Para viver bem: distinction from above and below

Many scholars have argued that the explosive growth of gated communities in African cities results from the soaring inequalities and insecurities unleashed by the adoption of ‘neo-liberalism’. Based on our analysis of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, we demonstrate how gated communities are the latest attempt at a long-held social engineering project through the built environment to create the desired urban subject. We then trace how utopian ambition, and aspirations bring these projects into being and how lack of resources and faulty management exacerbate internal tensions that cause them to fall apart. We argue that it is not only the lack of cultural knowledge or the ‘one size fits all’ authoritarian imposition of modernising plan that causes these projects to fail. Instead, through the case study of Mozambique we trace the ways in which seemingly exclusionary spatial forms, such as a gated community draw upon the legacies of former utopian projects.