and managed more than 90,000 dwellings in Abidjan before stepping back under pressure from international lenders. Annual housing needs around Abidjan were estimated at 22,000 units, roughly 80 percent of them social and economic housing. To secure land for the program’s largest site, the state’s Land Management Agency negotiated directly with the holders of customary rights at Songon-Kassemblé, and in 2013 a contract was signed for the cession of 439 hectares.

The financial architecture of that agreement was precise. Under Decree 2013-224 of March 2013, which regulates the purging of customary land rights for public utility, compensation for the loss of usage rights was set at 2,000 CFA francs per square meter in the Abidjan autonomous district. For the 439.27 hectares in question, the total came to 8.7 billion CFA francs, payable in three installments: 40 percent within two to six months of handing the site to developers, followed by two payments of 30 percent each at three-month intervals, a full settlement within twelve months. Compensation for destroyed crops, including rubber, oil palm, and cassava, added another 1.8 billion CFA francs, calculated by the Ministry of Agriculture under a 1995 scale, bringing the total to more than 10.5 billion CFA francs, roughly 16 million euros.

What followed was a systematic breach of that schedule. Construction began in March 2013 with more than twenty real estate companies, yet between July 2013 and 2015 the landowners received only 20.17 percent of the 8.8 billion CFA francs due, about half of the first installment the state had committed to pay within six months. The state did not settle its accounts in full until October 2020, seven years after signing. As researchers Tonan and Nassa had already observed, the payment schedules established by the state were simply not followed: developers occupied the land while rights-holders waited, sometimes for years, for money owed. The delay ignited a grievance that the Ébrié landowners, drawing on lessons from earlier conflicts in their ethnocultural area, converted into a coordinated strategy of publicization, site blockade, and negotiation.

The protest tactics were direct and disruptive. In May 2015, March 2016, November 2016, and September and November 2019, young villagers whose lineage lands had been sold organized protest marches with chants demanding their money, blocked roads, and occupied the main access route to the construction site, erecting barricades that forced developers to halt work. One young demonstrator explained to fieldworkers in September 2019 that his family had lost about four hectares of cassava and rubber land without being consulted, and that stopping the state’s works was the only way to secure the funds owed. The president of the village youth declared that the site would remain closed until the authorities delivered the second installment, six months overdue, and accused the sub-prefect and officials in Abidjan of making endless empty promises. These were not spontaneous riots but calculated acts of visibility designed to make the landowners audible to the state and to public opinion.

The consequences for the housing program were severe and measurable. The repeated blockages disrupted construction schedules, halted private investment and financing, and pushed delivery dates far beyond the three-year average originally planned. Several real estate companies, unable to absorb the unexpected costs, abandoned the project altogether. The first official handover of homes to subscribers took place only in March 2023, ten years after the program launched. Of an initial target of 60,000 units at the site, only about 15,000 had been built according to the Songon town hall’s technical service, and a February 2024 site visit found scattered clusters of houses interspersed with scrub, unbuilt plots, unfinished structures, and abandoned construction sites. The housing minister himself acknowledged in a 2019 interview that the program had a mixed record, citing the lack of flexibility of customary rights-holders in delaying works and insufficient budgetary resources as two of the major explanations for missing the original 150,000-unit national target.

Beneath the practical disruption, the study identifies a deeper restructuring of power. The negotiation arena at Songon-Kassemblé was dominated by a dyad of the state and the customary landowners, while private developers were sidelined and, remarkably, the village chieftaincy itself was pushed to the margins. The chiefs were excluded from negotiations because the land in question was family property managed by lineage heads under custom, not communal land under chiefly authority, a situation that contrasts sharply with other Ébrié villages such as Anono and Yopougon-Kouté, where chieftaincies signed protocols with the state for major urban projects in 1970 and 1971. The legitimacy of the individual lineage rights-holders gave them a preponderant role, redefining center-periphery relations: decisions were no longer dictated from the capital outward, but renegotiated from the periphery toward the center.

The study frames this reversal through the concept of autochthony capital. The Ébrié, officially recognized as the indigenous people of the Abidjan metropolitan area, have mobilized their identity since the 1970s to defend land rights against urban expansion, and at Songon-Kassemblé that immaterial resource proved decisive, reinforcing their legitimacy in negotiations and their influence over planning decisions. The parallel with Accra is instructive: there, customary actors remain central to land governance, with 80 percent of land held under customary tenure. As the scholar Kobo observed decades ago, the purging of customary rights is far from a mere formality; it is an essential phase of urbanization and one of the focal points of social struggle over land in Côte d’Ivoire and across Africa. At Songon-Kassemblé, the state’s repeated failures over decades of compensation payments placed it in a position of weakness, producing an inversion of roles in which landowners dictated terms through protest.

The resolution of the crisis came through institutionalized bargaining. To contain repeated public disorder, a multiparty working group was created comprising the chieftaincy, landowners, planters, the Ministry of Construction, and the real estate structures, tasked with monitoring both the construction site and outstanding compensation commitments. Community mobilization ultimately secured individual indemnification of the landowners, but without any collective counterpart for the village as a whole, a mechanism that unsettled the internal functioning of the Ébrié community. The monetization of customary land rights, the study concludes, has enabled peripheral actors to assert and price their power in land transactions, even against state authority, transforming a seemingly routine state-landowner dispute into a case study of how urbanization in the Global South can redistribute governance from the center to the fringe.

For scholars of urban land governance, Songon-Kassemblé offers a technically detailed demonstration that peri-urban land production is not a top-down process but a contested arena where customary legitimacy, protest capacity, and state fiscal weakness interact. The case shows that when compensation schedules are breached, the resulting conflict can permanently alter the geography of power, elevating lineage-based landholders into central negotiators and forcing the state to accommodate norms it once sought to supersede. As Abidjan’s expansion continues to absorb villages across the Songon sub-prefecture, whose 627 square kilometers of land capital made it a privileged reservoir for the 1998 Greater Abidjan master plan, the lessons of this decade-long conflict will shape every future negotiation over who pays for the city, and on whose terms.

Subject of Research: Conflict between the Ivorian state and customary landowners over compensation for a peri-urban social housing site in Songon-Kassemblé near Abidjan

Article Title: Logements sociaux et économiques à Songon-Kassemblé: Conflit et recomposition des rapports de pouvoir entre l'État et les propriétaires de droits fonciers coutumiers

Article References: Koffi-Didia, A. M. (2026). Logements sociaux et économiques à Songon-Kassemblé: Conflit et recomposition des rapports de pouvoir entre l'État et les propriétaires de droits fonciers coutumiers. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 453-462. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-453-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-453-2026

Keywords: customary land rights, Côte d'Ivoire, Abidjan, peri-urbanization, social housing, land governance, Ébrié, land conflict, urbanization, compensation, autochthony, Songon

The researchers frame the problem within what they call a new urban welfare paradigm. Twentieth-century planning pursued collective well-being by building new housing, public spaces, and facilities in a culture of quantitative expansion. Today’s challenge, they argue, is different: cities must transform existing fabric, and the measure of social progress is no longer the quantity of provision but its quality, accessibility, and distributive equity. Green spaces sit at the centre of this shift, and also at the centre of the One Health framework promoted by the WHO, FAO, WOAH, and UNEP, which recognises the interdependence of human, animal, and ecosystem health. Yet as the authors note, citing work by Murray and by Anguelovski and colleagues, the benefits of greening are never socially neutral. Anguelovski’s analysis of twenty-eight European and North American cities found a statistically significant relationship between new green spaces and gentrification in the following decades, with marginalised communities, ethnic minorities, and low-income residents disproportionately affected.

The literature’s failure to move from diagnosis to prevention is illustrated by Chicago’s 606 Trail, a 95-million-dollar project that converted a disused elevated railway into a 2.7-kilometre greenway through four Northwest Side neighbourhoods. Research by Rigolon and Németh showed that the non-profit lead partner, The Trust for Public Land, held a mandate limited to park creation and conservation, with no coordination with public bodies on affordable housing. That institutional fragmentation produced a structural disconnect between ecological objectives and anti-displacement instruments, and property values along the corridor rose sharply after the 2015 opening. A related study of 122 municipal green, stormwater, and climate plans across twenty US cities found that only 13 percent explicitly defined equity, fewer than 10 percent identified the causes of unequal environmental benefit, and almost none included mechanisms to prevent displacement. Even the influential ‘just green enough’ concept, introduced by Curran and Hamilton, remains a strategic principle without a system of design-stage indicators, and Rigolon and Németh’s later work showed that neither small park size nor peripheral location reliably protects against gentrification.

To isolate the mechanisms that determine whether greening displaces or protects, the researchers used a Most Similar Systems Design, a comparative method that holds background conditions constant so that a single divergent variable—and its outcome—can be analysed. They screened European repositories of nature-based solutions, including the Urban Nature Atlas, Climate-ADAPT, Oppla, the World Habitat Awards, and the URBiNAT project, applying four criteria: a neighbourhood-scale intervention in a disadvantaged working-class or port-industrial district; completion at least ten years earlier with post-implementation monitoring; availability of neighbourhood-scale public statistics; and divergence in housing governance. A striking finding emerged during selection: fewer than 6 percent of recorded nature-based interventions in the Urban Nature Atlas explicitly address poverty or deprivation, and fewer than 25 percent are integrated into housing or neighbourhood regeneration programmes, leaving an extremely narrow set of eligible cases.

The two cases selected were Ekostaden Augustenborg in Malmö, Sweden, and DakPark in Rotterdam’s Bospolder-Tussendijken neighbourhood in the Netherlands. Both were working-class districts hit by deindustrialisation, both underwent nature-based regeneration in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and both won European recognition. Augustenborg, built between 1948 and 1952 as 1,800 public rental dwellings, had suffered 30 percent unemployment, rising vacancies, and recurrent flooding when Malmö launched its regeneration programme in 1998. The project delivered more than 175 climate-adaptation solutions in nineteen categories, including green roofs covering over 11,000 square metres, biofilters, rain gardens, and retention basins designed to manage 70 percent of rainwater locally, all connected through an open stormwater canal network fed by the roofs.

The decisive difference lay in institutional architecture. In Malmö, green-space management was institutionally integrated with housing: MKB, a company wholly owned by the city, developed and managed both the dwellings and the open spaces, coordinating the Fosie district with the Department of Technical Services. The Swedish funding programme LIP required demonstrated social benefits, and the Swedish rental regime—open-ended public contracts with collectively negotiated rents based on objective dwelling quality rather than market value—meant that neighbourhood appreciation could not be passed on to tenants as rent increases. With 89 percent of the stock under regulated rents, the core mechanism of green gentrification was neutralised at source. The project also trained forty residents in sustainability practices who were then employed in three new local enterprises, and monitoring over more than two decades records no displacement attributable to the intervention.

Rotterdam’s DakPark, opened in 2013 atop a dyke, underground car park, and commercial platform on land transferred from the Port Authority, is technically impressive—one of Europe’s largest rooftop green infrastructures—and it was won through fifteen years of resident advocacy. But its governance was fragmented. The housing stock was managed independently by housing associations such as Havensteder and Woonstad Rotterdam and by private owners, none formally involved in the park’s governance, while the project actors held no mandate over housing or anti-displacement policy. Dutch housing policy had liberalised since the 1990s, and Rotterdam’s ‘balanced neighbourhoods’ strategy encouraged market-rate dwellings in social-housing areas. The Resilient BoTu 2028 programme defined no binding housing-equity indicators, and employment objectives linked to the energy transition arrived only in 2018, five years after the park opened.

The statistical picture is nuanced and the authors are careful with it. Between 2014 and 2022, the share of residents of non-Western origin fell by 4.2 percentage points in Bospolder and 5.4 in Tussendijken, while private-rental dwellings rose by 5 and 3 points respectively. Yet control neighbourhoods without comparable green interventions, such as Afrikaanderwijk and Spangen, saw similar or larger demographic shifts, so the change cannot be attributed solely to the park. The sharpest exclusion signal is access rather than eviction: the 145 dwellings of the Hudsons complex built beside DakPark remain unaffordable to many long-standing residents of Bospolder—people denied access to the dwellings generated by the intervention in their own neighbourhood. The comparison, the authors conclude, is not between a project that displaces and one that does not, but between one endowed with protective capacity and one that lacks it. Ecological quality alone is never a sufficient condition for equity.

From this comparison the team derived a toolkit for climate-equitable regeneration, built around four outcome indicators aligned with Sustainable Development Goals 3, 10, and 11 and six project parameters, each traceable to a mechanism observed in the case studies. Applied ex ante, the toolkit produces not an aggregate score but a profile: any indicator supported by none of the project’s mechanisms signals exposure to displacement risk before real-estate appreciation occurs. The authors acknowledge limitations—the analysis rests on public documents rather than fieldwork, translations may blur legislative nuance, and Swedish statistics did not permit a within-city control comparison for Augustenborg. They plan to expand the comparative base, add resident surveys, address the under-documented distribution of environmental benefits across income groups, and test the toolkit on Italian cases. Their central conclusion is stark: protecting communities from green displacement depends above all on public ownership of housing stock under regulated rents, and where that condition is absent, ecological regeneration leaves residents exposed.

Subject of Research: Governance models and equity indicators for preventing green gentrification and displacement during urban green space regeneration

Article Title: Assessing equity indicators and anti-displacement governance for urban green spaces as social infrastructure

Article References: Assessing equity indicators and anti-displacement governance for urban green spaces as social infrastructure. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00363-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00363-4

Keywords: green gentrification, urban green spaces, nature-based solutions, social housing, displacement, urban equity, Malmö, Rotterdam, urban governance, climate adaptation, urban planning, SDGs