Settlement in Transition: A Transformation of a Village into a Small Town in Western Sudan Mohamed Babiker Ibrahim, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Hunter College of the City University of New York, New York, New York, USA E-mail:
[email protected] Phone: 212-772-526 Leo C. Zulu, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, Michigan state University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA. E-mail:
[email protected] Frederick. L. (Rick) Bein, Professor, Department of Geography, Indiana University- Purdue University at Indianapolis. Indianapolis, Indiana USA. E-mail:
[email protected] Final – Ready for resubmission Acknowledgements We would like to thank the people of Shubbola and our research assistant Mirgahani Awad Bashir for their hospitality and help while the lead author in the field. We thank Dana Reimer for her help. Part of his work was supported by the PSC-CUNY 40 Research Award Program at Hunter College of the City University of New York. ___________________________________________________________________ This is the author's manuscript of the article published in final edited form as: Ibrahim, M. B., Zulu, L. C., & Bein, F. L. (2018). Settlement in Transition: a Transformation of a Village into a Small Town in Western Sudan. Urban Forum, 29(1), 85–106. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-017-9323-2 Abstract UN-Habitat Projects Sub-Saharan Africa’s global share of the urban population to increase from 11.3 per cent in 2010 to 20.2 percent by 2050. Yet little is documented about the underlying urbanizations processes, particularly of emergence of small towns. This article uses household interviews, focus groups, observation and secondary data to examine the spontaneous transformation of a Western Sudanese village, Shubbola, into a small town.