The Zimbabwean - South African border facilitates a fruitful ground for illegal transfer and mobility of goods and persons. Towns on both sides of the border - Beitbridge and Musina, have been attracting unaccompanied Zimbabwean children and teenagers in their search for sustainable lives, as poverty and unemployment continue to spread in their country. With no formal jobs, this underdeveloped border area can hardly be viewed as a center of attraction for young people, yet while many of them leave this area in the search of greener pastures, others find rare opportunities and advantages in the life this space provides.

This presentation will explore the lives of independent migrant children and youth from Zimbabwe through spatial lenses, or rather explore the two border towns and the spaces between them through the ways they accommodate Zimbabwean children and youth. It will provide a view on independent children and youth and the spaces in which they live in, in relations to former experiences of child and youth mobility. It will shed light on the ways young people view their spaces, and the ways this current setting continues, reshapes, reaffirms and at times contradicts, former conceptualization of Zimbabwean youth's mobility.

En Sénégambie, comme dans le reste de l'Afrique de l'Ouest, les villes frontalières sont au centre d'importants échanges transfrontaliers, à travers des flux à la fois licites et illicites, tirant profit de l'existence de fortes disparités frontalières (monnaie, fiscalité, offre de produits, différentiel de prix, etc). Ces échanges se nourrissent également, depuis plus d'une dizaine d'années, de l'urbanisation en cours dans la totalité des villes frontalières sénégambiennes et d'un réel dynamisme démographique de nombreux bourgs ruraux. L'augmentation de la demande urbaine se traduit par l'intensification des échanges urbains-ruraux tandis que la transformation des modes de vie alimentaire des ruraux entraine un recours de plus en plus accru aux produits des marchés urbains ; les interactions rurales-urbaines s'intensifient dès lors. En Sénégambie, de nombreuses zones transfrontalières illustrent cette situation où la ville, grâce à ses services, marchés, équipements sociaux et son poids démographique constitue un élément moteur. Farafenni, Brikama, Basse, Bansang (en Gambie) et Nioro, Vélingara, Diaobé (au Sénégal) exercent une forte polarisation sur leur hinterland rural tout en recevant des produits et avantages de ce dernier (prêt de terre, produits agricoles, etc).

Ainsi, cette communication part de l'hypothèse que la frontière en favorisant des interactions rurales-urbaines amène à repenser la gouvernance et la planification urbaine dans une perspective transfrontalière. Elle met en évidence le rôle moteur des villes frontalières dans l'animation spatiale et en conséquence la nécessité pour les acteurs territoriaux d'asseoir des stratégies transfrontalière de gouvernance.

This paper focuses on two sets of twin cities (Goma/Gisenyi and Bukavu/Cyangugu) straddling the border between what are today Rwanda and the DRC, and is based on oral and archival data. It argues that these cities and their rural hinterlands became a conurban 'transboundary' space during the colonial period and demonstrates that challenges border towns today face today were already apparent during the colonial period.

The paper does so by emphasising the importance of 'asymmetry'. It was the asymmetrical relationships between Goma/Gisenyi and Bukavu/Cyangugu, caused by their location in the Belgian Congo (colony) on the one hand, and Rwanda (mandated area) on the other, which created economic opportunities and the emergence of an urban 'transboundary' sphere. In turn, 'borderlanders' mobilized the opportunities available in this 'transboundary' space to their own benefit. Around Lake Kivu, the large presence of Europeans in urban centres straddling the border created opportunities for trade, the exportation of smallholder produce, and for labour.

The intense mobility between these twin cities, and especially the way the colonial administration dealt with it, reveals the contradictions in governing 'transboundary' urban contexts. Whilst colonial states needed rural-urban and cross-border mobility to provide labour and to cater to the needs of European consumption (e.g. for urban construction or household labour for Europeans), this intense mobility was at the same time also at odds with the colonial desire to curtail and control African mobility (e.g. urban pass laws). This study thus adds to our understanding of the historical challenges border towns face.