The main objective of this study was to compare the daily physical activities of secondary school students living in South- West Benin Republic, depending on whether they live in rural, suburban or urban areas. An investigation through a written and self-administered questionnaire was carried out from April to June 2004 on 678 students made up of 467 boys and 211 girls, aged 13 to 23 years old, regarding their movement modes, physical sports practices and other utilitarian activities. The data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that the percentages of students who go on foot or ride bicycles for long distances or a long time duration, and those who participate in physical training as well as practice utilitarian activities on weekly basis respectively, are far higher for students in the rural locations than for students in the other two locations, that is, suburban and urban areas. On the whole the highest proportion of students who engage in physical activities consisting of riding bicycles, traveling on foot, doing physical sports and utilitarian activities are found among students living in rural areas, followed by students in suburban and urban locations. These results are discusses in terms of their relationships with atherogenous risk factors.

This master’s thesis discusses the environmental history of a collective family domain in South Western Benin Republic from 1960 to 2016. Research material was collected through fieldwork in 2014 and 2016 focusing mostly on collective and personal oral histories, and participatory map making. The results of the fieldwork were analysed through a relational theoretical view of landscape to find out whether transformations in the landscape between 1960 and 2016 could be related to the uptake of rice farming in the early 1970s. The conclusion is that while some transformations could be directly linked to the uptake of rice farming, a consideration of wider spatial and temporal scales shows that transformations in the research landscape are part of transformations on broader scales. The uptake of rice farming thus appears as a less dominant factor of transformations in the landscape when broader spatial and temporal scales are considered. The research also included experiments with co-creative fieldwork methodology, which broadened the created research material beyond the initial research focus and offered unique insights to the relation between people and the landscape in the research area.