Introduction

1In this chapter we invoke Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’,1 as a tool in a critical rereading of the (self) production and transformation of the urban margins of the Mozambican capital, Maputo, over the five decades since the first edition of his seminal work, Le droit à la ville. We revisit the urban and housing policies, the dwelling practices and everyday reactions to the bureaucratic and mercantile rationale, arising from the processes of political and economic transformation.

2Like other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as Angola, since the 1960s Mozambique has been the scene of major transformations : the struggle against colonialism, the construction of independence, war, armed conflict, reconstruction, economic restructuring, neoliberalism and, since the turn of the millennium, the financialisation of the economy. These changes characterised the cities in the region, namely Maputo. In the new millennium the urban duality inherited from colonialism has been accentuated and the urban margins, which are mostly inhabited by low-income groups, continue to extend, constituting one of the common features of African cities like Maputo.2

3Since the new economic growth of many African countries has been accompanied by rapid urban growth, increased socio-spatial inequality, the concentration of investment in central, urbanised areas and growing suburbanisation3 with a high percentage of city dwellers living in the so-called slums.4 In the current neoliberal context, the renewal of the pericentral neighbourhoods, based on a tabula rasa of the existing housing fabric and on the peripheralisation of low-income groups, represents one of the main intervention strategies dictated by the commodification and financialisation of urban space in this region.5

4We contextualise the changes in the urban margins of the Mozambican capital in the global perceptions of the right to the city, taking Lefebvre’s, critical perspective and building on the work of authors such as Harvey and Souza.6 As architects-cum-urbanists, we refer to the three axes proposed by Lefebvre, referred to in other studies,7 and here referred to the inhabitants of Maputo’s urban margins : 1) their right to adequate housing and basic urban services ; 2) their right to a renewed centrality for all inhabitants and the right to a more democratic city steered by use value as opposed to exchange value ; and 3) their right to participate in the transformation of the city and their neighbourhood within that city. In other words, their right to be (co) authors of this transformation, which Lefebvre describes as the right to the Oeuvre.

5The two main objectives of this rereading are to understand the relevance of the notion of the ‘right to the city’ as a historical tool with which to gain a more critical understanding of urban and housing policies, dwelling practices and reactions to the hegemonic system ; and secondly as a tool to identify transformation actions with an emancipatory character. This critical and reflective rereading is based on an intense dialogue between theory and in-depth empirical research carried out by the two authors.8 It has subsequent cross-reflections in the Socio-Territorial, Urban and Local Action Studies Group (GESTUAL);9 and research carried out by other authors. The reflection has been divided into two broad periods : from the last decade of colonial administration (1960-1974) to the first decade of independent government (1975-1985) ; and from the first fifteen years of the reopening of the market and its liberalisation (1985-2000) to the consolidation of the neoliberal model in the new millennium (2000-2017).

From the end of colonial rule to the proclamation of greater socio-spatial equity

6In May 1968, student action against capitalism, authoritarianism and state bureaucracy erupted at the University of Nanterre, where Lefebvre worked and shortly after he had published his pioneering work, Le droit à la ville. A decade and half earlier, in 1953, at the 9^th Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (International Congress of Modern Architecture, CIAM), there had been open criticism of the alienating functionalism of the Modern Movement, the vertical decision-making processes, the excluding effects of renovation and gentrification operations on urban centres, and the massive post-war resettlements in segregated peripheries. In this period, architects, urban planners and social scientists produced new urban programmes and projects, alternative, participatory and inclusive. At the same time, in several large cities, urban social movements emerged and spearheaded the struggle for the right to housing and the right to place.10

The last decade of colonialism and a new perspective on the ‘reed city’

7In the same decade, and specifically from 1964, Mozambique was plunged into an intensive armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule and for national liberation, which lasted until 1974 and led to the proclamation of independence in 1975. Portugal had invested in the industrialisation of Mozambique since the 1950s, concentrated in the Matola and Machava areas on the outskirts of the capital, then named Lourenço Marques, and had promoted the verticalisation of the so-called ‘cement city’ where the colonial society lived.11 At the same time, there had been a slow but unrelenting expansion of this urbanised city, built on the tabula rasa of the adjacent urban margins12 inhabited by the colonised society, then called ‘reed city’ (“caniço”, the main building material). According to Rita-Ferreira,13 the renovation and evictions then implemented constituted one of the “main reasons for resentment” of the autochthonous population, which was being displaced progressively further from the urbanised city.

8Under pressure from the armed struggle for national liberation, the colonial administration invested in modernising the economy and for the first time included the ‘reed city’ in its urban agenda, more specifically the neighbourhoods that surrounded the urbanised city, regarded as the epicentre of independence ideals.14 The local administration – which was keen to keep the autochthonous population and the liberation movements at a distance –, together with some intellectuals critical of colonial ideology, defended the need to improve living conditions in the ‘reed city’. This is highlighted in three documents : architect Pancho Guedes’ manifesto ‘Várias receitas para curar o mal do Caniço e o Manual do Vogal sem Mestre’ (Several Ways to Heal the ‘Caniço’ Malady and the Manual of the Guild Member without a Master), published in 1963 ; in the more in-depth research by Rita-Ferreira, Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques (The Africans of Lourenço Marques), published in 1967-1968 ; and in the last colonial plan for the capital, the Plano Director de Urbanização de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Urban Master Plan), completed in 196915.

9This new attitude towards the urban margins was also expressed in the creation in 1969 of the Gabinete de Urbanização e Habitação de Lourenço Marques (GUHARLM) (the Lourenço Marques Office of Housing and Urban Development), which developed a planned approach to the ‘reed city’ through upgrading with two urban plans : Plano de Beneficiação da Área Suburbana de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques Improvement Plan for the Suburban Area) ; and Plano Parcial das Lagoas (Lagoons Partial Plan).16 Mazembe17 describes how, in addition to improving access roads, it developed an entry point into the ‘reed city’ for collective transport, firefighters, ambulances – but also for military vehicles. The plans aimed at improve other infrastructure and services, street lighting on the main roads, the installation of drinking fountains and a rubbish removal service ; and secondly the construction of buildings such as schools and facilities for extracurricular activities, with the creation of polyvalent units, for healthcare (medical centres, health centres, maternity services) and social centres.

10However, the impact of these visions, studies and intentions was rather limited. Although they defended access to better services for the autochthonous population, in implementing upgrading actions in the neighbourhoods around the urbanised colonial city, the duality between the ‘cement city’ and the ‘reed city’ prevailed. Simultaneously, access to a renewed centrality was not part of the colonial lexicon : the Africans, namely, the settlers’ servants, were not regarded as urban citizens and had to reside in the urban margins, excluded from the territorial limits of the city. In this sense, the autochthonous population continued to be the main inventor of their own dwelling space, adapting customary models to progressive spatial density and colonial urban norms. Unable to afford stone or brick building materials, poor families generally built as subdivided rectangular blocs with reed (caniço) walls or sometimes wattle and daub (pau-a-pique) and with a zinc roof. Only the assimilated Africans and those with more resources managed to build houses made of wood and zinc, which indicated a higher social status and which was more frequent in neighbourhoods adjacent to the urbanised colonial city. The poorest and most vulnerable families lived in rented houses and were subject to the speculation of the real estate market. The right to be co-creators of their dwelling space was thus conditioned by submission to the colonial and capitalist order. In this sense, the popular struggle in Mozambique for self-determination and liberation was a precondition for the struggle for the right to the city in the broad Lefebvrian sense.

A decade of socialist ideology

11In 1973 the oil crisis ushered in a neoliberal order worldwide, which was affirmed in the 1980s, supported on the commodification of the city, marginalising the emerging discourse on the right to the city and its more inclusive and participatory alternatives. This trend was only manifest in Mozambique in the mid-1980s. Until then, during the first decade of independence, from 1975 to 1985, the new government formed by a single political party with a socialist inspiration (Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO) and a planned economy, intended to promote greater social and spatial equity, drafting political and economic reforms based on strong political and social mobilisation.

12Several measures were introduced which envisaged state intervention in areas that benefitted the urban population, particularly that of the capital, Maputo. Following Oppenheimer and Raposo, we highlight the following measures:18 (i) the expansion of the territorial limits of cities at the 1ª Reunião Nacional das Cidades e Bairros Comunais (1^st National Meeting of Cities and Neighbourhoods), in 1979, which now included suburban areas, and aimed “to reduce the inequalities inherited from colonialism”, as well as green areas, “considered the basis of the urban self-sufficiency” ; (ii) the nationalisation of land (1975) and of rented and abandoned apartments buildings (1976),19 in order to end the exploitation of land and the impact of real estate markets and to reduce social discrimination, facilitating the access for people living in the urban margins or in rural areas to the urbanised city and to housing apartments ; (iii) the definition of new criteria for setting rents (1976) according to family income and the household size, constituting a form of urban housing subsidy and an attraction to for those thinking of moving to the city ; (iv) investment in upgrading the urban margins by improving infrastructure and basic facilities, in order to reduce urban duality, which built on the work initiated by GUHARLM,20 transformed with the independence into the National Directorate of Housing (DNH) ; and (v) the nationalisation of education and health systems and the extension of the primary school network to all neighbourhoods.

13The urbanisation project of Maxaquene and Polana Caniço (1977-1979), two self-built neighbourhoods located on the edge of the urbanised city, date to this period. Funded and supported by the United Nations, the project was developed by the DNH and was based on two strategic lines : the partial participation of residents and the elaboration of a general development plan. It had two main objectives : the implementation of urban infrastructure and upgrading housing, through technical assistance and self-construction.21

14Together these measures contributed to the right to the city at three levels : (i) a part of the population of the urban margins settled in the buildings of the urbanised city, namely those abandoned by settlers and nationalised by government ; (ii) the ‘cement city’ was appropriated by the population of the margins who worked there, allowing them access to services and to take part in recreational activities, while at the same time the margins became part of the city’s territory and gained a renewed centrality with new infrastructure and services and a new organisation of community life ; and (iii) the inhabitants of the margins won the right to the place and the right to organise their own dwelling space, which resulted in a new type of self-built masonry house, sometimes called a “Samora type house”,22 the first, albeit modest, sign of modernity.

15As regards the right to the Oeuvre, in the Lefebvrian sense of the right to participate and to be co-author in the city’s transformation,23 the organisation of the neighbourhoods into ‘driving groups’ (grupos dinamizadores) led to intense democratic debate in the first two years of independence. Since 1977, however, these ‘driving groups’ were controlled by FRELIMO. With its conversion from a liberation front to a political party guided by the principle of ‘democratic centralism’, these groups became an administrative and social structure of community management and of political control of the population. The colonial hierarchy produced a political party hierarchy and a bureaucratic apparatus that restrained the creative action of the population and that was reinforced by the continuing civil war – the Sixteen Years’War (1977-1992). In the middle of the war, in 1983, Operation Production was launched. Its aim was to contain urban sprawl and to control urban inhabitants. This was a highly repressive policy based on the deportation of so-called urban ‘unproductives’24 to their rural or provincial homelands.25 This aggravated the precariousness of the affected families and brought discredit on the government. Despite this and other control measures, Maputo as a city still continued to grow at the expense of the densification and expansion of its urban margins, mainly on the basis of self-production and the allocation of building plots for self-construction.26

Adopting structural adjustment to consolidate the neoliberal model

Opening up to the market in the civil war period

16Since the mid-1980s, taking into account the escalation of the economic crisis in which the country had plunged in 1981, the onset of civil war and pressure from the international community, Mozambique opened up its market economy, having adopted structural adjustment programmes based on privatisation and the reduction of the regulatory function of the state in the economy and provision of services. The result, as stressed by Oppenheimer and Raposo,27 was the marked increase in the percentage of the poor living in the capital (a six fold increase from the 1980 to the 1997 census), mainly in the urban margins, and the affirmation of the informal economy, which has become the main means of survival in these territories.28 Until the 1992 Peace Treaty, with the influx of displaced populations from war zones and the decline in public intervention, the urban margins became both denser and more extended, and the housing and basic services deteriorated throughout the capital. Under these circumstances the right to the city was limited to survival in the context of civil war.

The construction of the neoliberal model and the return of the vulnerable to the urban margins

17With peace, Mozambique followed the global trend of neoliberal affirmation. With the opening up to a multi-party system in 1990, the reformulation of the role of the state and its alliance with private capital and major financial interests, privatisations multiplied and new actors emerged : (i) the central state reduced its role and privatised the real-estate market, which resulted in the peripheralisation of groups with fewer resources that had settled in the urbanised city ; (ii) private investors, national and foreign, began to intervene in large projects in the urbanised city, again accentuating the urban duality ; (iii) the municipality saw its role reinforced by the implementation of decentralisation and local reforms, under pressure from international agencies, in particular the World Bank, but did not have the resources to intervene on the urban margins ; (iv) international organisations dictated the neoliberal strategy of intervention in the city ; and (v) only non-governmental organisations (NGO), foreign and national, were interested in the urban margins, focusing mainly on human rights in the cities.29

18New measures were introduced, influenced by neoliberal values : (i) in 1991, the privatisation of the state’s housing stock was decreed and new housing units were promoted through the market ; (ii) in 1997, a new Land Law was passed, in which, although land remained state property, a compromise was made between citizens’ rights over land and private, national and foreign investment;30 and (iii) in 1999, the Maputo Metropolitan Area Structure Plan was completed in a ‘technocratic way’ by two foreign companies financed by the World Bank. At the time this generated great controversy in civil society due to the lack of public debate, also in the Maputo Municipal Assembly, and it was not approved.

19This new constellation of powers, responsibilities and interests stimulated a capitalist market logic.31 The urbanised centre received most of the interventions undertaken by the state and by private investors and promoters, witnessing the renewal, rehabilitation and conservation of part of the housing stock and urban services. These processes were based on the (re) emergence of gentrification processes, with the exit – dictated or driven by market forces – of city dwellers with low and medium resources to ever more peripheral neighbourhoods. During this period, the urban margins benefited from the improvement actions of some infrastructure and basic services, led by NGO, but, as Raposo and Ribeiro32 relate, these actions tended to be individual aid measures and were not always based on a participatory or emancipatory approach. These actors failed to respond to the needs and aspirations of the great majority of inhabitants.33

20Taking into account the continuous population growth, the incapacity of management and regional planning bodies, and the neoliberal economic options, the 1990s witnessed a persistent and unplanned extension of the territory and the densification of the older self-produced neighbourhoods. As regards the right to the city, we can underline : (i) the lack of basic services and infrastructure in these neighbourhoods, due to overcrowding, absence or deterioration, and their privatisation, contributed to an increase in socio-spatial segregation and exclusion ; (ii) deterioration of the living conditions of the poorest families on the urban margins and their progressive withdrawal from the urban centre with its increasing concentration of wealth and services ; and (iii) the increase of socio-spatial differentiation within the urban margins (and between these and the urban centres) and the lack of urban constraints, reflected in a diversity of types of housing, from the very precarious to the more modern and urban, with more space, including a corridor, an inside bathroom and kitchen, asymmetrical roofs and more decorative elements, expressing the acquisition of more resources and better urban insertion.34 At the right to the Oeuvre level, it is worth mentioning the role of a group of municipal deputies in the opposition during this period. The Juntos pela Cidade (Together for the City) was a “minority but cohesive and strong”, which favoured public debate on urban management, with real consequences, especially at the urbanised city level.35

Neoliberal consolidation and the construction of alternatives

21In the new millennium, neoliberal globalisation and the capitalist production of space have led to an increase of global socio-spatial inequalities and the extension of urban margins. In this context, the notion of the right to the city is again cited globally, by both movements and social networks, and by governments and international agencies. In 2005, at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, approved the World Charter for the Right to the City, and was followed by numerous letters, platforms, protests and declarations on the subject. Since 2015, the notion of the right to the city has become a pillar of the preparation and implementation of Habitat III’s New Urban Agenda. This long appropriation includes, as noted by Raposo36 and Jorge,37 different values : from a limited vision of access to housing, infrastructure and basic urban services and democratic urban administration – which authors such as Marcuse,38 designated as “rights in the cities” – to a direct critique of the commodification of space, to a fight for the democratisation of the city, and to the right to the Oeuvre and to testing alternatives to the hegemonic system.

22In 2000 major floods in Mozambique triggered the reconfiguration of discourses and actions, marking a turning point in how experts/technicians, politicians and civil society in general perceive environmentally sensitive areas, located in the self-produced urban margins, strategic from a market perspective (located in the vicinity of the urbanised city and structuring routes, or near the coastline). These areas came to be considered “natural risk zones”, which did not stop some of them being bought for investment and urban expansion, occupied by luxury homes and gated communities.39 The renewal of self-produced areas, with expulsion via the market of its inhabitants in order to welcome wealthier groups, were widely adopted by planners and politicians, materialising in the so-called ‘urban requalification plans’, based on the tabula rasa of the existing housing fabric. By contrast, “(re)settlement plans” were planned in most peripheral neighbourhoods, returning to the principles of ‘sites-and-services’ schemes, widespread in the country during the early years of independence.40

23Following the same neoliberal ideal of consolidation and expansion of the urban city, the existing road network (e.g. Milagre Mabote Avenue and Julius Nyerere Avenue) and megaprojects (such as the Grand Circular and the bridge between Maputo and KaTembe) should be mentioned. The rapid execution of such schemes “in the public interest” was ensured through public-private partnerships (PPP). As generators of expropriation, renovation, valorisation and gentrification, these interventions, alongside those of large service buildings and gated communities, boosted the parallel purchase and sale market for building plots and construction alongside the spaces in the intervention. Yet, at the same time, they also generated resistance, especially by residents who refused the offers of developers and real estate investors.41 This new basic administrative structure contributes to the success of market dynamics and is embodied in the Regulation of the Organisation and Functioning of Municipal Neighbourhoods Administrative Structures (2011). This aimed at the political control of the territory, based on dividing the municipality into districts, neighbourhoods and blocks, administered respectively by councillors, secretaries and chiefs appointed by the president of the Municipal Council president, thus weakening the democratisation of local management.

24Despite the (re)emergence of the renovation paradigm42 – which prevailed in the last years of colonial rule – and the reactions it has provoked in the new millennium, Maputo has also been the scene of innovative experiences that placed the improvement of access to urban services on the municipality’s agenda. A case in point was an intervention in Mafalala (2004-2005) financed and conducted by UN-Habitat, which focused on the installation of digging drainage ditches, paving streets and drinking fountains. Another was an intervention in Chamanculo C (2005-2009), financed by the World Bank and conducted by a team from the Faculty of Architecture and Physical Planning (FAPF) of the University Eduardo Mondlane. This was based on an in-depth diagnostic study, it focused on opening up building streets, redefining plots and attributing symbolic occupation titles in some blocks considered a priority, with the participation and active involvement of residents, local structures and municipal architects, planners and engineers.43

25Imbued in this and other experiences that took place in Manica and Nacala, a study coordinated by architect José Forjaz, carried out by a team of the FAPF and financed by the United Nations, under the ‘Improvement of Informal Settlements’ initiative, presented upgrading as the main intervention strategy at the level of the self-produced neighbourhoods.44 The Maputo Municipality Urban Plan (MMUP), approved in 2008, following the new legislative package on to territorial planning is elaborated in line with this by a team from FAPF and initially with the same coordination. This plan places the (re)planning of what it calls ‘informal neighbourhoods’, through self-construction or the creation of PPP at the top of its agenda. This requires the Municipal Council to negotiate the concession of land in exchange for improvements, which include on-site rehousing, with investors and promoters.45

26From 2010 onwards, partial urbanisation plans for several neighbourhoods in Maputo’s urban margins have been developed and approved. It proposed an overall upgrade and land regularisation of the most peripheral neighbourhoods and the renewal of the pericentral ones, which will be subject to real estate projects.46 The factors that determine or influence these differentiated approaches to intervention for the two contexts are related not so much with their more or less positive perception and their morphological characteristics (more or less regular), than with the interests of the land and real estate market. However, despite the investment and commitment to formulating these urban planning tools, implementation is taking time to take effect.

27The urban margins are thus characterised by a great diversity of situation : (i) low-income families living in parts of rented houses, sometimes at high prices ; (ii) people living in their own homes, but whose living and housing conditions are worsening ; (iii) those living in their own homes and able to improve or renew their homes ; or (iv) middle and high-income families that voluntarily settle on the margins, acquiring a large plot of land at an affordable price and built a large house with distinctive elements that denote higher social status.

28In terms of the right to the city, we should highlight the following : (i) the lack of access of the poorer population to proper standards of housing, urban services and to a renewed centrality and their impoverishment with the increase in the prices of collective transport, privatised infrastructure and basic services ; (ii) the emergence of alternative practices and resistance by some residents in neighbouring areas, but also among architects/urban planners, engineers and members of civil society organisations involved in these processes, revealing the existence of a counter-current supported by new forms of solidarity, new strategies and organisation structures, such as the Kaya Clinic project;47 (iii) the emergence of micro-resistance to the on-going commodification and peripheralisation processes in some pericentral neighbourhoods, such as Polana Caniço and Maxaquene A, through the permanence in the places, the rejection of values proposed by promoters and real estate investors and media reporting on instances of abuse of power and human rights violations ; and (iv) even through active resistance or rebellion, such as the events in Maputo in 2008, 2010 and 2012, as a result of a hike transport costs and basic consumer goods, creating a transformative action that ran counter to the hegemonic system.

Conclusion

29The main producers of the urban margins of Maputo have been their inhabitants themselves, as builders. With their resources, they produced and organised their dwelling space, in a dialogue between customary models, ways of life and urban constraints. They progressively create new forms of urbanity. The policies and actions of external agents – colonial, socialist or neoliberal – design the city, which is more dualistic, more differentiated or more (un) equal, generating different (re)actions, different types of housing and ways of living. In the new millennium, the accelerated processes of land valorisation and urban renewal in Maputo tend to be based, as in the colonial period, on the tabula rasa of parts of their self-produced urban margins, thus exacerbating the phenomena of the extension, gentrification and fragmentation of the city. It denies the right to a place and the right to the city for low-income groups, which are moved away from the urbanised centre, where the main services and work opportunities are still concentrated. Some critical voices, from architects, planners and other experts and from civil society, have tried alternative and more inclusive practices but lastly the inhabitants of these urban margins are fighting for their rights in the city.

30Returning to our main question : the importance of the reference to the right to the city along the three Lefebvrian axes for a critical re-reading of the (self) production and urban transformation processes and in order to identify resistance practices and alternative constructions to the hegemonic system our research sheds light on the following :

• The gains, constraints and obstacles in each historical moment, regarding access of the inhabitants of the urban margins to adequate housing, services and a renewed centrality ;
• The appropriation, participation, room for manoeuvre and resistance of the most vulnerable groups in the (co) production of their living space and of the city in each historical moment, in short, their right to participate in the Oeuvre ;
• The relationships between the actors involved and the diversity of (self) produced spaces ;
• The limitations of an approach focused exclusively on the ‘rights in the cities’, as was the case in the last years of colonial rule ;
• The importance of insurgent practices, everyday resistance and urban struggle, as well as the construction of alternatives to the hegemonic system, even when these do not embrace the notion of the right to the city, which is generally the case in Maputo.

31Despite apparent widespread conformity, when these processes are understood at the level of action, they are plural and involve a multiplicity of agents with different interests, strategies and practices. Some are more favourable to the dominant interests and others are more opposed to it. In this context, alternative practices and centres of resistance have emerged, especially among city dwellers, but also among some urban planners/ experts and parts of civil society members involved in these processes. They reveal a counter current, supported by new forms of solidarity, strategies and organisational structures, which reject the segregated city and imagine another possible city inspired by Lefebvre’s right to the city, read as a tool of critical and reflective analysis of the contradictory urban reality. It is our belief that this counter current is part of the utopia of an ‘impossible possible’ that confers meaning to action, expands the field of the possible and reinvents another urban social life.