Modelling the city: bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique

Abstract

It has become a well-rehearsed truism that the growth of sub-Saharan African cities is the result of an amassing of persons, things and knowledge that takes place in the absence of centrally planned development initiatives and without any tightly orchestrated coordination of social life. Under such conditions, the argument goes, urbanites make do with whatever resources are available while increasingly chaotic cities expand beyond their social and material capacities. The question is, however, whether weak – and even absent – systems of urban management can be taken to signify a lack of coordination and planning of urban development. Might it not be, for instance, that cities organize and model themselves through means other than those afforded by formal urban planning schemes? Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores the shifting material forms of what are locally described as ‘bedroom drawer blueprints’ as an acutely potent type of urban modelling. Current and prospective house builders in Maputo exchange and share blueprints and physical and virtual models of houses that they plan to eventually build. Considered by residents as valuable social and material assets, such blueprints and models also offer an opportunity for experimenting with new forms of aesthetic organization of the city. Comparing the ongoing transactions and sharing of bedroom drawer blueprints with the increasing global circulation of middle-class architectural urban models, in this article I argue that it is the capacity of the former to move between different material forms and modalities that gives them their particular aesthetic potency and drive.