Re-forming resource entrepôts: Urban investment, extraction, and Beira’s Grande and Golden Peacock Hotels

Abstract

Recent literature on investment and African infrastructure have called for examining ‘Global China’s’ urban impacts. This article investigates these in the entrepôt city of Beira, Mozambique, offering an approach to urban investment that centers cities’ rural-urban, and historically entangled connections. Through what I term ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ aspects, I introduce an analytical and conceptual approach to attend to these temporal and spatial dynamics of not only city-making, but capitalist-oriented, extractivist place-making. Analyzing a set of historical and colonial hotels and special economic zones (SEZs), I demonstrate how, rather than being a Chinese model for implementation in various locales, new Mozambican-Chinese projects in Beira articulate with and create new spatial connections that are innately interlinked with European extractive practices and designs. I also de-center the city, demonstrating how urban space is reconfigured through its relationship with its outsides, rather than the other way around. By investigating Beira as a re-forming resource entrepôt, I challenge the above scholarship to take seriously deeper histories of infrastructure investment in Africa, and attend to the inextricable nature of especially city-hinterland regional ties. Ultimately, I examine temporal and spatial entanglements of capitalist extraction, entrepôt construction, and Southern African urbanism, through a historically situated and regional view.

Maintaining a city against nature: climate adaptation in Beira

“…This was a largely British-funded, chartered company that received a lease for the then districts (now provinces) of Manica and Sofala, and was tasked and entitled to order and develop the territory. In addition to agricultural exploration inland, this included chiefly the construction and operation of a railway line, linking the rapidly expanding port of Beira to the hinterland and to neighbouring Rhodesia (Amaral 1969;Direito 2020;Lazzarini 2023).…”

“…The central neighbourhood of Ponta Gêa, for example, counts as a 'noble' area of town, where Beira's iconic Grand Hotel stands: a looming, derelict hulk that has been occupied by people displaced by the war -who by now form an authentic 'republic', as people say -and a popular motif for any foreign photojournalist coming to town (Gillis 2021;Lazzarini 2023). Beyond that, the building stock of the zone is largely colonial, from airy, 'Indian' merchant houses and Portuguese vivendas to late colonial apartment blocks.…”

“…Is this a case of disinterested, technical 'best practice' seeking to 'avoid the human influence', or should this be viewed as a 'trans-local initiative aimed at securing Dutch influence abroad'(Shannon 2019: 397)? While deliberately leaving this question open here, it should be noted that the continuities between contemporary 'master planning' and colonial urban and corridor development plans(Harrison & Croese 2023;Kirshner & Baptista 2023;Lazzarini 2023) are equally manifest in Beira.The creation of a land development company, suggested by the masterplan, was put into practice in 2018, when the Beira Urban Development Company was constituted. SDUBeira (Sociedade de Desenvolvimento Urbano da Beira) was created with the support of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland, RVO) to attract investors and channel these funds into ordered urban development.…”