Search

We are, in 2006, at a crucial step of the Internet network development: the wide diffusion of the high bandwidth for new multi‑media uses which leads to rebuilding that one can characterize as a digital planning of territories. The problem is the same all around the world: to spread the high bandwidth at a correct cost for the various protagonists from the operator to the end‑user. The solutions to be implemented are the subject of discussions and struggles between various types of actors, private, public, associative, national and international, who are different according to their location at the center or in periphery of the system. Two economic logics are clashing: one which prevailed at the beginnings of the Internet, the co‑operative model where the network would become a world public property, and another which tends to spread today, the pure market logic. The case of Africa where the problems are exacerbated, illustrates what is at stake.

The “informal” economy concerns activities directly bound to the most contemporary evolutions. Those related with the insertion of the ICTs in territories are demonstrations of a “paradoxical invention of the modernity” [JF Bayart 1994] with regard to the universalist classic model of the modernization spread by the West. Having explained briefly what we understand by “informal” according to various disciplinary approaches, we shall show how the insertion and the appropriation of the ICTs in the African cities gives place to a proliferation of new activities of service which are embedded in the urban fabric, adapt themselves to the low level of income of the populations and generate more or less qualified jobs which recover totally or partially from informal practices. We shall wonder finally about the proliferation of this “other economy” expression of the globalization.

Our concrete analysis of the relationships between society and environment in coastal parts of Casamance, Guinea and Guinea Bissau associate two methods to represent a territory and its functioning that link space- and time- dimensions; SPOT's data and a model with "joined productions" or model of activities. The quantitative model created is nothing else than the systemic approach outcome in the material life field that is closely connected with operational research expressed in very general terms taking space in account. The analysis's heart is what links men, resources, technics in a changing territory. The term of "material production" does express this linkage, this interface. On the one hand, our researches are dealing with the processes by which humans make use of different forms of raw materials and goods available on their territory at the current of a given time, and on the other hand they are dealing with the result of these processes. So, we have defined a specific semantic and used a linear algebraic system, which materializes the connection rules of the processes, that is to say the phenomena of interconnected production and consumption, to build a formal and quantitative representation better adapted than natural language to a systemic and global description of societies' material reproduction. Such formalizations orientate the way of collecting data, especially in environments where statistics absence is generalized, they stimulate the functioning of a productive system, allow "to draw up the balance sheet" and to apprehend interactions, constraints, limiting factors existing at different levels of the material life functioning and allow to imagine the possible responses to cope with the changes (demographic growth, technical intensification, exodus). It is a contribution to the development "durability" on the lines as the models elaborated by Georgescu Roegen. That kind of quantitative method of analysis of a multifactual universe bound by changes can be in use to help with decisions; but it must be associated with other methods depending on anthropology to explain games and prospects from different actors beyond the material goods uses.