Urbanisation without the city, ruralisation without the agrarian: Bamako, as seen from the ‘village in the city’ of Lassa

In Mali, West Africa, peasant culture challenges the assumption that urbanism extends across the entire territory due to worldwide capitalist development. This paper proposes a peasant perspective to examine the genealogy and spatial forms of Mali’s capital, Bamako, as seen from the ‘village in the city’ of Lassa. Lassa is considered a ‘key to return’ to looking at the city through the broader territory where it is historically and geographically rooted. An interweaving of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ emerges at the core of the city’s configuration, prompting a rethinking of analytical frameworks by dissociating the concepts of ‘rural’ from ‘agrarian’, and ‘urban’ from the idea of ‘city’. The direct relation to soil, which shapes the way cities and territories are inhabited, appears as an actual freedom to envision the city beyond any spatial, political, or symbolic divide.