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Urban Forum
Published in: Urban Forum 3/2020

30-07-2020

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

Authors: Sandra Roque, Miguel Mucavele, Nair Noronha

Published in: Urban Forum | Issue 3/2020

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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.
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Footnotes
1
According to the Dicionário de Língua Portuguesa (Dicionários Editora 2006), the word “barracas” may refer to “a modest house built in precarious materials”; “a temporary construction made generally of wood or canvas”; or to a tent. In Maputo, the word is used to refer to small constructions on the sidewalks, usually made of wood or zinc or other precarious material where drinks and sometimes food are sold. They function as street bars and are at times associated with heavy drinking. Although their owners usually pay some fee to the Municipal Council, they are mostly viewed as informal, and as a temporary structure that will at some point be removed.
 
2
Throughout the text we will be referring to Barracas do Museu or Mercado do Museu, the two names by which the market is known.
 
3
The name “Museu” comes from the nearby Museu de História Natural (Natural History Museum) and has also become the name by which the whole neighbourhood is known.
 
4
Mozambique’s economy grew by around 7% between 2006 and 2016. In 2016, the surfacing of government-backed loans amounting to more than US$ 2bn plunged the country into a political and economic crisis which pushed the economic growth rate to below 4%. According to the World Bank, Mozambique’s growth rate in 2018 was 3.5%.
 
5
In a spatial duality common to many cities across Africa, Maputo is often described through two seemingly distinct spatial areas: the cidade de cimento (cement city), which broadly corresponds to the colonial city, and the cidade de caniço (city of reeds), the city’s informal settlements (Mendes 1989; Mendes de Araújo 1999; Frates 2002; Bertelsen et al. 2014). In more recent years, this duality has been described by the use of terms “cidade” or “centre”, on the one hand, and bairro, subúrbios or “periphery” on the other, and continues to express long-lasting, social and economic spatial inequality.
 
6
The project was funded by the Norwegian Research Council, and was carried by Christian Michelsen Institute of Bergen, Norway, together with COWI Mozambique. The project led the publication of several papers and policy briefs (see cmi.​com). The study on the Mercado do Museu started as a broader study of spaces of social interaction in Maputo and included at the beginning a few public gardens, such as Jardim dos Madjermanes and Jardim Dona Berta, and gatherings along Avenida 10 de Novembro. The study gradually focused on Mercado do Museu as this site strongly provided the elements of public space social interaction and urban culture formation in which our team was interested. In addition, as this text describes, Mercado do Museu was at the time being threatened by the possibility of evictions, which raised issues of relationships to and inclusion in the urban space which were issues at the origin of our interest in space of social interaction.
 
7
As the article related to Barracas do Museu was not fully finalised in 2015, information continued to be collected through short periods of visits to the Mercado by one or more of the contributors to this article.
 
8
We were a team of three researchers—a principal researcher (Sandra Roque) and two research assistants (Nair Noronha and Miguel Mucavele). Nair and Miguel were both from Maputo; Sandra Roque lived permanently in Maputo between 2001 and 2013. We all knew the city very well.
 
9
Our informants have been clients, sellers and workers in the Mercado do Museu whom we met during our long stays at Barracas. We have also spoken to officials in the city municipal government and to architects and urban planners who have worked in Maputo.
 
10
For a detailed account and critical analysis of the period, see Pitcher (2002).
 
11
The Indigenato legislation was formed by a set of laws and regulations which began to be introduced at the end of the nineteenth century and covered several dimensions of social, economic and political life. It regulated access and obligations to work, access to the urban space, civic rights and determined who was to be considered a citizen.
 
12
FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) is the Mozambique’s political party that proclaimed the country’s independence, in 1975 and which has been in power since then.
 
13
The nationalisation was announced by Samora Machel, Mozambique’s first president, and was explained as a measure to give the cidade de cimento “a Mozambican face” (Morton 2019, p. 163).
 
14
In his book “The Age of concrete: Housing and the shape of aspiration in the capital of Mozambique”, Morton (2019) describes in detail the process of nationalisation of housing in Maputo. He points to how, at the beginning of the process, many of the houses and apartments in Maputo’s wealthiest neighbourhoods had already been taken by members of Frelimo or the state administration elites. However, after some months, many of the city’s apartment blocks would be inhabited by residents of much more modest background coming from the poorer neighbourhoods surrounding the city centre. This is also what we have found in a previous study (Roque et al. 2016).
 
15
Two or three of the market vendors whom we have interviewed still lived nearby and spoke of many that had left. Colaço (2000) surveyed owners of the Barracas who lived in the neighbourhood as well.
 
16
Some of these projects included the creation of “enclave communities” which are not the object of this article, but contributed to growing social, economic and spatial differentiation across Maputo (see Nielsen and Jenkins 2020; Nielsen et al. 2020)
 
17
The news were published on Radio Moçambique on the 27th of July 2015, and other Mozambican media at the time. See for example, articles on Folha de Maputo (2015). According to market sellers and other Maputo residents, modernisation of these markets is talked about by municipal authorities from time to time, but lately modernisation intentions seemed to be stronger.
 
18
Suspicion of urban residents led to extreme measures. In 1983, Frelimo launched and executed the controversial “Operação Produção” which, according to that political party, aimed at sending “unproductive” urban residents to work in the rural areas, in particular to Niassa. The “rural bias” was experienced by many other African countries in the same period (Parnell and Pieterse 2014).
 
19
See Roque (2009 and 2011) for a discussion on the colonial historical foundations of present understandings of the urban space in Angola and the impact of colonial urban history on the significance of temporary and permanent construction and housing.
 
20
Interview with an urban planning manager in the Maputo Municipal Council in July 2015.
 
21
See for example Jornal Debate (2015). As we finish this article on June 2020, the Maputo Municipal Council has just closed several markets, and demolished numerous barracas which were standing on the city’s pavements across the city, as these were considered sanitation hazards within the current context marked by COVID-19. This included a few barracas that were standing on the pavement on Rua José Mateus but on the opposite side to the main structures of the Mercado do Museu. The current Municipal Council has also recently announced large upgrading interventions on key Maputo’s popular markets (O País 2020).
 
22
Chapas is the name by which minivans that provide public transport are known. The name comes from the expression “chapa 100” which was used in the 1980s to indicate that a ticket for a ride costed 100 meticais.
 
23
Escola Secundária Josina Machel (Secondary School Josina Machel) and Instituto Comercial de Maputo (Commercial Institutute of Maputo).
 
24
RENAMO: Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, the major Mozambican opposition party originating in the movement that fought against the Frelimo-led Government in a long civil war that lasted until the peace agreement signed in October 1992.
 
25
ONUMOZ, the United Nations Operations in Mozambique (UNOMOZ in English) was the UN peace mission to Mozambique which operated in the country between 1992 and 1994.
 
26
As a result of the municipal elections in 2018, the composition of the Maputo Municipal Council has changed, even though it continues to be governed by Frelimo. Under the previous council a contractor had started building some structures on Avenida dos Lusíadas, where vendors were supposed to move to while waiting for the upgrading of the Mercado do Museu. However, those structures were never completed, and the current Municipal Council had them demolished. (Radio Mais Live 2019). The plans to modernise the Mercado do Museu seem to have been halted by the current municipal government, at least for now.
 
27
This is to be seen, given the current context marked by COVID-19 as described in footnote 1.
 
28
Interview with a manager within the Maputo Municipality in July 2014. Similar PPP arrangements have been used in the rehabilitation of public gardens and parks.
 
29
Mercado Central, or Bazar Central, has however existed since 1900, in an iconic building well-known for its design. It is therefore a well-established building within cidade de cimento.
 
30
The avenue running along the beach in Maputo.
 
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Metadata
Title
The City and the Barracas: Urban Change, Spatial Differentiation and Citizenship in Maputo
Authors
Sandra Roque
Miguel Mucavele
Nair Noronha
Publication date
30-07-2020
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Urban Forum / Issue 3/2020
Print ISSN: 1015-3802
Electronic ISSN: 1874-6330
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-020-09400-w

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