Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects upon three main types of housing intervention that emerge in Maputo in the new millennium, aiming to understand their relation with the current uneven economic growth and increasing globalized society and their role regarding the city's strong socio-spatial disparities.

Paper long abstract:

With the opening to the market economy (mid 1980's and early 1990's), Mozambique started a process of uneven economic growth, which currently tends to increase with the discovery and recent exploitation of natural resources, highly valued in the international market. Along with it, new agents emerged, from international agencies to civil society organizations and private sector investors, intervening in various fields.

In Maputo, the majority of the population, with reduced economic resources, still lives without adequate living conditions, though these may assume different characteristics and intensities. Over time, alongside with a few public interventions, this population has been the main builder of their own residential space, mainly through unofficial or mixed processes. Simultaneously, in the new millennium, three main types of housing interventions - resettlements, subsidized housing and market driven investments - have been developing in Maputo's expansion area, introducing different kinds of approaches, related to this new context.

Understanding the urban space as a social and capital product, in the line of Lefebvre (1991/74) and Harvey (2001), the paper draws on paradigmatic case studies of such housing interventions. It aims to analyze their territorial impact and how they may contribute or not to overcome the strong socio-spatial disparities present in Maputo, trying to understand the complex relations established between them and the globalizing socio-economic context in which they take place.

HARVEY, D. - Spaces of capital: towards a critical geography. New York: Routledge, 2001. XI, 429p.

LEFEBVRE, H. - The production of space. Trad. NICHOLSON~SMITH, Donald. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991/74. 454p.