This book is a departure from a top-down approach to city planning and from much of the historical scholarship on the built environment in urban Africa. It does not focus on architecture or planning per se but rather on the social and political dimension of house construction in a heavily regulated environment. Portugal implemented a cheap and authoritarian form of colonialism and was reluctant to make public investments in its empire after World War Two. While spanning a large time period – from the 1940s to the present – the book focuses mainly on the three decades before and after independence and offers a different history of decolonization compared with conventional accounts. It is not a story of strikes, boycotts or armed rebellions. FRELIMO (the Mozambique Liberation Front) fought for independence, but the war took place mostly in the countryside away from Maputo. Morton convincingly suggests that, while there was much agitation in British and French colonial cities, which saw demands for higher wages and expanded political rights, another type of politics emerged in Lourenço Marques – renamed Maputo in 1976 – around housing and infrastructure. The book explores how people experienced colonial rule, independence and the socialist regime through the lens of house construction.
Age of Concrete brings to light the history of the oldest and most populous neighbourhood in Maputo, Chamanculo, which was close to the ‘City of Cement’, an area meant for white settlers. In the central part of the city, building regulations were strictly enforced, unlike in the rest of Maputo, referred to as the ‘City of Reeds’ or Caniço after the provisional materials used to build houses. These neighbourhoods might be summarily called slums today, but Morton rightly insists that they were not merely a pathology. Using such a qualification, very common in today’s sociological and geographical literature, risks dehumanizing the people living there. Morton is also critical of the notion of ‘informality’, a term that obscures the unwritten rules that oriented how neighbours dealt with one another.
Instead, Morton politicizes and historicizes the living conditions of the residents of the City of Reeds. He is reluctant to provide a grand narrative, preferring instead to give space to smaller narratives and individual stories. This approach is also of radical importance as it gives a less anonymous dimension to the dehumanizing process of colonization. These stories reveal how people made choices, hesitated, were lucky or unlucky, and faced public decisions, such as the nationalization of their houses after independence. The book is methodologically innovative as it uses an incredible array of materials to give a personal and social account of city life. The book draws on a hundred interviews, including ones with top government officials, grey literature from architects and planners, documents from various archival depots (from the city of Maputo, Eduardo Mondlane University, ministries in Mozambique, and several other archives in Portugal), complaints made by petitioners and historical maps, as well as photographs of residents, houses, neighbourhoods and aerial views. Altogether, this illustrates the concrete visual conditions of everyday life in Maputo.
The book is also full of vivid description of the new material culture surrounding house construction. The reed house was a fairly rigid reed construction assembled with clay, and was the mark of poverty, squalor and the precariousness of urban life. Increasingly in the 1960s, however, wood and zinc houses became more common. Zinc was more practical as it did not have to be changed every year. It was also easy to remove and replace in case of sudden eviction. The municipality allowed reed, wood and zinc constructions, but, with a few exceptions, one could not build in concrete. Still, many people ignored this prohibition. Age of Concrete critically tells the story of this disobedience and simultaneously examines how materials shaped people’s aspirations.
In the 1960s, only a quarter of Maputo’s inhabitants lived in conditions that the authorities considered both permanent and legal. Despite the lack of political freedom, people voiced their concerns and openly criticized housing authorities. Constructing illicit houses in cement was both a way of entering modern life and a personal achievement. As soon as a political space opened up (after the advent in 1962 of an otherwise heavily censored daily newspaper, A Tribuna), residents began to complain about their living conditions. At the same time, some Portuguese architects called for desegregating the City of Cement and criticized the ‘mountain of filth’ in the suburbios (outskirts of the city). One of the chapters reveals how grievances could be explored despite highly limited possibilities to table public demands. Also fascinating is the chapter on clandestine masonry builders. In the 1960s, thousands of people overcame their fears and the risk of eviction and built houses in concrete and clay. As Morton explains, ‘masonry construction was a political act, a break with expectations that Africans should be satisfied with perpetual impermanence’. Building a more permanent house was meant to benefit one’s family and offered better protection against fires and a way to earn income and rent.
Between 1974 and 1975, FRELIMO decided to nationalize rental housing in the suburbios. This led to a deep change of relationship between tenants and owners; however, houses were not repaired by the municipality, which had no means to sustain them. The last chapter tells stories of participatory planning exercises, the increasing demand for services, and the new legal division of the suburbios; surprisingly, it does not address why, how or to what extent a more general political economy of cement became central in the 1980s and early 1990s. This is a relatively minor quibble, however. The book has impeccable design, with high-quality illustrations. Morton is an excellent writer, able to connect life stories with general history, without being naïve about the social and political constraints faced by individuals. Age of Concrete is also absent of jargon, unlike so many equivalents in urban studies. It is a path-breaking book that covers the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, a history that has yet to be written for many other cities on the continent.
