MCU Policy Brief #3: Strengthening Local Economies? Architectural Ceramics in Mozambique’s Housing Construction
By: Nikolai Brandes | March 2021

As most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Mozambique is characterized by an ongoing growth of its urban population.1 In Maputo and other major cities in the region, this explosive growth leads to fast urban expansion and a persistent construction boom. A large proportion of new buildings is intended for the city’s expanding middle class. The city’s evolution results in a growing need for im- porting construction materials, but also offers new perspectives for the use of local products. Using locally made industrial and artistic ceramic products might help to strengthen the local building materials industry, provide jobs, and strengthen collective identi- fication with the built environment.

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MCU Policy Brief #2: Will the urban middle class save African Cities? Or just itself?
By: Morten Nielsen | July 2020

As cities across the Global South continue to grow at an explosive rate, a major challenge is how to ensure socially sustainable devel- opment for the many urban residents in need of basic services and viable housing. Over the last two decades, the middle class has con- sistently been promoted by urban analysts, researchers and practi- tioners as the probable vanguard of sustainable urban development: With their improved economic capacities and attention to civic rights and transparent governance, the argument goes, members of the urban middle class will ensure that cities across the Global South will provide sustainable living conditions for all. Based on recent research from Maputo, Mozambique, in this Policy Brief, this widespread understanding regarding the expected positive societal effects of a strengthened urban middle class is challenged. It is documented how recent urban developments focusing on the growing middle class have aggravated rather than alleviated entrenched social and economic inequalities. Rather than focusing on the assumed but uncorroborated productive effects of a growing middle class, recommendations are made for (1) implementing stronger regulations on speculative land investments and (2) formalizing existing land occupations on the urban periphery.

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MCU Policy Brief #1: Middle Class Urbanism is a Policy Issue
By: Anna Mazzolini | March 2020

Many different voices have arisen over the last years regarding the need for further evidence on urbanization directions in the Global South.
New, diverse and multi-agency urbanization patterns and their transformative impacts on countries ́ policies, planning apparatus and land management have been at the core of the recent debate on southern urbanism. Among factors such as the role of foreign investments on urban planning, the increasing contribution of the “informal” economies in the city development and economies, and the threat of new “unsustainable” urban trends such as sprawl, congestion and collapse of conventional planning systems, the urban middle class appears to be an intersecting and recurrent actor silently penetrating and influencing all the factors mentioned above.
Current rising investments in Africa’s cities which are often described as entirely new cities or planned, self-contained enclaves, are related to this new urban actor. On the other hand, paradoxically it is the urban middle class that is seen as the sole actor able to create a more equitable urban environment.
Beyond pure spatial and policy analysis, what is at stake is to capture more conceptual clarity on these issues, and this is a complex and long-lasting issue. After almost two years of Intense research, the Middle Class Urbanism Project is pleased to share the first brief on this topic and to introduce its interdisciplinary and positively deconstructive research approach.

Download the policy brief here.