The City and the Barracas: Urban Change, Spatial Differentiation and Citizenship in Maputo

Abstract

The paper discusses Maputo municipality’s plans for the modernisation of the Mercado do Museu, an iconic informal market located in the high-end Polana neighbourhood, which has long been a place for fervent social encounter among people from different social and economic origins. The Mercado’s upgrading plans emerge within the context of Maputo’s intensely urban transformation that has led gentrification effects, especially in the city’s wealthiest areas. This stems partly from private real estate investment, and also from large infrastructure and housing projects promoted by the Mozambican state. Modernist planning ideals and their ordering impulses shape the way municipal authorities view the city and its spaces of informality, contradicting the urban form produced and lived by the majority of Maputo’s inhabitants. While Mercado do Museu has enabled the production of urban social life and the foundations for urban inclusion and citizenship, the modernisation project brings forward “conflicting rationalities” (Watson Planning Theory and Practice, 4(4), 395–407, 2003). However as modernist views of cities are broadly shared across Mozambique’s urban society, the “conflicting rationalities” being played out are not only situated around urban material form; but rather between material expressions of urbanity and personhood; between urban form and urban citizenship.