Rooftop Autophagy Vertical Monadism in Maputo, Mozambique

Abstract

Based on recently gathered ethnographical data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article examines the vertical growth of the city. In particular, it focuses on the production of social and physical divides that emerge when the city’s rooftops are being used for habitational purposes. During the last two decades, rooftop spaces in Maputo’s inner-city have increasingly been appropriated for habitational use by owners of the buildings’ apartments. In order to secure a viable subsistence level, owners rent out their apartments and move to small storage rooms on the rooftops. Very few of these rooftops have electricity and water installed and so residents connect to the buildings’ existing but increasingly fragile systems of power cables, water pipes and drain pipes. In many of the city’s apartment buildings, this spatial organization—where apartment owners living on the rooftops are informally attached to the apartment renters through a fragile and leaking system of pipes, tubes and cables—has caused numerous and ongoing conflicts, which constantly threaten to disrupt the volatile social stability of the building. In this article, I introduce the notion of ‘rooftop autophagy’ to capture the dynamics of a critical urban phenomenon, which grows by feeding on itself and, by so doing, generates major urban divides at the heart of the city.