Urban Precarity and Aspirational Compromise: Feeling Otherwise in a Mozambican Suburb

Abstract

The rapidly expanding Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa is very much the product of urban precarity. Indeed, most people only end up there after having exhausted other options. Striking, however, is how residents have, in recent years, discursively and materially constructed the suburb as an idyllic urban place in the making, so much so that Inhapossa has become one of the most coveted neighborhoods in the area. This article proposes an ethnographic reflection on urban precarity that draws on theories “from the South” and extends the notion of suburb to the shifting urban edge in Mozambique. It examines how local land struggles have created new opportunities for people from very different backgrounds, and whose lives became entangled in unexpected life‐enhancing ways, to craft better futures for themselves and their families. Locating the transformative potential of urban precarity in the work of attuning one’s aspirations with one’s circumstances, it shows how the suburb—a space of aspirational compromise—can become a space of aspirational achievement.

Egalitarian Lives and Violence

“…You see? Similar dynamics have also been identified from long-term and recurring fieldwork (2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019) More generally, this suggests that a post-colonial neoliberal state places constraints on movement across an urban space conditioned by power and wealth (see also Archambault 2021). In these urban spaces, security tasks are-as we saw above-outsourced (in multiple meanings of that term), and predatory behavior, surveillance, and punitive policing are subject to shifting orders that are both integral and external to social orders.…”

Shifting peripheries: Dhaka's rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces of work and movement

“…Such forms of capitalist expansion, which become manifest through the construction of mega-projects, land and real-estate speculation, and increasing urban living costs, make it so that urban newcomers are often on the brink of being “out” again. It is this degree of uncertainty and ambivalence that marks urban peripheries as spaces of “aspirational compromise” (Archambault, 2021). Navigating these shifting configurations requires a constant (re)attunement of “one’s aspirations with one’s circumstances” (Archambault, 2021: 303).…”

“…It is this degree of uncertainty and ambivalence that marks urban peripheries as spaces of “aspirational compromise” (Archambault, 2021). Navigating these shifting configurations requires a constant (re)attunement of “one’s aspirations with one’s circumstances” (Archambault, 2021: 303).…”

“…Whereas rickshaw drivers use their workspace as a sleeping space (to save up on rent), the residents of dormitories use their sleeping space as a space of work. Both are examples of strategically optimizing space, money, and time and show how shifting is also a way of making “aspirational compromises” (Archambault, 2021). Inside Rokib’s accommodation (Figure 4), for instance, I observed how the storage boxes in his room were moved around.…”

“…Indeed, it would be quite common for rickshaw pullers to send back their families to the countryside in times of economic hardship or increasing living costs to save up on rent. The rickshaw garage, by offering free-of-cost accommodation, provided drivers with something to fall back on when they had to resort to such "aspirational compromises" (Archambault, 2021). The fact that most garages doubled as improvised dormitories made the rickshaw industry accessible to workers who only came to Dhaka occasionally or seasonally to complement other sources of income.…”