The right to the city in disputed sites : urban redevelopment and the street economy space nexus in Maputo, Mozambique

The study established the nexus between market-led urban redevelopment and involuntary displacement of street economy workers from public spaces. Taking Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique, as a case-study, it investigated how street economy workers are circumventing displacement from public spaces and building their ‘actual’ rights to the city in the process. The conceptual framework drew on the notion of the ‘encroachment of the ordinary’ by Asef Bayat to arrive at possible concepts of spatial analysis. These are main citymaking processes around which conflicts tend to emerge: flows-networks, spatial encroachment and the public-private interface. The framework was used to query the transformations in the main case study site of the Xikhelene Market-Transport hub. A mixmethod was used: a spatial analysis (2010-2019) compounded with the viewpoints and accounts of individuals directly implicated in those transformations. Key findings were: 1) Loss of public space is now a main spatial-political conflict in Maputo as it bears directly on the dispossession of a majority of street economy workers; 2) Loss of public space and vending bans correlate with the spread of condominiums along main arteries and advancing onto the popular neighbourhoods; 3) The city-making processes analysed play a role in how street economy workers are pushing back displacement: tactics include retreat-and-return in main arteries, re-establishing mobility, adaptable encroachment, and reactivation of publicprivate spaces for vending in retreat areas; 4) A main threat to the street economy in Maputo is the levelling of the housing fabric in popular neighbourhoods; 5) Street economy workers lay claims to public space as their ‘means of production’ backed by their social legitimacy as the main producers of Maputo’s transport-market hubs; 6) Such legitimation incorporates principles and statutory rights provided in the Mozambican Constitution and national laws on territorial distribution. Against the backdrop of economic and spatial ‘creative-destruction’ in the peri-central area of Costa do Sol, street workers’ struggles and tactical circumventions alongside protests and the organised engagements with the city authority through the workers’ union ASSOTSI, stand to challenge the state policy of ‘resettlements’ and the undeclared policy of the city authority of ‘enclaving’ the low-income street economy space. The main import for spatial planning knowledge resides in the conceptual framework. It allows a mode of analysis drawing from city dynamics that are spatial-political in nature and thus possibly relevant to similar contexts. Keywords: Maputo; street economy space; urban redevelopment; involuntary displacement; encroachment of the ordinary; rights to the city.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Polido Baeta, Vera

Contributors dc:contributor

• Butina Watson, Georgia
• Mbiba, Beacon

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/jcb7-wm97

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:9e331cb6-e20d-4de4-b11d-f29dfb80cd33:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1