The paper presents the premises and some ongoing results from “Boa_Ma_Nhã, Maputo!”, a transdisciplinary research project based at Politecnico di Milano in partnership with Eduardo Mondlane University (Maputo, Mozambique) and the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation. The project is focused on the districts of Boane, Moamba, and Namaacha, questioning their role in consideration of the ongoing metropolisation of the Maputo Province, where the relation between urban and rural, national and transnational, local and global has become critical. Among the most pressing challenges, the main ones are related to the changing rural-urban socio-economic conditions and the local effects of climate change, including water competition, food insecurity, and access to energy. The research project embraces these challenging issues, mainly untackled by local planning tools, by proposing a multiand inter-disciplinary approach to address the development of the growing peri-urban environment of Map...

What visions for the future of the “Greater Maputo”? What territorial images and analytical interpretations we can build on to envision long- term strategies and political decisions to promote integrated and sustainable development? Moving from these questions, through an innovative methodology and a transdisciplinary approach, the book offers a tool-kit for reading and rethinking the Maputo metropolitan region, from the perspective of a more balanced and comprehensive rural-urban relation. In addition, the volume outlines a combination of key guidelines and spatial scenarios for a possible agenda for the sustainable development of the Province of Maputo, with particular attention to the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus. The book presents a selection of the main results of the research project “Boa_Ma_Nhã, Maputo!” funded by Polisocial Award 2018 – the social engagement and responsibility programme at the Politecnico di Milano – to support PIMI, an ongoing educational and research programme at the Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo.

This book is accessible in the best sense of the term and yet offers complex ideas and challenges to traditional planning norms that have shaped a geography of vulnerability across Maputo, says Jonathan Silver. The climate crisis is not an uncertain future or purely scientific debate but a frighteningly real present that particularly threatens coastal, low-lying cities that an estimated one billion globally reside in. Maputo is one of these coastal metropolises that has experienced rapid and often under-planned development demonstrated by the 2000 floods which left parts of Mozambique's capital city devastated. As Christina Figueres, UNFCCC Executive Secretary writes in the forward, " Right now, the world's poorest and most vulnerable people are keenly feeling the impacts of climate change " (p. v) Responding to such climate change imperatives is vital in Maputo but opens up a whole series of new challenges for communities and authorities in making sure the city and its people are prepared for the climate instability of the 21st century. While in cities like Maputo this planning has been ongoing for much of the last decade, there still remain too few accounts of such processes, on how urban authorities and neighbourhoods have faced these challenges and the vital learning that has emerged. It is into this space that a new publication by UCL press has emerged. In a collaborative endeavour led by Vanesa Castán Broto, the detailed and interesting book about the actions taken in Maputo provides an essential account of the front lines in humanity's response to limit the full horrors of climate change along coastal, urban regions. This book is fascinating to those interested in such responses, and an all but necessary read for planners, social scientists, climate experts and activists well beyond the streets of Mozambique's capital.

Abstract The spatial and demographic configuration of today's Maputo–with one million people living in the city and about 1.8 million in the metropolitan area-is more the creation of those who inhabit the city than of those supposedly in charge of it. Attempts at imposing zoning regulations are invariably thwarted by private interests–business, commerce, and families who put their savings and earnings into building homes in the different areas of the existing and emerging city.

This article seeks to identify, map and explain the major factors (and perhaps myths) that postulate the present situation in African cities regarding the reluctance and inaction towards embracing the notion of the water-food-climate-energy nexus towards finding options for setting the necessary agenda that assists in building sustainable regions and cities. It argues for a systems approach as well as considering cities, not as isolated entities but networked systems of defined regions within a country. In doing so, the article brings again, the core-periphery syntax of urban and regional debate that was the major rallying point of regional planning philosophy of the 1960s and 1980s. The article makes use of four case studies of African cities—Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), Cape Town (South Africa), Dar es-Salam (Tanzania) and Cairo (Egypt) to demonstrate the issues and factors for considering in the agenda towards incorporating the waterfood-climate-energy nexus in the sustainability and resilience agenda for cities. Keywords Food production . Water supply. Urban policy. Drought . Flooding

Intense urbanization in African cities challenges the provision of water services. International development cooperation promotes water infrastructure projects to increase cities’ resilience and to address the historical inequalities in water access and distribution. However, those projects fail to effectively implement the decentralization and public participation principles advanced for urban water management with the shift from ‘government to governance’. This failure – aligned with the donor push for the replication of the modern infrastructure ideal in the interventions designed for African cities – prevents international development cooperation and African policy-makers from promoting innovative water governance and long lasting structural changes. Hence, this paper adopts a politicized perspective of water governance to review the decisionmaking process for improving urban water supply in Greater Maputo, Mozambique. I argue that the shift to participatory water governance is only apparent on paper and, as a result, donor interventions do not recognize and support innovative governance at the local level. This case study leads to the conclusion that investments in capacity building for water governance and the promotion of social entrepreneurship for the provision of water services could be employed as means to turn the challenge of sustainable water provision into opportunities to address the social and economic development needed for African cities.

In the age of climate change, human life's pliability is also reshaping anthropological debates. For debates centring on the urban domain, questions revolve around flexibility, adaptability and resilience, while in work drawing on the Anthropocene similar ideas of human beings as subsumable to Gaia are emerging. This article reflects on how these perspectives interweave and imply a paradoxical human figure. On the one hand, they convey a being that simultaneously infuses, consumes and transmogrifies the world. Conversely, the human figure is forged by theoretical and analytical orientations that prescribe that one should abandon such a human-centric reading of the world. The latter aspect is particularly evident in so-called 'resilience governance' discourses. These discourses presuppose a form of becoming less through reinventing humanity and human life as more adaptable to post-future horizons of always already collapsed ecologies. Critically tracing this paradox, this article probes the urban Anthropocene and its lesser humans as desirable under the aegis of 'resilience governance' in Mozambique, crucially also mapping and analysing the involvement of utopic registers in defiance of such developments.