Insurgent aspirations? Weak middle-class utopias in Maputo, Mozambique

Abstract

Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores middle-classness as an often-utopic aspiration articulated through particular forms of divides, that assert themselves by continuously deferring the stabilization of a supposedly growing middle-class population. As we argue, however, it is precisely by way of this deferral that new forms of urban citizenship are produced – that are available to the assumed members of the ‘middle-class’, as well as potentially to other residents enacting middle-classness as an urban ideal. After a brief review of how middle-class areas can be identified, the paper discusses the above argument through a comparison between two of the largest state-sponsored urban planning initiatives to be implemented in Mozambique in recent years. The first is in the Intaka Community on the northern periphery of Maputo, where residents re-configure the material aesthetics of the area in order to separate themselves from a collective that is based on supposed state-sanctioned middle-class values – but to which they do not want to remain attached. The second is in the KaTembe peninsula, where squatters have invaded the building site for the ‘New City’ and commenced building reed huts and laying foundations for cement-block houses in order to be resettled elsewhere. Strikingly, in both instances, middle-classness seems to be actualized by groups of urbanites that do not desire typical spatially envisioned middle-class status. However, the surprising effect is that this still articulates a particular conceptualization of middle-classness with a dominant utopian ideology for urban living.