Age of Concrete

Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique

David Morton author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Ohio University Press

Published:17th Jul '19

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Age of Concrete cover

Age of Concrete is about people building homes on tenuous ground in the outer neighborhoods of Maputo, Mozambique, places thought of simply as slums. But up close, they are an archive: houses of reeds, wood, zinc, and concrete embodying the ambitions of people who built their own largest investment and greatest bequest to the future.

Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical “slums,” these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people’s highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious.
Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age of Concrete focuses on ordinary homebuilders and dwellers. David Morton thus models a different way of thinking about urban politics during the era of decolonization, when one of the central dramas was the construction of the urban stage itself. It shaped how people related not only to each other but also to the colonial state and later to the independent state as it stumbled into being.
Original, deeply researched, and beautifully composed, this book speaks in innovative ways to scholarship on urban history, colonialism and decolonization, and the postcolonial state. Replete with rare photographs and other materials from private collections, Age of Concrete establishes Morton as one of a handful of scholars breaking new ground on how we understand Africa’s cities.

“Morton’s argument, delivered with passion and power, gives life to a nuanced, deeply personal understanding of how ordinary residents of disadvantaged urban communities not only make their neighborhoods—they reframe the everyday political order. The stories he tells resonate across the continent.” -- Garth Myers, author of African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice
Reading Age of Concrete feels like a walk through Maputo’s history. The vivid life stories, as well as the critical and respectable treatment of sources, paint a nuanced picture of an African city made and remade. Age of Concrete provides a unique glimpse into the hidden histories of African urban life, and we can only long for more such accounts. -- Luce Beeckmans * Technology and Culture *

  • Winner of African Studies Association Bethwell A. Ogot Prize 2020
  • Short-listed for Canadian Historical Association/Société historique du Canada Wallace K. Ferguson Prize 2021

ISBN: 9780821423677

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

336 pages