Market Gardening in Unbuildable Areas: A New Adaptation Strategy for Urban Agriculture in Libreville (Gabon)
Libreville has experienced accelerated urbanization in recent decades at the expense of cultivated areas. Today, actors in this sector are facing land tenure insecurity. An analysis of the reconversion of flood zones that cannot be built for agricultural needs is presented. The objective is, on the one hand, to identify and assess the dynamics of the agricultural areas and built between 2008 and 2020; on the other hand, to determine the strategies of farmers to adapt to the expansion of the city. The methodological approach used combines multisource satellite data, interviews and field surveys, in order to propose a model of the explanatory factors for the location of current market garden sites, from an implementation of the data in a GIS. Finally, the mapping of agricultural areas dynamics reveals the degradation of agriculture by the construction and evolution of exploited spaces which include those five parameters. At the same time, lands that cannot be built on because of the flood, but also those near urban areas, are gradually occupied by farmers as the city grows.