Re-forming resource entrepôts: Urban investment, extraction, and Beira’s Grande and Golden Peacock Hotels

Abstract

Recent literature on investment and African infrastructure have called for examining ‘Global China’s’ urban impacts. This article investigates these in the entrepôt city of Beira, Mozambique, offering an approach to urban investment that centers cities’ rural-urban, and historically entangled connections. Through what I term ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ aspects, I introduce an analytical and conceptual approach to attend to these temporal and spatial dynamics of not only city-making, but capitalist-oriented, extractivist place-making. Analyzing a set of historical and colonial hotels and special economic zones (SEZs), I demonstrate how, rather than being a Chinese model for implementation in various locales, new Mozambican-Chinese projects in Beira articulate with and create new spatial connections that are innately interlinked with European extractive practices and designs. I also de-center the city, demonstrating how urban space is reconfigured through its relationship with its outsides, rather than the other way around. By investigating Beira as a re-forming resource entrepôt, I challenge the above scholarship to take seriously deeper histories of infrastructure investment in Africa, and attend to the inextricable nature of especially city-hinterland regional ties. Ultimately, I examine temporal and spatial entanglements of capitalist extraction, entrepôt construction, and Southern African urbanism, through a historically situated and regional view.