Abobo

Abobo is what happens when a city grows faster than any institution can manage it. This commune in northern Abidjan is the most populous in Ivory Coast's economic capital, with over a million residents packed into an area that lacks the infrastructure to support half that number. Abobo grew through rural-to-urban migration during Ivory Coast's cocoa boom decades, absorbing newcomers from the country's north and from neighboring Burkina Faso, Mali, and Guinea in successive waves.

The commune's growth pattern resembles r-selection in biology: maximum reproduction with minimal parental investment. Housing is informal, services are improvised, and governance is stretched beyond capacity. Markets, mosques, and transport hubs emerge organically rather than by design, creating a functional but fragile urban fabric. During the 2010-2011 Ivorian political crisis, Abobo became a flashpoint for violence precisely because its dense, ungoverned spaces made it both difficult to control and easy to mobilize.

Economically, Abobo runs on informal commerce and small-scale services. Street vendors, motorcycle taxis, mobile phone repair shops, and market stalls form the visible economy. The invisible economy—remittances from diaspora workers, informal credit networks, and cross-border trade that never appears in official statistics—may be larger. This dual economy mirrors the visible and underground portions of a mycorrhizal network: what you see above ground is a fraction of the actual metabolic activity.

Abobo's challenge is the challenge of African urbanization writ small: how to retrofit governance and infrastructure onto communities that grew organically around economic opportunity rather than institutional planning. The commune needs not new construction but institutional succession—the slow replacement of informal systems with formal ones without destroying the adaptive capacity that allowed Abobo to function in the first place.