Developing the late colonial city: Strategies of a middle class housing cooperative in Mozambique, 1951–1975

Abstract

From the end of the Second World War until independence from Portugal in 1975, the population and size of Lourenco Marques, today's Maputo, was growing rapidly. This also led to the expansion of the city's white middle class of mainly Portuguese origin. This paper analyses COOP, formerly one of Portugal's largest cooperatives, as a major organisation of this group. COOP played a crucial role in the provision of housing for Luso-Mozambicans and was an active private shareholder in the city's urbanisation. Drawing on sources from the COOP archive, the paper asks how COOP used urbanisation to mediate specific ideas for Lourenço Marques' urban future. Following this approach, it identifies three strategies the cooperative applied in reaction to the government's late colonial modernisation discourse.