Urban Precarity and Aspirational Compromise: Feeling Otherwise in a Mozambican Suburb

Abstract

The rapidly expanding Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa is very much the product of urban precarity. Indeed, most people only end up there after having exhausted other options. Striking, however, is how residents have, in recent years, discursively and materially constructed the suburb as an idyllic urban place in the making, so much so that Inhapossa has become one of the most coveted neighborhoods in the area. This article proposes an ethnographic reflection on urban precarity that draws on theories “from the South” and extends the notion of suburb to the shifting urban edge in Mozambique. It examines how local land struggles have created new opportunities for people from very different backgrounds, and whose lives became entangled in unexpected life-enhancing ways, to craft better futures for themselves and their families. Locating the transformative potential of urban precarity in the work of attuning one’s aspirations with one’s circumstances, it shows how the suburb—a space of aspirational compromise—can become a space of aspirational achievement.