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The development of the central coach station in Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast, and associated activities strongly reflect the particular context and processes that have formed the way it functions. The facility’s role is much wider than that of a simple point of departure, arrival or for passing through, served as it is by most of the country’s main coach routes. Night-time activity generated by its improvised bars, stalls and traders offers a grassroots response to deficiencies in the city’s provision for social life and facilities in its otherwise extravagant planning and development policy. This relative success of urban integration, in an active area sprung from external influences and almost entirely formed by the informal sector, must not, however, be allowed to mask the severe structural fragility from which it suffers. Such weakness lies first in the economic precarity of all the businesses encountered there. It is also fostered by a multitude of conflicts of interest. This article sets out to decipher these. The current crisis has clearly put a brake on the usual running of this original hub of activity.