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This paper explores the effect of urbanisation process on domiciliary behavioural patterns in Papua New Guinea. Urbanisation process in PNG has had significant effects on traditional socio-cultural norms despite its low level. The rate of cultural change has of course been exacerbated by many years of missionary and colonial activities. Using ethnographic and anthropological evidence the paper first traces what has, for many years, been considered traditionally acceptable and expected domiciliary behavioural patterns. These are then examined in the context of the current urbanisation process and its attendant effects. It is then argued that any severance of the traditional domiciliary behavioural patterns are likely to cause considerable stress amongst household members and kinship groups. Finally, the paper calls for detailed studies into cultural domiciliary patterns. These will enable for the designing of appropriate dwellings in which culturally acceptable behaviours can unfold unimpeded. It is argued that the built environment is extremely important for both expressing and structuring domiciliary behaviours.

The road network in Papua New-Guinea is small in proportion to the geographical size of the country. On the contrary, the air transportation network is one of the most developed in the world. Shortly before the Second World War, the search for gold ore in the interior of the country stimulated the development of civil aviation and new cities. This study presents several typical cases of this history.

The integration of rural populations in urban zones is one of the greatest problems in Melanesia today. The originality of this study is that it presents four groups of migrants who came from the same village in the Sepik River Valley and who have settled in four different urban zones on the north coast of Papua New-Guinea. With the help of numerous tables, the reader sees how this population, which has conserved its own traditional organization, is distributed in various out-lying zones.

The city of Nouméa is often thought to be a mixture of races and peopled by a majority of half-castes. Things are rather different. Interracial marriages which happened at the start were quickly looked down upon, and stopped by all means, starting again slowly after 1945, expanding really only after the Matignon agreement. For the present, communities remain apart, more or less jealous of what share of the economy they have earned for themselves. Europeans benefitted from full employment but are regularly losing shares on the labour market. Vietnamese and Tahitian-Chinese have cornered a good part of tertiary activities. Melanesians have been using political pressure to facilitate their penetration of the civil service. For the first time, these communi- ties seem less prone to be hostile to each other in everyday life and favour a somewhat more difficult to obtain accommodation in political life between the different camps. This is a town influx, where the publicly proclaimed political will is not the most efficient way of creating mutual tolerance, where the attempt to obtain this through cultural action is misfiring, and where the financial efforts made in favour of low cost housing answer for the present the formula: too little, too late.