Urban Transformation, Family Strategies and Home Space Creation in the City of Maputo

Abstract

The spatial and demographic configuration of today’s Maputo – with one million people living in the city and about 1.8 million in the metropolitan area is more the creation of those who inhabit the city than of those supposedly in charge of it. Attempts at imposing zoning regulations are invariably thwarted by private interests – business, commerce, and families who put their savings and earnings into building homes in the different areas of the existing and emerging city. As the result of complex, often obscure processes of monetary accumulation, or merely the fulfilment of the “put a little by every day” method of saving, these homes range in size and standard from modern apartment blocks and luxury villas to the thousands of more modest (and often unfinished) dwellings that spread for miles across the city. Inherent to this dynamic process of “independent” building is a mesh of conflicts of interest, with the attendant power struggle waged in a context in which there co-exist different, and contradictory, legal interpretations of the possession, appropriation and use of land and property. This paper questions the relevance of certain dichotomy-based theoretical models (dual city, tradition and modernity) for the analysis of this exceptionally dynamic and constantly changing urban context. It does this by relating previous author’s research findings on the lives of Maputo families to the main ideas guiding ongoing research into the nature of the emerging forms of ‘urbanism as a way of life’ in the African city of Maputo, and by investigating the nature and impact of the creation of ‘home space’.