“Flooding Our Eyes with Rubbish”: Urban Waste Management in Maputo, Mozambique
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780090EAU Environment and Urbanization “Flooding our eyes with rubbish”: urban waste management in Maputo, Mozambique INGE TVEDTEN AND SARA CANDIRACCI Inge Tvedten is a ABSTRACT Critical voices on urban management tend to portray conflicting senior researcher and governmentalities, with Western “top-down” municipal development models anthropologist at Chr. on the one hand, and the everyday practices and diffuse forms of power of the Michelsen Institute, with poor majority on the other. This paper takes solid waste (lixo) management in expertise in urban and rural poverty monitoring Mozambique’s capital city, Maputo, and its informal settlements as an entry point and analysis; public service for assessing the relationship between these two urban development perspectives. delivery; gender and It shows that while the municipality considers itself to be working actively through women’s empowerment; public–private partnerships to handle the complex issue of waste management in and development the informal areas, people in these informal settlements, despite paying a regular cooperation/institutional fee for waste removal, continue to experience lixo as a serious problem and see its development. persistent presence as a symbol of spatial and social inequalities and injustice. The Address: Chr. Michelsen paper is formulated as a conversation between city planning and management and Institute, Jekteviksbakken the community side of the equation – leading to a joint set of proposals for how 31 P.O. Box 6033, Bergen best to manage such a contentious part of African urban life. 5892, Norway; e-mail: Inge. [email protected] KEYWORDS citizen–state relations / divided city / informal settlements / Maputo Sara Candiracci is an urban planner with experience / urban poverty / urban sanitation / waste management from urban development programmes in Africa, Asia and Latin America. She worked as an advisor in the Planning and Environment I. INTRODUCTION Department of the Maputo Municipality as part of the Solid waste management has long been a central concern of urban World Bank’s ProMaputo management and the urban management literature on Africa, as well as II Program. She currently works as an Associate at being regarded as a major obstacle to the development of modern and Arup, UK. habitable cities. The 2014 State of African Cities report(1) argues that poor Address: e-mail: sara. solid waste management poses extreme hazards to the environment and [email protected] health, but also that there is a high potential for waste separation and management. At the same time, however, waste management interventions have been criticized for being top-down and unable to relate effectively 1. UN-Habitat (2014), The State to poor informal settlement areas.(2) In the urban anthropology literature, of African Cities: Re-Imagining Sustainable Urban Transitions, which traditionally has concerned itself with understanding local spatial Nairobi; also Grest, Jeremy, trajectories and social formations from the “bottom up”, waste and waste Alex Baudouin and Camilla management have had a much less prominent place, despite the strong Bjerkli (2013), “The politics of (3) solid-waste management in material, social and symbolic connotations. Accra, Addis Ababa, Maputo In Mozambique’s capital city, Maputo, the prominence of the issue and Ouagadougou: different of urban waste is immediately evident. Rubbish is seen and sensed cities, similar issues”, in Simon Bekker and Laurent Fourchard everywhere – making the Mozambican poet Calane da Silva exclaim that (editors), Governing Cities in the city is “flooding our eyes with rubbish”.(4) In the city’s formal bairros, or Environment & Urbanization Copyright © 2018 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). 1 1–16.https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247818780090 DOI: 10.1177/0956247818780090 www.sagepublications.com ENVIRONMENT & URBANIZATION settlement areas, large containers are visible all over, many waiting for Africa: Politics and Policies, more rubbish or lixo and some flowing over – with people both inside HSRC Press, Cape Town. and outside these containers trying to locate contents that can be eaten, 2. Mbiba, Beacon (2014), “Urban solid waste characteristics sold or used in other ways. In the informal bairros, containers are much and household appetite for more scarce, and public throughways and open spaces are littered with separation at source in Eastern plastic bags, bottles, foodstuffs, and other waste. Private dwellings, yards and Southern Africa”, Habitat International Vol 43, pages and alleyways, on the other hand, are well taken care of by residents 152–162. and are impeccable. The epicentre of the city’s waste problem is found 3. Douglas, Mary (1966), Purity in Maputo’s only rubbish dump, located between two heavily populated and Danger: An Analysis of informal bairros, where more than five hundred people live and/or make the Concepts of Pollution and a living.(5) Taboo, Routledge, London; also Jaffe, Rivke and Eveline Dürr The immediate impression of ubiquitous waste in Maputo’s (editors) (2010), Urban Pollution: cityscape is supported by political statements, citizen opinions, and Cultural Meanings, Social statistics. The city’s mayor has stated that waste management is one of Practices, Berghan, Oxford; Reno, Joshua (2015), “Waste the most serious challenges the city faces, from both infrastructure and and waste management”, human development perspectives. For respondents in the municipality’s Annual Review of Anthropology annual Report Card survey on satisfaction with municipal services, the Vol 44, pages 557–572; and issue of lixo consistently comes out as the top concern.(6) Officially, Eriksen, Thomas Hylland and Elisabeth Schober (2017), the city produces 1,100 metric tonnes of garbage every day, but the “Waste and the superfluous: municipal official (vereador) responsible for the sector acknowledges that an introduction”, Social this probably only accounts for around 50 per cent of the waste actually Anthropology Vol 25, No 3, pages 282–287. produced. 4. ANIMA (2015), The Although the municipality, like people in the informal settlements, Ethnography of a Divided sees solid waste as a considerable problem, it has been unable to develop City, Film produced by ANIMA a coherent system that takes the lixo from the settlements to its final Estúdio Criativo, Maputo, destination in municipal garbage dumps or recycling entities. This available at https://www. cmi.no/news/1921-maputo- paper argues that the problem largely rests on the inability to develop ethnography-of-a-divided-city- constructive communication and cooperation between the municipality film. A short segment from the and people in informal communities. The municipality takes a Western/ film, relating to the themes of this paper, is available online neo-liberal perspective, and sees waste management as a technical issue. alongside the paper. It expects citizens to behave in accordance with this perspective, while 5. Allen, Charlotte and Elísio only partially delivering on its own assumptions. People in the informal Jossias (2012), “Mapping communities, by contrast, have come to perceive the piles of lixo in public of the policy context and space as an integral part of being poor and marginalized, and they only catadores organizations in Maputo”, WIEGO Organizing (7) keep their immediate private space clean and sanitary. Brief No 6, Women in Informal After a brief introduction to the city of Maputo in Section II, Section Employment: Globalizing and III assesses Maputo’s urban waste problem from an urban planning Organizing, Cambridge, MA. perspective, drawing on a combination of relevant official laws and 6. CMM (2014a), Report Card Sobre a Satisfacão dos regulations, 10 interviews with public and private sector stakeholders, and Municipes, 2013, Final report, the experiences of one of the authors as an advisor in the Municipality of Conselho Municipal de Maputo, Maputo’s Department of Urban Planning. In Section IV, the issue of waste Maputo. and waste management is described from the point of view of community 7. The municipality’s leaders and residents in the two informal bairros Inhagoia and 25 de perspective is in line with Foucault’s notion of Junho, using a qualitative approach. The bairros have a total population “governmentality” [Burchell, of 60,000 and were chosen for their different socioeconomic conditions. Graham, Colon Gordon and Data are drawn from more than 30 interviews on issues of waste with Peter Miller (editors) (1991), The Foucault Effect: Studies community leaders and male and female residents, and supplemented by in Governmentality, Chicago the authors’ long experience in working with local government and the University Press, Chicago], communities in question on issues of urban development, poverty and while the informal settlers’ inequality. Section V discusses possible short-term and long-term solutions perspective aligns with Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” to Maputo’s urban waste problem, and there is a concluding discussion [Bourdieu, Pierre (1990), The of Western “top-down” and community-based waste management Logic of Practice, Stanford perspectives in Section VI. University Press, Stanford]. 2 FLOODING OUR EYES WITH RUBBISH MAP 1 Informal settlements in Maputo Municipality (partially planned areas in green, spontaneous areas in yellow) NOTE: The red line indicates the boundary of Maputo Municipality. SOURCE: Maputo Municipal Council (2010), Municipal Strategy of Intervention in Informal Settlements.