Circumventing the investor-friendly city and displaceability in Maputo’s street economy space

Abstract

This article explores how street economy workers are resisting the condition of ‘displaceability’ imposed upon them via exclusionary market-led redevelopment and state-municipal practices in Maputo, Mozambique. In particular, it focuses on how street and market workers engage in forms of ‘street politics’ to build their rights to produce, to inhabit and to work in public spaces from which they are being excluded. Drawing on Yiftachel’s notion of ‘displaceability’ and adopting a spatial perspective, we describe and discuss the main exclusionary aspects of current market-led redevelopment in Maputo’s peri-central area, including municipal and state practices and the (non)use of planning laws. Against this background, we examine the circumventing tactics of street and market vendors. We construe these tactics in the terrain of social legitimacy—or actual rights—as forms of challenging market-driven state practices of demolitions, resettlement, forced zoning, and social banishing of street economy workers.