The Production of Urban Peripheries For and by Low Income Populations at The Turn of The Millennium Maputo Luanda and Johannesburg

Journal of Southern African Studies
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The Production of Urban Peripheries For and

By Low-Income Populations at the Turn of the
Millennium: Maputo, Luanda and Johannesburg
Vanessa de Pacheco Melo
To cite this article: Vanessa de Pacheco Melo (2016) The Production of Urban Peripheries For
and By Low-Income Populations at the Turn of the Millennium: Maputo, Luanda and Johannesburg,
Journal of Southern African Studies, 42:4, 619-641, DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2016.1196955
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1196955
Published online: 30 Jun 2016.
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Journal of Southern African Studies, 2016
Vol. 42, No. 4, 619–641, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1196955
The Production of Urban Peripheries For

and By Low-Income Populations at the Turn
of the Millennium: Maputo, Luanda and
Johannesburg
(Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon)
The dynamics of rapid urbanisation and urban trends in the present neoliberal context, which
arise from the production of space in the capitalist mode of production, are evident in the
peripheries recently produced for and by low-income populations. This article examines these
peripheries in representative southern African cities, with Maputo as the main case study,
analysed in relation to Luanda and Johannesburg. Basing my argument on the overarching
theory of the production of space, I seek to understand how the interventions undertaken by the
state and low-income people, and the interrelationship between these two main agents and the
urban morphology, vary according to the historical, political and socio-economic specificities
of each country. I argue that in Maputo, more than in the other two cities, these specificities,
expressed in the morphology of these peripheral areas, benefit some crucial aspects of the
living and housing conditions of Maputo’s low-income population, which is the city’s most
vulnerable social group.
Introduction
The production of space in the capitalist mode of production generates socio-spatial disparities,
particularly evident in cities in countries with high socio-economic inequalities, such as in
southern Africa, where low-income people, who cannot afford to live in more central and/
or valued urban areas, tend to be pushed to peripheral locations. Yet such processes differ
according to the historical, political and socio-economic context of each country, which
differently influences agents’ perceptions, their approaches to urban issues and their ability
to intervene, as demonstrated in Maputo, Luanda and Johannesburg. The peripheries recently
produced in these three cities are among those areas where the dynamics of rapid urbanisation
and urban trends in the present neoliberal context appear most prominently, with the different
types of interventions performed by different agents determining the particular character of
the production of space in each of them. In this article, I argue that the specificities of each
context are expressed in the morphology of these peripheral areas, while in Maputo the most
vulnerable social group – the low-income population – benefits more than that in Luanda and
Johannesburg, with respect to certain crucial aspects of its living space.
I will use a comparative approach as an operational and learning tool since, as pointed
out by McFarlane,1 it allows for the identification of both generalities and particularities
1 C. McFarlane, ‘The Comparative City: Knowledge, Learning, Urbanism’, International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 34, 4 (2010), pp. 725–42.
© 2016 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies

620 Vanessa de Pacheco Melo
of a phenomenon, through its analysis in different contexts, as well as revealing distinct

characteristics in each case. On the one hand, I will present the three cities as different aspects
of a broader process of production of space intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production;
on the other hand, I will use the differences and similarities between Maputo, Luanda and
Johannesburg to highlight special features in Maputo that would be more difficult to trace
and describe in an isolated analysis. This article is thus an empirically grounded contribution
both to comparative urban research, an area of study which is currently attracting considerable
research interest,2 and to the understanding of some of the urbanisation processes that shape the
current processes of ‘planetary urbanisation’3 promoted by the capitalist mode of production,
which require new strategies of concrete research and comparative analysis, as pointed out by
Brenner and Schmid.4
From this perspective, the three cities permit the bringing together of a set of representative
and diverse illustrations of what is happening in southern Africa regarding the production of
urban peripheries for and by low-income populations, constituting together a rich field of
research. My analysis is based on fieldwork undertaken between 2011 and 2013, which was
more extensive and deeper in Maputo than in the other two cities. In all of them, I interviewed
well-informed people and visited some representative peripheral sites inhabited by low-income
people. In 2014, an extensive collection of morphology samples, collected through Google
Earth satellite imagery, was obtained, using different scales and at different development
periods. These covered most of the paradigmatic peripheral locations produced for and by
low-income populations in the three cities and were grouped and analysed according to each
type of intervention.
My argument has three parts. The first presents a theoretical overview of the production of
urban peripheries for and by low-income populations; in this, I introduce the main concepts and
designations used throughout, as well as the specificities of the urban southern African context.
The second reveals the top-down determinants in the production of these areas by describing
the main differences and similarities in the influences at work in the three contexts. The
third identifies correlations between these differences and similarities and the morphological
characteristics of the analysed peripheries.
The ‘Production of Space’ in the Capitalist Mode of Production

The term ‘production of space’ is used with reference to Lefebvre’s work of 1974,5 in which
he conceives and elaborates space as a social product, shaped by the intrinsic characteristics
of each society’s mode of production. In the capitalist mode of production, Lefebvre sees
space as an intermediary, the role of which becomes increasingly active as both instrument
and goal, since it becomes a key element in the process of the formation, accumulation and
distribution of profit. Thus, it becomes simultaneously a product of the system and a means
of its reproduction, a concept also well developed in Harvey’s work.6 Space obtained this role
through the great transformation, understood by Polanyi7 as the time when the market economy
came to dominate all other types of economy: namely, the conversion of land, as well as labour
and money, into fictitious commodities.
2 See, for example, Special Issue on ‘Comparative Urbanism’, Urban Geography, 33, 6 (2012).
3 See, for example, N. Brenner (ed.), Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Berlin,
Jovis, 2014).
4 N. Brenner and C. Schmid, ‘Planetary Urbanisation’, in M. Gandy (ed.), Urban Constellations (Berlin, Jovis,
2012), pp. 11–13.
5 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991).
6 For example, D. Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York, Routledge, 2001).
7 K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, Beacon Press,
2001).
The Production of Urban Peripheries 621
On the one hand, space becomes a commodity, and, using Marx’s8 concepts of ‘use value’
and ‘exchange value’, Lefebvre9 conceives of the production of space by human labour both
as a ‘work’, governed by ‘use value’, and as a ‘product’ (here in a narrower sense), driven by
‘exchange value’, referring to the fact that in the capitalist mode of production the former is
increasingly subordinated to the latter. On the other hand, by eliminating space barriers and
‘annihilating space by time’, as Harvey10 puts it, the urban milieu itself becomes central to
production and consumption activities, the reproduction of labour and the promotion of capital
circulation. This is achieved through the concentration of goods, services, people, knowledge
and technology; the organisation of human activities and of (re)constructed space; and the
proliferation of access roads and means of communication and information.
As urban space becomes more and more the object and the locus of capital accumulation, so
it is also increasingly made, unmade and remade for this purpose according to a capitalist logic
based on land value. At the same time it grows in complexity, simultaneously attracting and
centralising, expanding and creating peripheries, within a process of spatial and socio-economic
fragmentation in an increasingly urbanised world. This fragmentation is exacerbated in the
current neoliberal context, as competition between cities (as hubs that attract capital investment,
commodities and means of accumulation) increases, as does the capacity of private interests to
shape urban development. Both phenomena occur hand in hand with a growing concentration
of wealth. Private spaces for elite companies, mega-projects for land-use reconfiguration
and business promotion, urban enclaves, gated communities and ‘other “purified” spaces of
social reproduction’ are fashioned, as described by Brenner and Theodore.11 At the same time,
other opportunities for speculative investments are created in central and/or more valuable
areas, accompanied by an increase in renovation and renewal projects, usually associated with
gentrification and processes of relocation to peripheral areas. This is sometimes achieved by
forced evictions, which are part of the processes of ‘creative destruction’ and ‘accumulation by
dispossession’ that Harvey describes.12 The move to the peripheries is also promoted by other
measures, such as: (1) increase in taxes, interest rates and rents and real estate speculation,
which prevent those who are less well-off from moving to, or continuing to live in, more
central and/or valued areas; (2) housing interventions undertaken by the state, on its own or
in partnerships with other agents, directed towards low-income populations, in an attempt to
mitigate the negative effects of this uneven production of space. Another factor contributing
to the production of the peripheries for and by lower social strata is the vast number of actions
undertaken by those in the poorest sectors, who have to find their own way of occupying space
and creating a place to live.
In southern African cities, these processes of production of space occur in urban realities –
inherited from the colonial or apartheid periods – that are already very unequal and fragmented.
Currently, as stated by UN–Habitat,13 ‘“world-city”-inspired and aspirant cultures with market-
driven investments’ co-exist with poor and deprived areas; because it results in a form of
urban development increasingly based on socio-economic class differentiation, this adds to the
8 K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (New York, Vintage Books, 1976).
9 H. Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville (Paris, Economic and Anthropos, 2009); Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
10 Harvey, Spaces of Capital, pp. 244–5. The author uses this expression to describe how ‘spatial distance reduces
itself to time’ within the process of capital accumulation, since time to overcome a spatial distance becomes
more important than the distance itself. As a result, as time to move between different locations gets shorter,
space also seems to get smaller.
11 N. Brenner and N. Theodore, ‘Cities and Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”’, Antipode, 34, 3
(2002), p. 371.
12 D. Harvey, Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (München,
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005); D. Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, 53 (2008), pp. 23–40.
13 UN–Habitat, The State of African Cities 2010: Governance, Inequality and Urban Land Markets (Nairobi,
UN–Habitat, 2010), p. 209.
heritage of the past, while transforming it. Mabin et al.14 describe the most peripheral areas not
only as marginalised territories, but also as heterogeneous and imbricated spaces where rapid
change is concentrated. These areas are inhabited both by higher-income groups, as a matter
of preference, and by lower-income groups. The latter frequently live in these areas as a result
of: (1) top-down processes of gentrification and relocation, brought about not only by the
various urban interventions mentioned above, but also by natural calamities; (2) the provision
of parcelled-out land and low-cost housing, supplied with different levels of infrastructure,
associated or not with resettlements; (3) the inability of these groups (and sometimes also their
unwillingness) to live in more valuable and regulated areas, generally more central, where
land is in shorter supply, which is conducive to bottom-up processes of production of space.
These peripheries inhabited by low-income populations are usually characterised by different
kinds and levels of deprivation of the benefits offered by urbanisation, such as land-use diversity
(for example, housing, social facilities, economic activities, services, leisure); environmental
quality (for example, adequate housing, basic infrastructure, waste disposal, high-quality public
spaces); access to transport and to a stimulating cultural and socio-economic diversity. Used in
the 1980s in Mozambique to designate officially planned areas with inadequate infrastructure
and equipment, the term ‘semi-urbanised’ is employed here to describe all areas characterised by
the absence of urban benefits in a broader sense.15 I also use it to avoid the negative connotations
attached to most common concepts of informal settlement or slum, which contribute to its
residents’ vulnerability and tend to encourage urban intervention policies and practices that
aim to eradicate these areas, as various authors have recognised, such as Gilbert,16 Groenewald
et al.17 and Huchzermeyer.18
Two main agents thus perform the production of peripheries inhabited by low-income
populations: the state, represented by various government institutions that also set the guidelines
for actions of other agents (private investors, multilateral agencies, civil society organisations
and others) and are simultaneously reconfigured or influenced by them; and the grass-roots
population itself. As Lefebvre19 claims, the state exerts on society a homogenising rationality –
by its authority, law, knowledge and technology – that seeks to establish and legitimise a global
order reflected in space. Urban planning and management, housing policies and programmes,
and top-down urban interventions constitute privileged means of imposing such rationality
and order. Nevertheless, in line with Santos’ perspective on the capitalist state,20 the contents
and guidelines of these regulatory mechanisms depend on how the state’s conflicting and
contradictory nature leads it to act. For the state intends to ensure two things: on the one
hand, the general conditions that allow the reproduction of the capitalist system, based on
profit accumulation under a market economy, in favour of private capital interests; on the
other, citizens’ equality, liberty, social welfare and the public interest. In the current neoliberal
context, in which the state’s main priority is the creation of a ‘good business climate’, as stated
14 A. Mabin, S. Butcher and R. Bloch, ‘Peripheries, Suburbanisms and Change in Sub-Saharan African Cities’,
Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 39, 2 (2013).
15 This term has been debated and adopted by some researchers at the Urban Socio-Territorial and Local Intervention
Study Group (GESTUAL), a study group at the Research Centre for Architecture, Urbanism and Design (CIAUD),
Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon.
16 A. Gilbert, ‘The Return of Slum: Does Language Matter?’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,
31, 4 (2007). pp. 697–713.
17 L. Groenewald, M. Huchzermeyer, K. Kornienko, M. Tredoux, M. Rubin and I. Raposo, ‘Breaking Down the
Binary: Meanings of Informal Settlement in Southern African Cities’, in S. Bekker and L. Fouchard (eds),
Governing Cities in Africa: Politics and Policies (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2013), pp. 93–116.
18 M. Huchzermeyer, Cities with ‘Slums’: From Informal Settlements’ Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa
(Claremont, UCT Press, 2011).
19 Lefebvre, The Production of Space and H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis and London, University
of Minnesota Press, 2003).
20 B. de S. Santos, ‘O Estado, o Direito e a Questão Urbana’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 9 (1982), pp. 10–86.
by Harvey,21 the latter tends to be subordinated to the former. In addition, state action is also
conditional on its capacity to intervene and the resources available, often very limited in the
majority of southern African countries.
The production of peripheries by the grass roots usually takes place through the process
described by Bayat22 as the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary – a silent, patient, protracted,
and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive
hardship and better their lives’. Although largely a consequence of the unequal production of
space imposed by capitalist logic, the mechanisms used may diverge from this logic: first,
land occupation may not be governed by the value of land, though land commercialisation
is also increasingly present in these processes; second, the construction of houses tends do
be governed by ‘use value’, even if ‘exchange value’ may also become dominant in renting
and selling processes. For Lefebvre,23 such production of space depends on timings, rhythms,
symbols and everyday practices that are transposed on to urban morphology and differ from
state rationality. Therefore, an ‘[a]ppropriation [of space and its production] of a remarkably
high order is to be found here’.24 It is through this appropriation by the grass roots that a city
and the life in it may become a ‘work’ and ‘use value’ (and not an ‘exchange value’), one of the
basic conditions of the ‘right to the city’, as first conceived and defended by Lefebvre in 1968.25
According to Lefebvre,26 areas produced by the grass roots create a conflicting spatial
relation with those produced, top-down, within the system, and they promote counter-actions
from the state that may result in the emergence of unforeseen differences or in the absorption
or destruction of the areas produced by the grass roots. Because of the nature of the capitalist
state, its actions, as mentioned above, may be conflicting and contradictory. The same can apply
to the actions of the population, since besides redistribution it aspires to both autonomy and
integration, and to the defence of the conquests already achieved, as described by Bayat.27 In
these processes and interrelationships, important elements include the degree of leeway given
to the population and the extent to which their actions receive recognition and legitimacy.
This is particularly so in the context of low economic performance and great socio-economic
inequality, where a large percentage of the population cannot gain access to land or housing
through the mechanisms determined by the state: they cannot use the official market, as it is
unaffordable, nor does the state provide enough alternatives. This is true of the majority of
southern African countries.
To summarise, the production of urban peripheries for and by low-income populations in
Maputo, Luanda and Johannesburg is mainly based on: (1) low-cost housing supply, mostly as
a result of relocations, in a top-down planned intervention that provides a standardised product,
though not always a finished one;28 (2) co-production, involving state provision of land, with
different levels of infrastructure supply, associated or not with resettlements, and where house
construction is left to the beneficiaries, who do as much as they can with limited resources; (3)
self-production, in which land occupation and house construction occur by various processes
established by the grass roots. How often this happens and on what scale, along with the
morphology, vary in each city in accordance with the two main factors determining action:
the priority given to either private or public interests, and the state’s capacity to act and the
21 Harvey, Spaces of Neoliberalization, p. 19.

22 A. Bayat, ‘Un-civil Society: The Politics of the “Informal People”’, Third World Quarterly, 18, 1 (1997), p. 57.
23 Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
24 Ibid., p. 374; emphasis in original.
25 Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville.
26 Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
27 Bayat, ‘Un-civil Society’.
28 In South Africa, the construction of social housing is also a rental or co-operative housing option for low- to
medium-income households, but its scale is not as large, its location is more diverse and its typology has no
parallel in the other two cities, so this type of intervention is not analysed here.
financial resources at its disposal. These factors influence state action within different historical,
political and socio-economic contexts and shape its relationship with low-income populations
in the production of space.
Top-Down Determinants in the Production of Space
Specificities of the Three Countries and Cities in the Neoliberal Context

After long struggles, Mozambique and Angola gained their independence from Portugal in
1975. Similar post-independence contexts ensued, marked by the adoption in each country of
a planned economy and the coming to power of a socialist, centralised single-party government
in the first years of independence; a prolonged civil war, which ended in 1992 in Mozambique
and only in 2002 in Angola; and a dramatic economic decline and the weakening of public
institutions and their capacity to intervene. In the mid 1980s and early 1990s, both countries took
the first steps to liberalise their economic activities, which helped to cause irregular and uneven
economic growth, aggravating social stratification and exclusion, and increasing their poverty
levels.29 Currently, Mozambique is still one of the poorest countries in southern Africa, though
in recent years its economy has grown considerably, due to the discovery and exploitation of
natural resources. Angola, which has relied especially on oil exploitation for much longer, has
a stronger economy. During the same period, both countries also adopted a multi-party political
system, starting a process of political and administrative decentralisation. As Fauré30 has pointed
out, this has been more effective in Mozambique, where a decentralisation process (though
incomplete) accompanied municipalisation. Meanwhile a greater level of centralisation has
persisted in Angola. The first municipal elections in Maputo were held in 1998, while Luanda
is still governed by the unelected Provincial Government of Luanda. The local governments
of both cities suffer from limited human, technical and financial resources.
South Africa broke away from direct British rule much earlier, in 1910, but the African
majority remained disenfranchised under an apartheid system of government from 1948 to 1994.
The regime came to an end after a long social struggle and international pressure, but without
major violence or political fragmentation: a ‘small miracle’, in Mandela’s words (1995).31 South
Africa’s relatively strong private sector and social institutions continued undisturbed,32 allowing
the economy to remain quite stable and one of the most vigorous in southern Africa. The
transition period began in 1990 and entailed four years of negotiation and an intensive process
of political, administrative and economic restructuring (which, in practice, has continued
beyond 1994), resulting in the country’s re-integration into global markets. The first post-
apartheid municipal elections took place in Johannesburg in 1995, and the reorganisation of
its administration, which included the restructuring of its robust regulatory apparatus, lasted
until 2000.33
Given these different economic, political and administrative backgrounds, Maputo, Luanda
and Johannesburg, with estimated populations in 2010 of 1,132,000, 4,790,000 and 3,673,000,
29 C. Lopes, J. Oppenheimer, C. Proença, M. Ribeiro, N. Cunha and M. Ferreira, ‘Economia de Luanda e Maputo:
Olhares Cruzados’, in J. Oppenheimer and I. Raposo (coords.), Subúrbios Luanda e Maputo (Lisbon, Edições
Colibri, 2007), pp. 65–103; J. Oppenheimer and I. Raposo, A pobreza em Maputo (Lisbon, Ministério do Trabalho
e da Solidariedade, Departamento de Co-operação, 2002).
30 Y. Fauré, ‘Angola e Moçambique: de uma descentralização prometida a uma descentralização tímida’, in Y. Fauré
and C. Rodrigues (org.), Descentralização e desenvolvimento local em Angola e Moçambique: processos, terreno
e atores (Coimbra, Almedina, 2011), pp. 295–354.
31 W. Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa, 2nd ed. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 270–1.
32 Ibid.
33 City of Johannesburg, Department of Development Planning and Urban Management, A Citizen’s Guide to
Planning in Johannesburg (Johannesburg, City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, 2009).
respectively,34 have different colonial and apartheid urban legacies. The lusophone cities each
inherited an urbanised centre where most economic activities, services and social facilities are
still concentrated, and co-produced and self-produced semi-urbanised areas, which expanded
extensively and continuously around the city centre during and after the colonial period,
and where currently about 70 per cent of Maputo’s population35 and 80 or 86 per cent of
Luanda’s population36 live. In contrast, Johannesburg is a polycentric city divided by a mining
belt, which separates the most impoverished areas in the south from the richest areas and
city centres in the north. It illustrates Dewar’s37 description of South African cities as being
shaped by two ideologies, apartheid and modernism: it has an extensive and fragmented urban
fabric, marked by social and functional separation. Nowadays, the city has about ‘180 or so
informal settlements’38 parcelled out over the territory, more significant in the south and on
the metropolitan edges, where more than 25 per cent of city’s population lives,39 a much lower
percentage than in Maputo or Luanda.
Land Management
Private property is one of the bases of the capitalist mode of production, being recognised and
protected by law, and, when it concerns land, it forms the basis of the production of space driven
by capitalist logic. As Magalhães40 claims, private landownership is a western cultural feature,
and when colonialism introduced it to Africa, it collided with customary rights over land use.
Although colonial power (and apartheid) concentrated landownership and its management into
the hands of a few, customary rights continued to operate with different intensities and levels
of recognition and freedom of manoeuvre. With Mozambican and Angolan independence and
the end of apartheid in South Africa, land management began to be questioned.
As Clover,41 Hall42 and Tanner43 show, two similar concerns guided the discussion in the three
countries: (1) the promotion of poverty alleviation and equal opportunities; (2) the attraction
of private investment and the implementation of market strategies in the neoliberal context.
Yet the results demonstrate fundamental conceptual differences: in Mozambique, land was
nationalised just after independence, and this principle was maintained in the 1997 Land Law;44
in Angola, land was also nationalised, but the 2004 Land Law45 also acknowledges private
34 UN–Habitat, The State of African Cities 2014: Re-Imagining Sustainable Urban Transitions (Nairobi, UN–Habitat,
2014), p. 271.
35 UN–Habitat, Mozambique Cities Profile: Maputo, Nacala and Manica (Nairobi, UN–Habitat, 2010), p. 16.
36 Republic of Angola, Planos Integrados de Expansão Urbana e Infra-estruturas de Luanda e Bengo. Decreto
Presidencial n.º 59/2011 [Integrated Plans for Urban Expansion and Infrastructures in Luanda and Bengo]
(Luanda, Diário da República n.º 62, I Série, 1 April 2011), pp. 1561, 1702. The two different percentages are
given in the same document.
37 D. Dewar, ‘The Relevance of the Compact City Approach: The Management of Urban Growth in South African
Cities’, in M. Jenks and R. Burgess (eds), Compact Cities: Sustainable Urban Forms for Developing Countries
(London and New York, Spon Press, 2000), pp. 209–18.
38 City of Johannesburg, A Citizen’s Guide, p.26.
39 City of Johannesburg, Regularising Informal Settlements (Johannesburg, City of Johannesburg, 2008), available at
http://www.joburg.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2854&Itemid=198, retrieved 20
January 2012.
40 A. Magalhães, ‘O desenvolvimento. Uma reflexão’, in O. Barata and S. Piepoli (coords.), Populações, Ambiente
e Desenvolvimento em África (Lisbon, Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas da Universidade Técnica
de Lisboa, 2001), pp. 17–32.
41 J. Clover, ‘The Role of Land as a Site and Source of Conflict in Angola’, in W. Anseeuw and C. Alden (eds),
The Struggle over Land in Africa: Conflicts, Politics and Change (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2010), pp. 147–74.
42 R. Hall, ‘Two Cycles of Land Policy in South Africa: Tracing the Contours’, in Anseeuw and Alden (eds), The
Struggle over Land, pp. 175–92.
43 C. Tanner, ‘Land Rights and Enclosures: Implementing the Mozambican Land Law in Practice’, in Anseeuw and
Alden (eds), The Struggle over Land, pp. 105–30.
44 Republic of Mozambique, Lei de Terras [Land Law]. Decreto-Lei n.º 19/1997 (Maputo, Boletim da República
n.º 40, I Série, 7 October 1997).
45 Republic of Angola, Lei de Terras [Land Law]. Lei n.º 9/2004 (Luanda, Diário da República, 7 November 2004).
landownership as one of the means by which land rights are transmitted to national citizens;
in South Africa, private landownership prevailed. The two concerns that guided the discussion
also emerged in different ways. A comparison between Mozambican and Angolan land laws
reveals that the former responds to both concerns and gives some leeway to the population by
recognising customary rights and usucapio after ten years’ occupation in good faith,46 while
the second gives more power to the state to decide the way in which land should be used and
to establish forms of access that fail to take into proper account the needs of most of the low-
income urban population, placing them in a condition of illegality.47 In South Africa, the state
kept a significant part of the land under its domain and established redistribution mechanisms,
but these measures proved insufficient to ensure more equitable access to this resource, which
remains unevenly distributed.
Urban Planning and Management, Housing Policies and Programmes and Top-Down
Paradigmatic Interventions
Given weak local governments with few available resources, urban planning and management
systems in Maputo and Luanda are still under construction, and not all the necessary instruments
have been created. In Maputo, the structure of these systems gained more consistency in the
new millennium with the publication of the Territorial Planning Law,48 the approval, as a
result, of the Urban Structure Plan of Maputo municipality49 and the subsequent elaboration
and approval of Partial Urbanisation Plans in some semi-urbanised neighbourhoods.50 In
Luanda, the situation is less clear-cut: the Territorial and Urban Planning Law,51 the far too
extensive Integrated Plans for Urban Expansion and Infrastructure in Luanda and Bengo,52 and
several other non-binding plans (produced before or after the first two main instruments) are
sometimes unclear and show evidence of lack of co-ordination and complementarity between
them. Housing policies and programmes are also marked by the same contextual limitations
in both countries, but with differences: in Mozambique, action is less developed, characterised
mainly by scattered initiatives, largely developed since 1995 by its Housing Development Fund,
and by the publication in 2011 of a vague and barely operational Housing Policy and Strategy;53
action has been more vigorous in Angola, where the Basic Law of Housing Development,54 and,
particularly, the National Urbanism and Housing Programme (PNUH),55 play an important role.
46 Usucapio is a concept in Roman law that refers to ownership acquired by use or by length of possession. In
this case, it refers to the right acquired, after ten years’ occupation in good faith, to occupy and use land, if the
occupation has not been challenged by any other entity or person with a legal right to do so.
47 See also, S. Viegas, ‘Luanda, Cidade (Im)previsível? Governação e Transformação Urbana e Habitacional:
Paradigmas de Intervenção e Resistência no Novo Milénio’, PhD thesis, Faculty of Architecture, University of
Lisbon, 2015, p. 522.
48 Republic of Mozambique, Lei do Ordenamento do Território [Territorial Planning Law]. Lei n.º 19/2007 (Maputo,
Boletim da República n.º 29, I Série, 18 July 2007).
49 Conselho Municipal de Maputo, Plano de Estrutura Urbana do Município de Maputo [Urban Structure Plan of
Maputo Municipality] (Maputo, Conselho Municipal de Maputo, September 2008).
50 For example, Conselho Municipal de Maputo, Plano Parcial de Urbanização de Albazine, Magoanine A, B e C
e Zimpeto [Partial Urbanisation Plan (…)] (Maputo, Conselho Municipal de Maputo, October 2010).
51 Republic of Angola, Lei do Ordenamento do Território e do Urbanismo [Territorial and Urban Planning Law].
Lei n.º 3/2004 (Luanda, Diário da República, 25 June 2004).
52 Republic of Angola, Planos Integrados de Expansão Urbana e Infra-estruturas de Luanda e Bengo. Decreto
Presidencial n.º 59/2011.
53 Republic of Mozambique, Política e Estratégia de Habitação [Housing Policy and Strategy]. Resolução n.º
19/2011 (Maputo, Boletim da República n.º 23, I Série, 8 June 2011).
54 Republic of Angola, Lei de Bases do Fomento Habitacional [Basic Law of Housing Development]. Lei n.º 3/2004
(Luanda, Diário da República, 25 June 2004).
55 National Commission for the Implementation of the National Programme of Urbanism and Housing, ‘Sob o
Lema “Habitação um Desafio para Todos”’[‘Under the theme “Housing a Challenge for All”’]: Programa de
Urbanização para a Promoção Habitacional e Estratégia de Implementação, Conferência sobre Desenvolvimento
Urbano e Habitacional (Luanda, Ministério do Urbanismo e Habitação, 2009).
In South Africa, both the urban planning and management system and housing policies and
programmes are consolidated, reflecting a more mature institutional capacity for generating
and operating them, assisted by stronger and more sustained economic growth. Regarding
urban planning and management, the Municipal Systems Act No. 32,56 approved in 2000,
obliges municipalities to draw up an Integrated Development Plan (IDP) every five years,
which is reviewed annually. In Johannesburg, it is related to various other instruments, such
as the Growth and Development Strategy, the Growth Management Strategy and the Spatial
Development Framework. Housing has been a central concern in South Africa since the
end of apartheid, leading to the formulation of several policies and programmes. Of these,
the ones related to the supply of low-cost housing are particularly important, starting with
the Reconstruction and Development Programme in 1994, which was replaced in 2004
by a national housing policy, Breaking New Ground (BNG). As stated by a researcher on
housing issues,57 ‘the big difference between South Africa and other African countries is its
programme of massive housing supply, which requires a huge economic and institutional
state effort’.
Top-down Interventions and Low-Cost Housing Supply

In Maputo and Luanda, each of which has less infrastructure than Johannesburg and only one
centre, urban planning and management instruments focus on, among other things, improving
mobility within each city. Although attention is given to improving both transport facilities
and road infrastructure, the latter prevails in practice and often results in relocations. Another
of the priorities expressed in these instruments is to create new city centres, with new or
improved road infrastructure and higher population densities. In Maputo, far fewer of the new
city centres and other top-down residential projects planned for the periphery are carried out
than in Luanda, where the influx of capital investment is larger. These types of urbanisation,
mainly public or public–private initiatives but also carried out by private enterprise alone,
consist of sets of apartment buildings and/or detached houses, usually in gated communities,
and mainly aimed at the middle and upper classes. They follow the patterns found in most
western cities (and nowadays almost everywhere) and, though sometimes partly subsidised
by the state, they represent a form of modernisation driven by the capitalist logic of the
production of space. The same logic and aims also drive urban renewal interventions in
more central and/or valuable areas, again more intensely in Luanda, some only figuring in
various urban planning instruments while others have been implemented, often associated
with relocations.
In Maputo, resettlements that stem from these interventions generally entail some kind
of negotiation with the communities, although more recently some coercion has also been
reported.58 In Luanda, resettlements frequently accompany forced evictions, which have been
56 Republic of South Africa, Municipal Systems Act No. 32 (Cape Town, Government Gazette, 20 November 2000).
57 Interview with a senior lecturer of the School of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Engineering and the Built
Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 5 May 2011 (all interviews for this article were
conducted by the author).
58 Interviews with two residents relocated after Julius Nyerere Avenue was rebuilt (Maputo, 4 March 2013) and
news articles, such as E. Arantes, ‘Há “barulho” no reassentamento de 40 famílias retiradas da Julius Nyerere.
Denunciam promessas falsas e lentidão do Município de Maputo’ [‘There is “Noise” in the Resettlement of
40 Families Removed from Julius Nyerere. False Promises and the Slowness of Maputo Municipality are
Denounced’], Correio da Manhã, Maputo, 9 May 2012; E. Beúla and R. Senda, ‘Estrada Circular de Maputo volta
ao barulho. População revoltada com o governo’ [‘Maputo’s Ring Road in the Spotlight Again. Population Revolted
against the Government’], Savana, Maputo, 9 November 2012; A. Mulungo, ‘Projecto Circular faz novas vítimas
no bairro dos Pescadores’ [‘The Ring Road Project Makes New Victims in the Fishermen’s Neighbourhood’],
Canalmoz, Maputo, 22 October 2013.
criticised by international agencies59 and civil society organisations. Resettlements may also
result from natural disasters, such as the floods of 2000 in Maputo, responsible for the largest
ever relocation. Overall, resettlements with or without the provision of low-cost housing take
place in the outskirts of the cities and happen much more frequently in Luanda than in Maputo,
with those in Panguila and Zango being the most typical cases. These two resettlement areas are
located in distant areas isolated from the urban fabric that expands around the city centre, with
low-cost housing being the dominant form of housing supplied – around 6,20060 units built in
Panguila and 30,00061 in Zango. In Maputo, Magoanine B and C neighbourhoods are the most
representative examples; they are incorporated into the city’s continuous fabric by the rapid
expansion and consolidation of co-produced and self-produced semi-urbanised areas, but only
about 350 and 56062 low-cost houses were delivered, respectively, in the two neighbourhoods.
The dual aim in both Maputo and Luanda is, on the one hand, to improve mobility in the city
and promote new city centres and urbanised areas, which are generally inaccessible to low-income
populations, while, on the other hand, accommodating those people’s housing needs. This has
required the reformulation of Mozambican and Angolan housing guidelines drawn up during the
socialist period, which were mainly geared to satisfying the second objective and which now receive
lower priority. Through the reformulation, the guidelines have gradually been overshadowed by
the requirement to establish partnerships with private enterprise and the banking sectors, and to
introduce private-sector management methods into the administration of the Housing Development
Funds. As a result, these government departments resemble real-estate companies that benefit from
state resources and other advantages. In Angola, the PNUH considers all interventions involving
the state in the construction of houses – both for higher- and lower-income groups, the latter mainly
through resettlement – as a means of achieving the goal of building one million houses by 2012.
In fragmented and polycentric Johannesburg, with its proliferation of roads, the government’s
urban planning and management instruments focus on the establishment of development
corridors. These are described as the ‘re-stitching corridors of freedom’63 in the title of the latest
IDP 2012–16 review, because they are geared to overcoming the city’s fragmentation. These
corridors are developed to achieve three goals: the strategic location of residential projects,
urban densification and improvements in transport facilities. Although these objectives have
been partly accomplished, the city continues to develop in a fragmented way. On the one
hand, according to Todes,64 since the uncontrolled real-estate boom of 2003, housing projects
for the upper and middle classes have been developing in the north-west, an area of rapid
growth. These projects usually take the form of gated communities of detached housing and/
or apartment buildings, golf estates and multi-use complexes.65 On the other hand, low-cost
59 Amnesty International, Angola – Lives in Ruins: Forced Evictions Continue, January 2007, available at http://
www.amnesty.org.au/news/comments/632/, retrieved 1 January 2012; Human Rights Watch and SOS Habitat–
Acção Solidária, ‘“They Pushed Down the Houses”: Forced Evictions and Insecure Land Tenure for Luanda’s
Urban Poor’, Human Rights Watch, 19, 7(A) (2007), available at https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/
angola0507web.pdf, retrieved 28 September 2012.
60 Viegas, ‘Luanda, Cidade (Im)previsível?’, p. 314.
61 S. Croese, ‘Post-War State-Led Development at Work in Angola: The Zango Housing Project in Luanda as a Case
Study’, PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Stellenbosch University, 2013, p. 2.
62 These numbers are based on Google Earth satellite imagery observation, interviews with expert informants and
information contained in the partial plan of Magoanine C resettlement.
63 City of Johannesburg, 2012/16 Integrated Development Plan: 2013/14 Review (Johannesburg, City of
Johannesburg, 2012/13).
64 A. Todes, ‘Urban Growth and Strategic Spatial Planning in Johannesburg, South Africa’, Cities, 29, 3 (2012).
65 For gated communities in Johannesburg, see, for example, F. Duca, ‘Gating in Urban Johannesburg: Digging
Inside the Social and Political Systems of a Golf Estate and an Open Suburb’, in S. Bagaeen and O. Uduku (eds),
Beyond Gated Communities (Abingdon and New York, Routledge Earthscan, 2015), pp. 49–64; K. Landman and
W. Badenhorst, ‘Gated Communities and Spatial Transformation in Greater Johannesburg’, in P. Harrison, G.
Gotz, A. Todes and C. Wray (eds), Changing Space, Changing City: Johannesburg after Apartheid (Johannesburg,
Wits University Press, 2014), pp. 215–31.
housing continues to be relegated to the city’s edge, usually in the south but also in the north,
in more or less isolated locations and within a broad discontinuous urban fabric.
South Africa’s housing policies and programmes also foresee the establishement of
public partnerships with other agents, but in contrast to Mozambique and Angola, these
partnerships prioritise the resolution of the housing shortage among low-income populations.
In Johannesburg, as a result of the authorities’ greater institutional capacity and more abundant
resources, the supply of low-cost housing is far greater than in the lusophone cities, but even so,
as in other South African cities, it has been unable to meet existing needs. In 2009, the executive
mayor of the Johannesburg metropolitan municipality stated that almost 60,000 units were
supplied between 1994 and 200466 and the Joburg Annual Performance Report 2009/10 said that
45,649 more houses had been built between 2006/07 and 2009/10.67 Some of these initiatives
may have resulted from renewal and upgrading, but many have aimed to ‘eliminate informal
settlements’, which is one of the objectives mentioned by BNG. In this city, the UN–Habitat
‘Cities Without Slums’ campaign (criticised by Huchzermeyer)68 has had the most influence
on this objective, being a campaign that is sometimes associated with forced evictions, despite
legal mechanisms created to regulate the relocations and mitigate their impact. In Luanda, the
objective of ‘eliminating informal settlements’ also appears in urban planning and management
instruments and in the PNUH, but not in Maputo.
In these two lusophone cities, currently higher economic growth and greater capital
availability, compared with the socialist period, have stimulated the construction of houses
for higher-income groups, while the search for ways to house the lower-income groups has
received lower priority. This situation reflects not only the wish of central and local government
institutions to promote interventions that follow the capitalist logic of production of space
(a tendency which is stronger in Luanda than in Maputo), but also their dependence on the
interests and proposals of private investors, who exercise pressure on government to allow them
to interevene in particular areas or in more profitable market sectors (stronger in Maputo than
in Luanda). According to Raposo,69 the competitive and unequal liberal city model has been
becoming more accentuated in these two cities. In Johannesburg, despite urban planning and
management instruments, together with housing policies and programmes which are geared
towards the low-income population, it has been impossible to control pressures from the real-
estate lobby. The public sector has also celebrated and encouraged it, seeing it as a means of
promoting economic development. Thus, in a context of private landownership, private capital
interests continue to shape space in a fragmented way.
Another factor that reinforces the capitalist logic of production of space is its similarity to
what can be called ‘Western city patterns’. According to Raposo et al.,70 these were rejected
in Maputo and Luanda during the socialist period, but are now increasingly promoted in the
context of neoliberalism and globalisation and seen as symbols of the kind of development
the authorities desire: in Maputo, an official of the Housing Development Fund71 said that the
66 A. Masondo, ‘Statement by the executive mayor of Johannesburg, C.L.R. Amos Masondo,at the media
briefing of the summit on human settlements’, City of Johannesburg, 26 November 2009, available at
http://www.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4450&Itemid=114, retrieved 10 December
2013.
67 City of Johannesburg, Jo’burg Annual Performance Report 2009/10 (Johannesburg, City of Johannesburg, 2010),
p. 5.
68 Huchzermeyer, Cities with ‘Slums’.
69 I. Raposo, ‘Instrumentos e práticas de planeamento e gestão dos bairros peri-urbanos de Luanda e Maputo’, in J.
Oppenheimer and I. Raposo (coords.), Subúrbios Luanda e Maputo (Lisbon, Edições Colibri, 2007), pp. 219–46.
70 I. Raposo, S. Jorge, S. Viegas and V. Melo, ‘Luanda e Maputo: inflexões suburbanísticas da cidade socialista à
cidade-metrópole neoliberal’, urbe. Revista Brasileira de Gestão Urbana, 4, 2 (2012).
71 Interview, Maputo, 1 October and 12 November 2012.
project for the new urban node in KaTembe is an opportunity to ‘correct mistakes’ and build an
‘intelligent, functional and modern city’; in Luanda, an official from Luanda’s Urban Planning
and Management Institute72 confirmed that the objective of the projects now under way is to
transform this capital into a ‘world city’; while in Johannesburg, the Jo’burg 2040 Growth and
Development Strategy73 aims to turn the city into a ‘World Class African City’.
The Recognition and Legitimacy of the Production of Space by Low-Income Populations

Self-produced, semi-urbanised areas which do not fit the aspirations described above both derive
from and are marginalised by the capitalist logic of production of space. Attitudes towards
these areas vary in the three cities.
In Maputo, where the Land Law partly protects grass-roots action, these areas may be
seen as disorderly and substandard; more recently, they have even been called illegal by
some. Nevertheless, their existence is partly recognised: the Urban Structure Plan of Maputo
municipality identifies one of them as a protected historic area;74 and five of the Partial
Urbanisation Plans for the northern neighbourhoods predict that such areas will remain,
although they are held to require upgrading.75 While coercive relocations have increased, these
are not the norm, and no one has expressed the intention to eradicate these areas. In contrast,
the elimination of self-produced, semi-urbanised areas in Luanda and Johannesburg is an overt
goal: in Angola, the Land Law and the Basic Law of Housing Development consider these
areas to be illegal, thus legitimising eviction; in South Africa, according to Huchzermeyer,76
they are often seen, among other negative perceptions, as a threat to private landownership,
a barrier to the rising value of land or a violation of the law. Yet, in Johannesburg, other state
measures weaken these attitudes by protecting and recognising peoples’ actions, as pointed
out by Pithouse77 in his analysis of the BNG or by Charlton and Kihato,78 who characterise
this state discourse as ‘ambiguous’.
In the three countries, legislation concerning territorial planning and management allows for
the involvement of the population. Nevertheless, in Luanda, where state centralised dirigisme
continues to prevail, this is not translated into practice. In contrast, in both Maputo and the more
technocratic Johannesburg, the population may take part in various initiatives – public hearings
as part of the process of drawing up urban planning and management instruments, participatory
budgeting and community planning initiatives – even though their participation is not always
effective or comprehensive. The Manual of Basic Techniques of Territorial Planning,79 drawn
up in Mozambique to guide bottom-up interventions, also illustrates the significant leeway
given to grass-roots involvement.
The space produced by low-income populations is also recognised and legitimised by
incentives for self-help housing and for upgrading semi-urbanised areas. Self-help housing has
72 Interview, Luanda, 1 November 2011.

73 City of Johannesburg, Growth and Development Strategy – Jo’burg 2040 GDS (Johannesburg, City of
Johannesburg, 2011).
74 Conselho Municipal de Maputo, Plano de Estrutura Urbana do Município de Maputo.
75 Conselho Municipal de Maputo, Plano Parcial de Urbanização de Albazine, Magoanine A, B e C e Zimpeto.
76 M. Huchzermeyer, ‘From “Contravention of Laws” to “Lack of Rights”: Redefining the Problem of Informal
Settlments in South Africa’, Habitat International, 28, 3 (2004), pp. 333–47.
77 R. Pithouse, ‘A Progressive Policy without Progressive Politics: Lessons from the Failure to Implement “Breaking
New Ground”’, Town and Regional Planning, 54 (2009), pp. 1–14.
78 S. Charlton and C. Kihato, ‘Reaching the Poor: An Analysis of the Influences on the Evolution of South Africa’s
Housing Programme’, in U. Pillay, R. Tomlinson and J. Toit (eds), Democracy and Delivery: Urban Policy in
South Africa (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2006), p. 258.
79 Ministério para a Coordenação da Acção Ambiental (MICOA), Direcção Nacional de Planeamento e Ordenamento
Territorial (DINAPOT), Manual de Técnicas Básicas de Planeamento Físico [Manual of Basic Techniques of
Territorial Planning] (Maputo, MICOA and DINAPOT, 2006).
always been promoted in Mozambican housing strategies, though it has become less prominent
in the current neoliberal context, as mentioned above. It exists, for example, in the handing
out of plots when populations are resettled without the provision of housing, and in other
situations. Upgrading interventions were also promoted in the first years of independence
and are still promoted today in Maputo’s urban planning and management instruments, which
were formulated in the early years of this century: besides the ones mentioned earlier, these
tools include the Municipal Strategy for Informal Settlements Interventions and the plan for
upgrading informal settlements,80 developed as part of the ‘Cities Without Slums’ campaign.
However, in practice, these initiatives are often one-off, palliative measures.
In post-apartheid South Africa, some housing policies and programmes were also designed
and redesigned to promote similar interventions. The most significant are: (1) in relation to
self-help housing, the People’s Housing Process, replaced by the Enhanced People’s Housing
Process when the former failed to deliver the hoped-for outcomes; the latter has shown some
results in Johannesburg, according to the Jo’burg Annual Performance Report 2009/10;81 (2)
in relation to upgrading, the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme and the National
Upgrading Support Programme, the second formulated as a result of Outcome 8, which aimed
by 2014 to benefit 400,000 residents. Despite the efforts and investment in upgrading, especially
in the paradigmatic areas of Soweto and Alexandra, some authors have suggested that the
Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality has been lukewarm in its support, preferring to carry
out resettlements supplied with low-cost housing, and that this in itself has become an obstacle
to the development of similar upgrading intervention elsewhere.82
Of the three cities, Luanda has had fewer of these interventions. In the PNUH, self-help
is understood as the most significant way of dealing with the housing shortage, but all social
groups may receive plots. According to an official of the Provincial Government of Luanda,83
the provision of land to low-income populations ‘never took off’ in practice, and plots are
usually sold to upper- and middle-class people, as also suggested by Croese84 and some press
reports.85 In addition, very few upgrading interventions have taken place. The urban planning
and management instruments fail to discuss upgrading in an unambiguous way, since they
sometimes use the term to refer to urban renewal; and the Urban Rehabilitation Strategy and
PNUH sub-programmes dealing with upgrading are almost completely ineffective.
80 Centro de Estudos de Desenvolvimento do Habitat (CEDH), Melhoramento dos Assentamentos Informais, Análise
da Situação & Proposta de Estratégia de Intervenção (Maputo, DINAPOT and MICOA, 2006).
81 City of Johannesburg, Jo’burg Annual Performance Report 2009/10, (Johannesburg, City of Johannesburg, 2010).
82 For example, K. Landman and M. Napier, ‘Waiting for a House or Building Your Own? Reconsidering State
Provision, Aided and Unaided Self-Help in South Africa’, Habitat International, 34, 3 (2009), pp. 299–305; K.
Tissington, Towards a Synthesis of the Political, Social and Technical in Informal Settlement Upgrading in South
Africa: A Case Study of Slovo Park Informal Settlement, Johannesburg (Johannesburg, Socio-Economic Rights
Institute of South Africa, 2011); Huchzermeyer, Cities with ‘Slums’; M. Maina, ‘Challenge of Implementing
Informal Settlements Policy Shifts: Lessons from the City of Johannesburg’, South African City Studies Workshop
on Empirical Studies, Theory and Criticism (Johannesburg, CUBES Laboratory, School of Architecture and
Planning, Faculty of Engeneering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, 2012), pp. 1–16;
Pithouse, ‘A Progressive Policy’.
83 Interview, Luanda, 3 November 2011.
84 S. Croese, ‘1 Million Houses?: Angola’s National Reconstruction and Chinese and Brazilian engagement’,
Strengthening the Civil Society Perspective – Series II: China and Other Emerging Powers in Africa (Nairobi,
Fahamu and Emerging Powers in Africa Initiative, 2011), pp. 7–29, available at http://www.fahamu.org/images/
empowers_report_0311.pdf, retrieved 5 November 2011.
85 Such as ‘GPL distribui terrenos para autoconstrução em 2011’ [‘DPL Distributes Land for Self-Help Housing
in 2011’], O País, Luanda, 20 December 2010; ‘Governo provincial retoma venda de terrenos’ [‘Provincial
Government Resumes Land Sales’], Jornal de Angola, Luanda, 18 March, 2011; ‘Governo de Luanda implementa
projecto de autoconstrução dirigida’ [‘Luanda’s Government Implements Self-Help Housing Project’], Angop,
Agência Angola Press, Luanda, 31 October 2013.
Different Urban Morphologies, Different Determinants
Low-Cost Housing Supply in Resettlement Areas

Interventions such as the provision of low-cost housing require a concentrated and usually
non-repayable investment and, as stated above, are more intensive and extensive where
resources are more available: first in Johannesburg, where institutional capacity to intervene
is also higher, followed by Luanda and then Maputo. Their great frequency in the first
two cities also relates to the fact that they are the most common measure taken by these
governments with the purpose of eradicating self-produced, semi-urbanised areas, which
are negatively perceived. To carry out these interventions on a large scale in these two cities
is thus a problem, since they require massive, regular actions with respect to both funding
and the provision of land.
In Johannesburg, the prevalence of private landownership and tighter land use regulations
pushes the search for large parcels of land for low-cost housing towards more isolated areas
on the metropolitan region’s periphery, where land is cheaper and restrictions less strict.
These factors also encourage the authorities to get the most mileage out of their investment
by providing smaller plots (see Figure 1). In Angola, although the Land Law also recognises
private landownership, the state is the main decision-maker with respect to land management,
urban planning and urban management. Even so, in Luanda the most important resettlements
that supply low-cost housing are also distant and isolated, usually with smaller plots than in
the other two cities. This may be because the state has invested heavily in new urbanisation and
urban renewal interventions, consistent with the urban model it hopes to achieve, and in favour
of the involvement of private investors. Meanwhile, it shows little concern for low-income
populations, pushed towards the periphery spatially and politically.
A different situation obtains in Maputo. Although resettlements have tended to increase
with the rise in road construction projects and urban renewal interventions, low-cost housing
is still supplied on a smaller scale than in the other two cities, in a context in which the Land
Law gives some protection to land occupation by national citizens. The state initially located
low-cost housing schemes in peripheral areas not so distant from the city centre, and they
rapidly melded into the continuous fabric of the city. Here the plots are significantly larger
than those provided in the other two cities, sometimes even larger than those provided in
market-driven interventions in all three cities. During the 1970s and 1980s, concerns about
the future installation of infrastructure guided the debate about the size of the plots,86 and
not the land’s market value, since land could not legally be bought and sold. By law, land
was not fully converted into one of Polanyi’s fictitious commodities.87 Ultimately, and more
in line with the preferences of the affected populations, the plots usually provided in these
resettlements, especially for low-cost housing, turned out to be even larger than the ones
initially recommended.
The provision of larger plots in Maputo has allowed residents both to develop income-
generating activities and carry out housing improvements, through the progressive appropriation
of part of the plot, while keeping some land free to enjoy. In the other two cities, space
appropriation has been limited by the smaller size of the plots. The residents exhaust the
area of their plot more rapidly, which has given rise in many cases to excessive population
and construction density, which worsens housing conditions (see Figure 1). In Johannesburg,
86 I. Raposo and C. Salvador, ‘Habitar nos Subúrbios de Luanda e Maputo. Relatório de Especialidades 5’, Research
Progamme about ‘Urbanização Acelerada em Luanda e Maputo: Impacto da Guerra e das Transformações
Socioeconómicas (décadas de 80 e 90)’ (Lisbon, Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology – FCT,
PRAXIS XXI / POCTI, CEsA/ISEG, 2004).
87 Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
Figure 1. Examples of different plot sizes and density over time, in areas of low-cost housing supply in each city.
first row (l–r): Maputo 2004, 2009, 2011; second row: Luanda 2006, 2008, 2013; third row: Johannesburg 2004,
2008, 2011.
(Source: Author, with satellite imagery from Google Earth © 2015 DigitalGlobe)
some areas have benefited from the largest number of housing improvements registered in the
three cities, but other areas have suffered from the highest population and construction density
found in the cities. In this city and in Luanda, the excessive population and construction density
found in some areas has been promoted by the smaller size of the plots. Other factors may
have contributed, however, especially those resulting from a kind of ‘transference mechanism’:
limitations to land access and the mishandling of self-produced, semi-urbanised areas. These
stem from factors such as private landownership, strong restrictive regulations, insecure land
tenure, the vulnerability of populations to evictions and the negative perceptions of central
and local governments towards self-produced, semi-urbanised areas. These factors may have
led to more people moving into resettlement plots, encouraged by the legal protection that
resettlement plots enjoy.
Socio-economic inequality always has consequences for the territory: if something is
obstructed on one front, it will emerge on another. As Engels wrote in 1872, ‘[t]he same
economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place’.88 If
larger plots had been supplied in Luanda and Johannesburg in the same areas, would they be as
densely occupied today as they are? To what extent did the fact that, in Maputo, customary rights
and usucapio were recognised by law, and that the central and local governments had a more
favourable attitude towards more peripheral self-produced, semi-urbanised areas, influence the
outcomes of the existing appropriation process? Which other factors, such as the greater or
88 F. Engels, The Housing Question (New York, 1935), quoted in Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, p. 33.
lesser urban or rural experience of individuals, their origin, economic activity and status, and
household composition and size, influence such processes?
In regard to the housing supplied, their typology usually varies in the three contexts from
small detached to semi-detached units, but in Maputo and Johannesburg some housing doesn’t
conform to this pattern. In the Mozambican capital, some houses supplied in the late 1980s
and mid 1990s were bigger and higher in quality than most of those supplied in this century.
In the South African city, the opposite has been the case: some recent housing is better
finished and has a more elaborate design, in response to BNG concern about the quality of
the houses supplied. Such areas in Johannesburg also reflect greater public investment in road
infrastructure, which promotes higher quality public space and greater accessibility, a situation
also observed in Luanda, but on a smaller scale. In addition, these areas in Johannesburg also
tend to have more social facilities. All these aspects are indicative of a greater availability of
resources and greater institutional capacity in South Africa, and a greater ability to control
and regulate urbanisation. This can lead to different outcomes: low-income populations might
benefit or be ignored.
Co-Produced and Self-Produced Areas

In Maputo, co-production and self-production of semi-urbanised areas occurs through the
progressive occupation of plots with houses constructed ‘little by little’ (an expression often
used by their residents), with the formation of a continuous urban fabric. This process, carried
out by individual families, involves a gradual investment in housing according to the resources
and characteristics of each family, something that approaches Lefebvre’s concept of ‘work’.89
Self-help housing tends to predominate, though the construction process might also involve
some specialised workers, small builders or, in a few cases, payment for the whole of the
construction process, which is sometimes architect-designed or as elaborate as an architect-
designed project. As a result, a poor family’s house may find itself next door to one that displays
significant signs of wealth.
In contrast to the other two cities, Maputo exhibits a close resemblance between areas in
which government supplied low-cost housing, co-produced areas and some self-produced areas
which reproduce the urban form of central and local governments’ interventions (see Figure 2).
Nielsen90 casts light on this mimesis of the state and relates it to certain particularities of the
Mozambican context, such as the Frente de Libertação de Mocambique (Frelimo)’s socialist
ideology during the first years of independence. He refers to: (1) the experience of communal
villages, also analysed by Raposo,91 which had a morphology similar to that of the urban
areas being discussed and which was widely disseminated by the manual of the Ministry of
Public Works and Housing, published in 1976, which broadly oriented territorial planning
practices all over the country; (2) the encouragement given to popular participation in urban
interventions and to self-help housing, which were debated in the 3rd Frelimo Congress in
1977, and in other events, as a way of coping with the state’s paucity of financial and technical
resources. In some cases, not only is the urban form of public interventions reproduced in
self-produced, semi-urbanised areas, but the results of this reproduction are incorporated in
89 Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville; Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

90 M. Nielsen, ‘Inverse Governmentality: The Paradoxical Production of Peri-Urban Planning in Maputo,
Mozambique’, Critique of Anthropology, 31, 4 (2011), pp. 329–58; M. Nielsen, ‘Mimesis of the State: From
Natural Disasters to Urban Citizenship on the Outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique’, Social Analysis, 54, 3 (2010),
pp. 153–73.
91 I. Raposo, ‘Do Habitat Disperso às ‘Adeias Comunais’. A Transformação do Habitat Rural em Moçambique/Os
Camponeses e o Estado/Vilanculos’, Sociedade e Território – Revista de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais, 25/26
(1988).
Figure 2. Resemblance between urban planning instruments and the morphology of resettlements with low-cost
housing supply, co-produced and self-produced areas in Maputo.
first row (l–r): (1) partial plan of resettlement in Magoanine C neighbourhood; (2) partial plan of Magoanine C and
Zimpeto neighbourhoods; (3) image from the Manual of Basic Techniques of Territorial Planning (Ministério
para a Coordenação da Acção Ambiental, Direcção Nacional de Planeamento e Ordenamento Territorial); second
row: (1) resettlement with low-cost housing supply in Magoanine C neighbourhood, (2) co-production in Zimpeto
neighbourhood parcelled out area, (3) self-production in Magoanine B neighbourhood.
(Source: Author, and urban planning instruments referred to in the legend above, with satellite imagery from Google
Earth © 2015 DigitalGlobe)
the official system of urban planning and management, a process designated by Nielsen as
‘inverse governmentality’.92
From a production of space point of view, the factors that led to this mimesis of the state
by the grass roots can be further elaborated. As stated before, in the first years of Mozambican
independence, the population was included in the process and their interventions were
legitimised, not only as a consequence of Frelimo’s socialist ideology, but also as a way of
addressing existing and recognised limitations to state action. At the same time, the state
established and disseminated basic rules to guide such interventions. The acceptance of
the traditional systems of land attribution in semi-urbanised areas, mentioned by Jenkins,93
and the exemplary upgrading of the Maxaquene and Polana Caniço neighbourhoods, with
popular participation,94 provided other examples of such guidelines and practices. These
92 Nielsen, ‘Inverse Governmentality’.

93 P. Jenkins, ‘Beyond the Formal/Informal Dichotomy: Access to Land in Maputo, Mozambique’, in K. Hansen and
M. Vaa (eds), Reconsidering Informality: Perspectives from Urban Africa (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet,
2004), pp. 210–26.
94 See, for example, I. Saevfors, Maxaquene, a Comprehensive Account of the First Urban Upgrading Experience
in the New Mozambique (Paris, UNESCO, 1986); S. Jorge, ‘Que Espaço Desenha a Valorização Imobiliária?
A Transformação dos Bairros Pericentrais Autoproduzidos de Maputo’, PhD thesis, Faculty of Architecture,
University of Lisbon, forthcoming.
experiences remained influential beyond that period, though they assumed different forms.
The recognition of customary rights and usucapio in the 1997 Land Law95 is one of the most
meaningful examples, but, as mentioned above, they also appeared in various urban planning
and management instruments and practices that were adopted in the new century, which take
into consideration the space produced by low-income populations.
The various partial urban plans produced since the 1980s, their use in the allocation of land
in some recently occupied semi-urbanised areas and the parcelling out of other plots without
such a plan (see Figure 2) are simultaneously an example of the implementation of the rules
drawn up by the public entities and a means by which these rules are advocated, used and
disseminated. This did not always happen in an intentional or conscious way. For example,
in the resettlements that took place in a northern neighbourhood as a result of the floods of
2000, the volunteers who worked in the parcelling out of land learned how to proceed and then
reproduced their knowledge in other areas.96 In this context, not only is the population given
more leeway to intervene, but it is also gradually empowered and directed to do so, promoting
this mimesis of the state.
As Nielsen97 claims, this phenomenon also related to security of tenure, based on the belief
that by reproducing state actions the occupation will be more easily legitimised. However,
other points can be added to this claim. First, residents exhibit a growing preference for areas
with roads laid out in a grid, as used and disseminated by public entities. This is seen as more
orderly, with better accessibility for people and motor vehicles, while also being seen as more
appropriate, because it resembles the urban form of the city centre.98 Second, some large areas
parcelled out by people known as nativo,99 with the intention of providing and selling plots
(outside the law), reproduce this same morphology in order to meet people’s expectations
following a market-driven logic.100
The self-produced, semi-urbanised areas in Maputo, which have mixed or organic road
layouts, also have points in common with those laid out on a grid, namely a clear demarcation
between plots and roads, usually made early in the occupation, a progressive appropriation
of space, and the maintenance of free space in the plot. In areas with an organic layout,
however, some plots tend to be smaller and more inclined to become densely populated and
built up. So most of Maputo’s urban fabric, composed of co-produced and self-produced
areas, has become relatively homogenous. This is reinforced by its housing characteristics:
little use of unsafe, unstable and/or low-quality materials that do not last; dominance of
detached brick houses (usually made of cement bricks), apparently inserted into the territory
at random with different dimensions and finishes and at different stages of construction; and
the involvement of the residents to different degrees in the building process, guided by ‘use
value’, although ‘exchange value’ may sometimes dominate. Such characteristics, and the
fact that the housing has been established in properly demarcated plots, also suggest that
the occupation will be long-lasting or permanent, indicating the existence of some security
of tenure (see Figure 3).
95 Republic of Mozambique, Lei de Terras, Decreto-Lei n.º 19/1997 (Maputo, Boletim da República n.º 40, I Série,
7 October 1997).
96 Interview with an ex-official of the municipal council of Maputo, who participated as such in the resettlements
after the floods of 2000 (Maputo, 5 and 6 September 2012).
97 Nielsen, ‘Inverse Governmentality’; Nielsen, ‘Mimesis of the State’.
98 Interviews with about 40 residents of four northern neighbourhoods of Maputo, January–March 2013.
99 Nativo is a term commonly used in Maputo to designate someone whose family has inhabited a certain area for
a long time, usually a rural area on the outskirts of the city before the process of rapid urbanisation had reached
it. Some of these families may have the right to occupy and use large parcels of land.
100 These subjects are further developed in V. Melo, ‘A Produção Recente de Periferias Urbanas Africanas. Discursos,
Práticas e Configuração Especial: Maputo versus Luanda e Joanesburgo’, PhD thesis, Faculty of Architecture,
University of Lisbon, 2015, p. 5311.
Figure 3. Examples of Maputo’s housing and homogeneity of urban fabric.
first row (l–r): (1) detached houses with different finishes and number of floors, (2) houses and annexes build with
cement bricks and reed; second row: (1) house at the front of the plot with income-generating activities, (2) house
in construction at the back of the plot; third row: (1 and 2) co-production with orthogonal road layout in two
parcelled out areas, (3 and 4) self-production with mixed and organic road layouts, the latter near a resettlement area.
(Source: Author, with photographs from 2013 and satellite imagery from Google Earth © 2015 DigitalGlobe)
In Luanda, most co-produced and self-produced semi-urbanised areas, in contrast with

isolated top-down resettlements with their low-cost housing, also develop progressively, ‘little
by little’. They also usually form a continuous urban fabric of grid, mixed or organic road
layouts, which sometimes ultimately merge with other isolated resettlements. Nevertheless,
interventions lack cohesiveness of form under an autocratic government, which does not
always state clearly the content and intentions of its policies on housing, urban planning and
management. Such government also has institutional and administrative weaknesses and fails
to give much scope for the actions of low-income populations. As a result, a great variety of
different situations arise: the rigidity and metric layout of the grid of areas of low-cost housing
supply are not present in most co-produced and self-produced areas; in those with a grid or
mixed road layout, the size of the plots tends to increase; in some mixed or organic road layouts,
plots are not always defined; areas laid out within large road grids are subsequently filled with
different types of urban fabric and functions; in faraway places, housing agglomerations emerge
like islands near industrial facilities and farms close to main roads; in extensive areas in the
south, which are expected to be occupied soon, a grid of roads has already been established,
but in the north an organic road layout has emerged (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Examples of different morphologies of Luanda’s co-produced and self-produced areas.
(l–r): (1) low-cost housing supply beside a self-produced area, (2) co-produced area with orthogonal road layout
and larger plots demarcated, (3) self-produced area with mixed road layout and without plot demarcation, (4)
self-produced area with organic road layout and without visible plot demarcation, (5) co-produced area with an
orthogonal grid of roads filled with different functions.
In Luanda, housing in most co-produced and self-produced semi-urbanised areas resembles

that in Maputo, but the fact that several occupations start with the construction of small zinc-
plate houses indicates less security of tenure. Especially in co-produced and self-produced
peripheries, which now have more central and valuable locations, the speed of the occupation
is also higher than in Maputo and can rapidly lead to excessive population and construction
density. In this case, the limitations on land access and the mishandling of self-produced,
semi-urbanised areas also influence the development of excessive population and construction
density. In addition, Luanda’s greater size, its dependence on one main centre and its higher
land values also influence such development. In this city, very dense organic self-produced
areas, with undefined plots, can also be found and are sometimes the result of forced evictions.
These are not produced gradually, but almost instantly, giving them a feeling of permanent
transience and lack of dignity, which stems from their extreme precariousness, their complete
lack of infrastructure and their low-quality zinc-plate houses (see Figure 5).
In the already fragmented city of Johannesburg, co-produced and self-produced semi-
urbanised areas – which are less dominant than in the two lusophone cities – emerge as
isolated islands in the metropolitan territory or close to areas of low-cost housing. These
areas, which have a substantially different morphology from that found in areas of low-cost
housing, resemble the most precarious self-produced, semi-urbanised areas of Luanda, areas
that do not exist in Maputo. They are either extremely dense and lack plot demarcation, or less
densely occupied within a grid or mixed road layout. In both cases, they have rigid limits and
expand through the rapid occupation of neighbouring parcels of land, with houses frequently
constructed out of unstable, low-quality materials that are not long-lasting (see Figure 5). As
in Luanda, limitations on land access and the mishandling of self-produced, semi-urbanised
areas have played a role in determining the form of these unstable areas with extremely poor
housing conditions. They are part of the ‘city of extremes’, described by Murray,101 a city also
characterised by the proliferation of gated communities and other ‘citadel’ spaces where capital
is reproduced and concentrated.
101 M. Murray, City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2011).
Figure 5. Examples in Luanda and Johannesburg of self-produced, semi-urbanised areas made of low-quality,
unstable materials that are not long-lasting: housing, morphology and development.
first row (l–r): (1) zinc plate houses in Luanda, (2) zinc plate houses in Johannesburg; second row: Luanda 2008,
2010, 2013; third row: Johannesburg 2004, 2008, 2011.
(Source: Author, with photographs from 2012 and satellite imagery from Google Earth © 2015 DigitalGlobe)
Even so, a significant degree of homogeneity of space also exists. In contrast to Maputo, it
derives from a lower incidence of co-produced and self-produced semi-urbanised areas and a
predominance of areas of low-cost housing, planned in a particular standardised way, imposed,
produced and disseminated from the top down, but not reproduced by low-income populations.
Upgrading interventions – such as infrastructure improvement, the supply of in loco low-cost
housing and the re-ordering of road layout – are supported by more abundant resources and
better institutional capacity for interventions, which often happen only after demands from
the population, supported by civil society organisations. On the one hand, they contribute to
homogeneity by shaping these areas to resemble those planned from the top down, but, on the
other hand, they represent an effort to implement more effectively policies and programmes that
take into account space produced by low-income populations, who receive less leeway than in
Mozambique. Whereas in Maputo homogeneity presents a continuous form, in Johannesburg
it is expressed in a discontinuous or fragmented urban fabric, a physical barrier to socio-spatial
cohesion (see Figure 6).
Figure 6. Homogeneity of Johannesburg’s urban fabric, in loco low-cost housing and road layout
re-ordering examples.
first row (l–r): housing supply areas in Orange Farm, Lehae and Lufhereng; second row: in loco low-cost housing
supply 2004, 2008, 2011; third row: road layout reordering 2003, 2006, 2011.
Conclusion
Within the overall production of space in the capitalist mode of production, I have identified
throughout this article specificities of the Mozambican context, in relation to Angola and South
Africa, which influenced the morphological characteristics of peripheries produced for and
by low-income populations in Maputo in the current neoliberal context. In relation to Luanda
and Johannesburg, these specificities bring benefits to this vulnerable group in crucial aspects
of their spatial living conditions. For example, low-income populations in Maputo suffers less
isolation, while having larger plots and the potential to appropriate further space by developing
income-generating activities and housing improvements. These processes occur without leading
to excessive population density or density of construction (or, at least, they delay the increase
in density). In Maputo, greater security of tenure than in the other two cities translates into
widespread plot demarcation and use of brick for construction. This city also enjoys the absence
of concentrated manifestations of extreme poverty, precariousness and insecurity.
Some of these situations are associated with a particular interrelationship between the state
and low-income populations that allows some level of appropriation by the grass roots of the
production of space, one of the basic conditions of the ‘right to the city’, as first conceived by
Lefebvre.102 They permit some freedom to manoeuvre and lead to interventions that recognise the
actions of low-income populations. At the same time, public entities establish and disseminate
rules to guide such interventions, which result in relative homogeneity of space, which is also
promoted by residents’ preferences and even the logic of the market. An important contribution
to these processes comes from the inclusion by land management of customary rights and
102 Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville.

usucapio after ten years of occupation in good faith. In addition to a capitalist logic, such
mechanisms also enhance other production logics, in which land is not fully converted into one
of Polanyi’s fictitious commodities,103 and thus space departs from its role as a product of the
system and a means of its reproduction, as described by Lefebvre and Harvey, among others.104
In the other two cities, such benefits are hindered by greater limitations on access to land
and the mishandling of self-produced, semi-urbanised areas. This limitation and mishandling is
influenced by more intensive and extensive processes of production of space under a capitalist
logic, hand in hand with the desire for ‘western city patterns’, and determined by a state’s
homogenising rationality, which tends to give less freedom to manoeuvre to low-income
populations. The negative effects of such processes emerge more significantly in Luanda than in
Johannesburg, where some mechanisms of protection and more alternatives have been created,
in addition to a greater commitment to take into account space produced by the grass roots,
this in a context of a more decentralised government with greater institutional capacity and
resources for intervention.
In Maputo, the capitalist production of space also intensified at the turn of the millennium,
encouraged by changes gradually introduced into public discourse and public practice in the
current neoliberal context and accompanied recently by the country’s relatively high level of
economic growth. As production of space becomes increasingly a ‘product’ driven by ‘exchange
value’ and not ‘work’ governed by ‘use value’, as stated by Lefebvre,105 we witness increasing
pressure on land, with growth in illegal commercialisation and speculation (partly caused by
the failure of the authorities to provide sufficient parcelled-out land for housing); a shift in the
priorities of both land and housing provision; a progressive rise of urban renewal interventions in
more central and/or valuable areas and of investment in road infrastructure, which leads, among
other things, to an increase in relocations and a gradual deterioration in the conditions attending
relocations. As a result, there is a risk that the mechanisms outside capitalist logic, which promoted
the mitigation of the production of unequal space in this relatively poor country and city, will
be weakened or even disappear, making low-income populations even more vulnerable. For this
reason, but also because they point to a possible way out of the hegemonic domination that ‘limits
“creativity” to finding ways of surviving within this oppressive state of things’, according to Butler
et al.,106 it is more pressing than ever that these mechanisms be uncovered and properly examined.
Acknowledgements
The first version of this article, titled ‘Urbanisation Processes in the Expansion Areas of Luanda,
Maputo and Johannesburg: Urban Planning and Everyday Practices’, was presented at the 15th
International Planning History Society Conference, held in 2012 in São Paulo, Brazil. I thank
the JSAS reviewers, whose comments contributed to its reformulation and improvement, and Sue
Branford for her careful English editing. I also acknowledge PhD funding from the Portuguese
Foundation for Science and Technology, which made the research possible.

Urban Socio-Territorial and Local Intervention Study Group (GESTUAL), Research Centre for
Architecture, Urbanism and Design (CIAUD), Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon,
Rua Sá Nogueira, Pólo Universitário, Alto da Ajuda, 1349-055 Lisboa, Portugal. E-mail:
vanessa.p.melo@gmail.com
103 Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

104 See, for example, Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Harvey, Spaces of Capital.
105 Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville; Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
106 M. Butler, C. Dennis, T. Ndlazi, D. Ntseng, G. Philpott, Z. Sithole and N. Sokhela, Finding Our Voice in the
World (Pietermaritzburg, Church Land Programme, 2010), quoted in Huchzermeyer, Cities with ‘Slums’, p. 169.

The Production of Urban Peripheries For and by Low Income Populations at The Turn of The Millennium Maputo Luanda and Johannesburg

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Journal of Southern African Studies

ISSN: 0305-7070 (Print) 1465-3893 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjss20

The Production of Urban Peripheries For and

Vanessa de Pacheco Melo

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1196955

Published online: 30 Jun 2016.

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of a phenomenon, through its analysis in different contexts, as well as revealing distinct

The ‘Production of Space’ in the Capitalist Mode of Production

21 Harvey, Spaces of Neoliberalization, p. 19.

Top-Down Determinants in the Production of Space

Specificities of the Three Countries and Cities in the Neoliberal Context

Top-down Interventions and Low-Cost Housing Supply

The Recognition and Legitimacy of the Production of Space by Low-Income Populations

72 Interview, Luanda, 1 November 2011.

Different Urban Morphologies, Different Determinants

Low-Cost Housing Supply in Resettlement Areas

Co-Produced and Self-Produced Areas

89 Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville; Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

92 Nielsen, ‘Inverse Governmentality’.

Figure 3. Examples of Maputo’s housing and homogeneity of urban fabric.

In Luanda, most co-produced and self-produced semi-urbanised areas, in contrast with

Figure 4. Examples of different morphologies of Luanda’s co-produced and self-produced areas.

In Luanda, housing in most co-produced and self-produced semi-urbanised areas resembles

102 Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville.

Vanessa de Pacheco Melo

103 Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

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21 Harvey, Spaces of Neoliberalization, p. 19.

72 Interview, Luanda, 1 November 2011.

89 Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville; Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

92 Nielsen, ‘Inverse Governmentality’.

102 Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville.

103 Polanyi, The Great Transformation.