Tackling the invisible during COVID-19 urban prevention: insights on housing and mobility in Maputo, Mozambique

According to mainstream opinion, diverse, dynamic and dense cities in the global South pose extreme challenges in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic since they are more likely to be targets for contagion. Journalistic narratives regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in African cities call for ‘innovative’ and ‘creative’ measures to prevent a hecatomb, regardless of the measures that each country has put into place and the specificities of each context. Once again, the ‘African-city’ model, seen as a planning ‘solution’ to the problem of the co-production of urban space, becomes a visible threat when an environmental or health crisis surges. A certain city model is, once again, judged from different viewpoints depending upon what is being observed. It is a model for the evaluation of future performance through the Western perception of risk based on the static observation of the urban fabric and the use of absolute numbers like urban density and total urban population. Narratives regarding density, overcrowding or sprawl are continuously subjected to in-depth examination in terms of the contingency and type of risk involved. Whether it is social, health-related or environmental, the urban model is a given and static category influencing responses to threats and dysfunctionalities. Ad hoc urban ‘surgeries’, together with creative or innovative solutions, in parallel with the provision of affordable housing, reappear cyclically at times of crisis to highlight a potential turning point in the creation of more functional urban scenarios.