Rural/Urban/Metropolitan. Trying to reduce inequalities through planning

The regulation of land use is a crucial tool to try to ensure conditions of equity and access to fundamental and non-negotiable rights: living, moving, eating. In the Anglo-Saxon disciplinary tradition of urban planning, this regulation has represented an unavoidable node to try to govern the tumultuous and dynamic processes of metropolisation of the territories, meaning by this expression a field of forces that implies a radical reconfiguration of the relational and settlement framework, characterized by the emergence of new polarities and new gravitation that transform the historical city/countryside relationships. In recent decades, in Sub-Saharan Africa, this process has taken on such strong, accelerated, and uncontrolled forms that it has radically and irreversibly redesigned some centuries-old territorial relations, such as that between urban and rural, and produced new forms of exclusion and inequality in a global world that is increasingly polarized between poor-poor and rich-rich. The contribution, starting from the research experience of “Boa_Ma_Nhã, Maputo!”, aims to focus on the main criticalities/inadequacies of planning practices in the field today, reinterpreting the relationship between rural-urban-metropolitan starting from the water-energy-food nexus (WEF nexus), assuming a transcalar and integrated approach as a necessary condition for a strategic vision of sustainable development.