Peri-Urban Expansion in the Maputo City Region: Land Access and Middle-Class Advances

Vanessa de Pacheco Melo and Paul Jenkins

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2021, vol. 47, issue 4, 541-565

Abstract: Urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa has been marked by high socio-economic inequality, which continued after independence. The growth of a still ill-defined middle class has introduced new dynamics in urban space in the region, with different effects on lower-income groups, who form the vast majority of city dwellers. Access to urban land is central to these new dynamics and plays an important role in the reduction of pre-existing inequalities. In the Mozambican capital, Maputo, as land becomes increasingly scarce, development expands into the peri-urban areas of a fast-growing city region, partly encouraged by the improvement and construction of main roads but also by official urban planning praxis in a context where land is state-owned. This article analyses the land occupation processes promoted by these state initiatives and how these are shaping expansion in the Maputo city region, with a focus on new occupation by a growing middle class, linked to increasing land value and commodification. It argues that recent state initiatives in urban development have been supportive of middle-class advances into peri-urban areas of the Maputo metropolitan area, with reduced consideration of lower-income groups, on which these advances often have negative effects.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2021.1939499 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:47:y:2021:i:4:p:541-565

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2021.1939499

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().