What is Urban Development

The interest in urban planning and development is a major preoccupation in the two last decades. In fact, the urban development is the act of improving living conditions, which are necessary for rest and for labour, for the health and education facilities, for the various exchanges and provisioning, for the moving of the population between their dwellings and their working place. However, the cities of the developing countries know serious problems of urbanization due not only with the non application of the urban guide (SDAU) when it exists, but also with the inadequacy of the policies of management of the city needed by the populations. That is why the proliferation of unstructured quarters around the cities, without the urban services necessary for their operation like drinking water network, electricity, and roadway system. Facing these failures, the urban development is not any more the only fact of the municipal authorities. The populations through associations and the non governmental organisations are more implied, these activities are carried out under the impulse of the multilateral backers that support and finance the actions of the different actors. In order to propose new approaches of the urban development, we started by defining a characterization of the city for better apprehending its morphology and its operation (Pettang, Kouamou, & Mbumbia, 1997). This characterization permits to deal with the land question, since the soil is the beginning of any installation (Pettang & Kouamou, 1999).