Rooftop Autophagy Vertical Monadism in Maputo, Mozambique
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Rooftop Autophagy Vertical Monadism in Maputo, Mozambique Morten Nielsen 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
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 innercity 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. Keywords Vertical urbanism . Maputo . Informality . Urban management . Housing market
Introduction On 16 September 2019, an article was published in Mozambique’s leading national newspaper Notícias, which discussed the critical conditions of Maputo’s apartment buildings (Tene 2019). With the telling title ‘Misuse and lack of maintenance: Scenes that suggest the end of some buildings’, the article presented its topic by outlining some of the key physical features of the city’s dilapidated apartment blocks: ‘Cracks in the * Morten Nielsen [email protected]
1
The National Museum of Denmark, Ny Vestergade 10, DK-1471 Copenhagen K, Denmark
M. Nielsen
walls, puddles of sewage water, trash and other signs of degradation …characterize many buildings in the city of Maputo… In some buildings the situation is so serious that the security of the residents and users is threatened’ (ibid.). According to António Simão Júnior, the head of the Department of Urbanization and Construction (DUC)1 at the Maputo Municipality, there are currently more than 120 apartment buildings in the city, which ‘do not offer the minimum conditions of security’ for its residents. In collaboration with the city’s Justice Department, the DUC is therefore preparing a series of legal measures to ensure that failure to maintain the apartment buildings is rendered illegal. The main problem is, as the reader is reminded several times throughout the article, that residents ‘do not respect the norms of good conduct and coexistence’. In many apartment buildings, collective spaces (espaços comúns) on the rooftops an
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