The City and the Barracas : Urban Change, Spatial Differentiation and Citizenship in Maputo
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The City and the Barracas: Urban Change, Spatial Differentiation and Citizenship in Maputo Sandra Roque 1
& Miguel
Mucavele 2 & Nair Noronha 2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
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. Keywords Maputo . Informal markets . Urban upgrading . Modernisation . Conflicting
rationalities . Urban citizenship
* Sandra Roque [email protected]
1
COWI, Parallelvej 2, 2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
2
Maputo, Mozambique
S. Roque et al.
Introduction Arminda pointed her chin to a new high-rise building a few metres away and said “Do you think they will want a market like ours next to that building?” Arminda is the owner of a stall in Barracas do Museu, or Barracas1, the name by which the Mercado do Museu (Museum Market) is popularly known in Maputo.2 We are discussing the Municipal Council’s plans for upgrading Barracas do Museu, and she is telling us about the rumours saying that the old colonial house on the opposite side of Rua José Mateus will be sold in a highly lucrative deal to give space to a new high-rise building. Barracas do Museu is a popular informal market located in an area of the city also known by “Museu”3, in the heart of the high-end Bairro Polana, just a few blocks away from the Polana Shopping Centre and the affluent Julius Nyerere Avenue. The Mercado’s location engenders this stark juxtaposition (Hammar and Millstein 2019) between the informality of its structures and mode of operating and the wealthy highly spatially structured Polana neighbourhood. The Museu area was until recently formed mainly by houses and small one-storey to twostorey buildings. Similarly to the rest of the city, the neighbourhood has however been undergoing significant tran
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