Scholars interested in urban Africa usually have three main genera of books at their disposal: those that treat the built environment as the scaffolding to ‘important’ social processes; those that narrate a city's history through government plans, planners and planning processes; and those that offer contemporary accounts of the everyday experiences of ‘slum residents’. In Age of Concrete, historian David Morton treats us to a skilfully written account of the history of housing in Maputo, Mozambique, which engages the shortcomings of these genera in three innovative ways.

First, Morton argues that relationships between state and citizens are constituted through the production of Maputo's built environment. Morton illustrates this by examining shifts in housing materials: initially, Africans were only allowed to build with reeds; but over time homes hardened into wood-and-zinc structures and then into concrete. As materials changed, ideas of what the state is, what the city should be like and the attitudes residents have towards state and city cemented into concrete aspirations. Therefore, this is a book about the materiality of social relations. Second, Morton draws our historical gaze away from the planned colonial urban spaces and towards the self-built subúrbios (roughly Maputo's ‘slums’ and peripheries). Morton examines how the majority African population actually lived in colonial Maputo, how they experienced independence and their material aspirations for better, if uncertain, futures. Finally, instead of treating home-building as an everyday experience, Morton carefully unpicks the extraordinary effects it has on the lives of underprivileged residents and on the contours of the state. Morton concludes we cannot think of these residents as mere victims of either colonial oppression or post-colonial high-modernism or capitalist development. Over time, residents of Maputo's subúrbios made themselves legible to those governing using various forms and degrees of agency: from abject or enlightened submission; to hesitant negotiation or opposition; to enthusiastic engagement or outright demanding. While these arguments are derived from the colonial and post-colonial history of Mozambique, they will resonate with scholars elsewhere in Africa and the Global South.

The argument unfolds in five chapters bookended by an Introduction and a Conclusion. The Introduction lays out the argument in relation to existing research on Maputo, Mozambique and Africa more generally. Chapter 1 introduces the various urban spaces of Lourenço Marques (Maputo's designation until 1976) and their relationship with the specificities of Portuguese colonialism until the 1960s. Chapter 2 explores various instances in the 1960s when Africans sought to engage colonial authorities to address their needs, grievances, or conflicts around housing and neighbourhood conditions in the peripheries. Chapter 3 examines how changes in housing construction from reeds to wood-and-zinc foreshadowed the end of colonialism. Chapter 4 centres on the post-independence nationalisation of rental housing, a policy designed on the fly in 1976 that had unpredictable, disastrous and enduring consequences. Chapter 5 turns attention to residents’ efforts to order and improve their neighbourhoods in the late 1970s, in spite of governmental apathy or outright violence towards them. The Conclusion runs through the last three decades and the multiple trajectories for the subúrbios’ residents.

Morton offers a balanced and critical analysis of situations and events by drawing on a range of data, including interviews with residents and other key protagonists, archives, official reports, media articles and novels. JMAS readers will know how difficult it is to piece together titbits of evidence into a compelling and engaging narrative. They will be untroubled by Morton's creative liberty in conveying some of the book's stories. One of Morton's strengths is his deep engagement with the neighbourhood of Chamanculo, his primary fieldwork site. Some may dare to see this work as anthropology by other means.

This book is essential to students and scholars of urban history, but also of relevance to those in urban studies, geography or anthropology interested in cities in Africa or elsewhere in the Global South. The book should also be of interest to the growing numbers of political scientists and development scholars who have turned to the city as the terrain for politics, modernisation or sustainable development.