Abstract
A new era of global interventionism in African cities is emerging, the implications of which for existing claims to urban space are poorly understood. This is particularly true for the claims of farmers. Despite being a ubiquitous feature of many African cities, urban agriculture broadly exists in a conceptual limbo between rurality and urbanity, largely invisible to urban governance and substantive scholarship. Based on the case of Beira, Mozambique, in this article we make urban agriculture empirically and conceptually visible within the context of emerging debates on the urban land question in Africa. Through a historical–political analysis, we demonstrate how urban farming has constituted a distinct feature of Beira’s urbanism, which has evolved amidst successive and contradictory state-land regimes. Moving to the present day, we demonstrate how a new urban regime has emerged out of a coalition of municipal leaders and international donors with the aim of erasing all traces of urban agriculture from the city through urban ‘development’. The findings demonstrate that there is a need for a better understanding of the manifold claims to urban space, outside of slum urbanism alone, in contemporary land rights debates. We conclude by arguing that there is a need for a substantive land rights agenda that transcends the prescriptive categories of urbanism and rurality by focusing instead on the universal land question.
Highlights
A new era of urban governance and interventionism has emerged for African cities, manifested in global policy agendas, competing epistemologies and utopian masterplans, each promising a better urban future for the continent (Barnett and Parnell, 2016; Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018; Parnell, 2016; Watson, 2014)
In its support of green zone agriculture in the socialist and neoliberal eras, Mozambique was among a progressive minority of post-colonial African states with regard to urban agriculture
Based on extensive empirical data and document analysis, this article has demonstrated how a new regime of intervention has recently emerged in Beira that is seeking to erase urban agriculture from the city’s future
Summary
A new era of urban governance and interventionism has emerged for African cities, manifested in global policy agendas, competing epistemologies and utopian masterplans, each promising a better urban future for the continent (Barnett and Parnell, 2016; Brenner and Schmid, 2014; Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018; Parnell, 2016; Watson, 2014). Urban development is always premised on land, which in the context of African cities is owned, governed and toiled over by a variety of urban denizens How these established claims will relate to the new claims associated with urban development is unclear, while it will no doubt be a crucial determinant of Africa’s urban future. Despite providing crucial insights into urban livelihoods, these debates have been centred on issues of food security, evaluating agriculture in terms of yields and hunger (Crush and Frayne, 2014; Drechsel and Dongus, 2010; Frayne et al, 2016; Redwood, 2009; Simatele and Binns, 2008) On its own, this developmentalist perspective is not useful for a substantive agenda regarding the urban land question, as it is akin to debating slum urbanism solely in terms of structural integrity. This perspective is largely absent from debates on African urbanism
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