Isabel Raposo Cristina Salvador
Abstract
At the time whenAngola and Mozambique gained independence, Luanda and Maputo were adequately described as "dual" cities. On the one hand there was the "concrete" or "asphalt" part of town, inhabited by the colonial society, on the other hand, the musseques or caniços, where the Africans and "assimilados" lived. It was precisely this spatial, social and racial segregation that the socialist-oriented governments of the early years of independence pretended to reduce within the general framework of centrally planed economies. In both capitals, the buildings left behind by the departing colonisers were occupied by suburbanites or by people recently arrived from the hinterland. Measures were outlined and actions were taken to reduce inequality. However, after 27 years of independence, dominated in Angola by a nearly uninterrupted civil war (Mozambique's civil war came to an end in 1992), the cities' fundamental duality resists and imposes itself in new forms.
The urbanised city has been run down and became increasingly suburban. More recently, attempts at rehabilitation and modernisation have been undertaken. However, available resources were largely insufficient given the scope of the problems at hand. At the same time, the suburbs have kept on growing and becoming more densely populated, attracting people from different places, spreading over into the contiguous countryside and concentrating an ever-increasing volume of houses, relationships, markets and traffic. Its inhabitants' way of life differs from their original rural one, but is also quite different from the lifestyle of downtown urbanites. The urban and social infrastructures have deteriorated by overuse, public investment in suburban areas is notoriously insufficient and the resources of the vast majority of suburban dwellers are extremely precarious. Whatever little savings they manage to put aside are invested in their houses, which are built little by little, piece by piece, thus daily reinventing not only their survival, but their dignity as well.
It is this suburban part of town, on the outskirts of the "city of concrete", that we set out to discover. To what extent can the new configuration of these areas, formerly known as caniços and musseques, lead to their transformation into actual districts that are truly integrated into the city? To what extent, and under which circumstances, can this accelerated and disorganised suburbanisation process, which is closely associated with formal unemployment and exclusion, bring about social urbanisation, i.e. urban inclusion and improvement of people's living conditions? How do hundreds of thousands of people who live below the so-called poverty line organise their habitat and create new forms of urbanity on an everyday basis, based only on their own scarce resources?
In this paper, we try to assess different degrees of urbanity and precariousness at the two levels of analysis we focus on, namely the neighbourhood (bairro) and the habitat. We want to inquire whether a higher level of urbanity of the housing units tends to correspond with a higher level of integration of the residential social groups in urban lifestyles and with lower degrees of precariousness. We assume that, even in this context of substantial change, the housing types that are most representative of the various social groups allow us to reach valid conclusions with regard to the degree of social urbanisation - each housing type representing a stage in the urbanisation process and indicating the degree of integration/marginalisation of its inhabitants. We also seek to understand the changes in peri-urban housing types that have taken place in both capitals ever since the time immediately before the independence, as well as the differences and similarities between the various neighbourhoods within the same city and between the two cities.
Furthermore, we try to identify some general trends and models which would allow us to assess whether we are here dealing with the emergence of a new housing culture or, on the contrary, with a syncretic process of transition from rurality to urbanity, a sub-culture of the predominant urban model of the western world.
The relevance of the sociospatial structures and types notwithstanding, we also seek to find out which strategies are pursued by families, individuals and communities in order to improve their housing conditions in peri-urban areas. Finally, we try to evaluate whether some of these strategies allow the inhabitants to pull themselves above mere survival and to overcome the structural restraints that weigh on them.
