Inverse governmentality: The paradoxical production of peri-urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique

Abstract

This article examines urban planning on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique, where governance constitutes an ambiguous realm whose imagined opportunities are as enticing as its dangers are frightening. Although state agencies have proven incapable of implementing coherent urban policies, numerous peri-urban areas reflect a remarkable aesthetic regularity. In the article I unfold how it emerged through informal attempts to mimic state-defined urban standards which even civil servants acknowledge exist only as scattered imitations. It is when initiating building projects based on urban standards that the state could have implemented that house-builders create the ordering gaze of power by which they ought to be illuminated. Taking governmentality to refer to a form of reason that takes as its object the problem of the population, I argue that peri-urban planning in Maputo can be considered as inverse governmentality, that is, a form of reason that takes as its object the problem of governance.