Faces of the City Seminar Series
26 August 2014
On the Provenance of Spatial Violence: A History of Planning the
Peripheral in Late Colonial Mozambique
Dr Tiago Castela
(University of Coimbra)
Abstract: In contemporary cities everywhere, actual modes of urban life are often endangered by
urban planning practices, usually invoking normative dichotomies whose contingent formation is
elided—for example, the oppositions between spatial legality and spatial illegality, or urbanity and
non-urbanity. This lecture argues for the timeliness of rethinking the underused term “spatial
violence,” and of critically articulating the latter concept with recent discussions on the peripheral in
urban studies, defending that research on situated genealogies of urban knowledge is necessary to
enable those experiencing spatial violence today. Since urban knowledge as a field is partly produced
through transnational circuits, the lecture starts by exploring how crucial it is to consider past and
present ramifications of knowledge production linking cities such as Johannesburg, Lisbon, Maputo,
and Paris; in particular, the lecture will interrogate the relations between the contemporary experience
of spatial violence and histories of the government of informally created housing in the third quarter
of the Twentieth Century, focusing on the illegalisation of “clandestine” neighbourhoods in the
Lisbon area of Portugal and on the valuation of unequal urban division in colonial Mozambican cities
like Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo), Beira, or Quelimane. The lecture will foreground the
latter aspect by examining the history of the planning of the peripheral in late colonial Mozambique,
while noting the dangerous persistences of an authoritarian and colonial rationality of urban planning
in the country today. The lecture will conclude by recalling how the experiences of the Maputo school
of urban planning, developed after political independence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, can
provide lessons for a decolonisation of urban planning practices, and towards an urban knowledge that
is not inimical to democratic urban government. The lecture presents results of the research project
“Urban Aspirations in Colonial/Postcolonial Mozambique: Governing the Unequal Division of Cities,
1945-2010,” undertaken at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra for the
Portuguese state Foundation for Science and Technology, in collaboration with the Faculty of
Architecture and Physical Planning of Eduardo Mondlane University and the School of Architecture
and Planning of the University of the Witwatersrand.
Bio: Dr Tiago Castela is an urban historian and a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for
Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, integrating the research group on Cities, Cultures, and
Architecture. He holds a PhD in History of Architecture and Urbanism from the University of
California, Berkeley (USA), and a 'Licenciatura' professional degree in Architecture from
the University of Lisbon (Portugal). His doctoral dissertation discusses the history of the illegalised
working-class suburban subdivisions of the Lisbon area of Portugal, foregrounding the role of the
government of informality in the formation of a dual planning regime during the late Twentieth
Century. His current research prolongs this genealogy of planning in the postwar development project
by exploring the history of colonial urbanism in Mozambique from the end of the Second World War
to independence, focusing on the ways in which Portuguese state planning managed the informal
production of urban peripheries in present-day Maputo. He is the coordinator of the exploratory
research project "Urban Aspirations in Colonial/Postcolonial Mozambique: Governing the Unequal
Division of Cities, 1945-2010," undertaken at the Centre for Social Studies for the Portuguese state
Foundation for Science and Technology.
Before starting his doctoral research as the recipient of a Fulbright Grant, he worked as an architect,
notably as project coordinator for the Theatre and Auditorium of Poitiers (France) at the office of
Carrilho da Graça in Lisbon. He also was the coordinator of the team that received first prize in the
international competition for the Administrative Centre of the Autonomous Community of
Extremadura in Mérida (Spain).