UrbAspire
Urban Aspirations in Colonial/Postcolonial Mozambique: Governing the Unequal Division of Cities, 1945-2010
This exploratory research project contributes to the fields of urban history and theory, in particular of colonial and postcolonial urbanism in southern Africa. The project examines the history of the government of the unequal division of cities in Mozambique, from the end of the Second World War to the present. We will foreground a genealogy of the planning practices for the government of informally created urban peripheries, in the capital Maputo and in the northern town of Angoche. This proposal explores a broad conception of urban government, as encompassing both state planning practices and the ways in which urban dwellers govern themselves. Knowing the situated histories of the government of informal peripheries is crucial for planning the future of cities in southern Africa and elsewhere in the global South. Furthermore, such histories are necessary for a critique of the role of colonial urbanism in the formation of state planning apparatuses in Europe, notably in former imperial polities like Portugal.
The objective of this research project is to understand the ways in which the government of peripheries was suffused with urban aspirations, not only of officials and professionals working in state planning, but also of the unequal citizens of the peripheries. We aim at investigating both the expert and the ordinary circuits of knowledge through which prospective imaginations of the urban were formed in both Maputo and Angoche. Such circuits link the primatial southern African city, Johannesburg, with Mozambican cities like Maputo, created to serve as a harbor for the inland mining region, and as a gateway for laborers. In addition, circuits of knowledge connected both Maputo and Angoche with Lisbon, the former political capital of the Portuguese empire. The project is knowledge connected both Maputo and Angoche with Lisbon, the former political capital of the Portuguese empire. The project is therefore particularly attentive to how colonial urbanism was integral to the formation of the present-day planning regime in Portugal.
Research will address three aspects of urban government practices. First, we will investigate colonial professional knowledge, foregrounding how Portuguese planners valued the “indigenous” periphery as a space that contrasted culturally with the European city. This first aspect will include three dimensions: the relation of planning with a Portuguese rationality of empire; an account of the planning of the periphery; and an examination of the persistence of the spatial violence of colonial planning. Furthermore, we will question the relations between successive political orders and the naming of urban spaces. This is key for understanding both the urban visions of the state vis-à-vis everyday naming practices and how colonial governmental reason was rearticulated after political independence. Moreover, the project will address professional and lay-persons’ discourses of the urban created between Mozambique and South Africa, and specifically how this imaginary plays itself out amongst migrants to Johannesburg. The research methodology for a genealogy of the government of peripheries will necessarily combine an ethnographic perspective with historical methods. The primary research method will be archival research in Maputo, Lisbon, and Johannesburg, complemented with observation and open in-depth interviews in both Maputo and Angoche.
The project team combines an experience of urban research in Mozambique, South Africa and Portugal with an interest in innovative ways of studying urban life that can inform prospective exercises for less unequal citizenships. The project coordinator Tiago Castela is an urban historian. He acquired experience in scientific coordination at the University of California, Berkeley, as the co-coordinator of the Townsend Center Working Group on Global Spatial Histories. Anthropologist Paula Meneses’ experience regarding the meanings of history and memories in the reflux generated by the colonial “encounter” in Mozambique and elsewhere in Southern Africa is key for an ethnographic perspective on a history of the present. Mpho Matsipa’s experience as an urban scholar studying the post-apartheid aspirations of urban dwellers in the Johannesburg area is crucial to ask critical questions of the situated urban past.
In a contemporary urban world of cities that were mostly created informally, this research project aims to provide tools to those engaged in imagining future modes of urban government that acknowledge the potentialities of actual spatial practices, and challenge the persistences of the rationality of colonialism in present-day spatial planning. The results of the project will be discussed through a one-day workshop at the University of Coimbra and reported through two conference presentations and the publication of five journal articles, organized according to the beforementioned aspects and dimensions. A film will be prepared by documentary filmmaker Joana Ascensão, for the purposes of public diffusion of the results.