Urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa has historic roots, and though it has accelerated in recent decades, it retains distinctive forms. This book explores sub-Saharan urbanism through a detailed and wide-ranging study of Maputo, Mozambique, covering physical and socio-economic factors as well as an ethnographic inquiry into cultural attitudes.

Sub-Saharan Africa is considered the last region in the world where women still give birth to presumably too many children. However, within large cities such as Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, the average number of children per woman varies greatly. What is extraordinary, as this book shows, is that childbearing is a social action. Parenting allows one to consider different action alternatives, or rather, opportunities to act. These actions are not the same for everyone in different contexts. The book highlights that macro level socio- demographic changes, namely intraurban reproductive disparities are brought up by micro level (individual) actions.

This book equips readers with a deeper understanding of the challenges posed by radical socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural changes due to globalization and describes effective, sustainable solutions to these challenges. The focus is especially on the rapid urbanization processes in countries of the Global South, which are giving rise to dramatic new problems of spatial and social inequality and difficult environmental challenges in relation to climate change. Readers will gain skills and knowledge that will help them to develop an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to planning, design, and management of urban settlements and territories in contexts with a high level of social, economic, territorial, and landscape vulnerability. The coverage includes, for example, strategies to promote social inclusion, improve housing quality, ensure adequate education, protect cultural heritage, enhance risk management, and address issues in the food-energy-water nexus. Among the authors are leading experts from the Polytechnic University of Milan, where a multidisciplinary set of studies and research projects in the field have been undertaken in recent years.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we ‘see like a city’ in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.

Urban planning on the five Lusophone African countries - Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Príncipe - has so far been relatively overlooked in planning literature. Bringing together a team of leading scholars, this book fills the gap by providing an in-depth analysis of key issues in the history of urban planning and discussing the key challenges confronting contemporary urban planning in these countries. The book argues that urban planning is a non-neutral and non-value free kind of public action and, therefore, ideology, planning theories, urban models and the ideological role urban planning has played are some of the key issues addressed. For that reason, the practice of Urban Planning is also seen as the outcome of a complex interrelationship between structure and agency, with the role of key planers being examined in some of the chapters. The findings and insights presented by the contributing authors confirm previous research on urban planning in the colonial and postcolonial periods in Lusophone African countries and at the same time break fresh ground and offer additional insights as new evidence has been collected from archives and in fieldwork carried out by a new generation of researchers. In addition, it outlines possible directions for future research.

The book explores and discusses some of the changes, challenges and opportunities confronting local governance in the context of the new urban paradigm associated with the HABITAT III New Urban Agenda, a 20-year strategy for sustainable urbanization, adopted in October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador. The chapters included in the book address public policy issues from different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, written by authors from different academic disciplines within the broad area of social sciences (Geography, Political Science, Public Administration, Spatial Planning, Law, Regional Science, among other fields), and offer an inter-disciplinary vision of these issues. The chapters are written by members of the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Geography of Governance.

The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities pushes the frontiers of how we understand cities and citizenship and offers new perspectives on African urbanism. Nuanced ethnographic analyses of life in an array of African cities illuminate the emergent infrastructures and spaces of belonging through which urban lives and politics are being forged.

How do people live together in cities shaped by inequality? This comparative ethnography of two African cities, Maputo and Johannesburg, presents a new narrative about social life in cities often described as sharply divided. Based on the ethnography of entangled lives unfolding in a township and in a suburb in Johannesburg, in a bairro and in an elite neighborhood in Maputo, the book includes case studies of relations between domestic workers and their employers, failed attempts by urban elites to close off their neighborhoods, and entanglements emerging in religious spaces and in shopping malls. Systematizing comparison as an experience-based method, the book makes an important contribution to urban anthropology, comparative urbanism and urban studies.

This book introduces readers to the anthropology of urban life in Africa, showing what ethnography can teach us about African city dwellers’ own notions, practices, and reflections. Social anthropologists have studied city life in Africa since the early 20th century. Their works have addressed a number of questions that are relevant until today: What happens to rural people who move to the city? What kinds of livelihoods do they pursue? How does city life affect moralities and practices connected with gender roles, marriage, parenthood, and intergenerational relations? In which social situations are ethnic and other collective identifications relevant? How do people make a home in the city? What forms of authority and leadership become relevant in urban governance? How do people talk about city life? This book asks what anthropologists have come to learn about Africans’ views on city life. It provides a critical acclaim of ethnographies in English, French, and German and elucidates anthropology’s contribution to understanding city life in Africa. It highlights the significance of female, African and Diaspora scholars for an emerging urban anthropology of Africa. The chapters are organized according to everyday activities of city dwellers: moving, connecting, governing, working, dwelling, and wayfinding. The book will be an essential read for students and researchers of social anthropology, African and urban studies, but also for professionals in research and development organizations, thinktanks, and other institutions concerned with urban Africa.

This volume collects the results from the Politecnico di Milan’s award-winning “Boa_Ma_Nhã, Maputo!” research-by-design project, which studied various transdisciplinary approaches to development in the context of the Global South. The challenges of urbanization are well known, but that only goes so far in aiding implementation. From local considerations like water access and housing rights to global issues like climate change, territorial development demands solutions that address the needs of the specific population while keeping such goals as sustainability and inclusion in mind. By focusing on a number of towns within the Maputo Province of Mozambique, and thus addressing many of the issues endemic to Sub-Saharan Africa, the research, structurally presented so as to aid those who may require introduction to the issue, makes a clear case in favor of always keeping the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus in mind when formulating development strategies for improving people’s lives, as well as the wisdom of marrying academic findings with the insights accrued by local NGOs and institutions, thereby expanding the potential idea bank beyond the Eurocentric status quo that has tended to dominate the field.