Pemba

Spontaneous Living Spaces

Corinna Del Bianco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367499976
• eBook ISBN: 9781000259285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Design

Pemba: Spontaneous Living Spaces looks at self-built dwellings and settlements in the case study city of Pemba in the Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique.

Self-built houses born from need, in haste and with limited economical resources are often considered to be temporary structures but frequently become an integral part of the urban fabric, representative of a local culture of living. The study is part of the Spontaneous Living Spaces research project, and through a variety of documentation tools, it investigates the evolution of the architectural and urban elements that characterize self-built dwellings in Pemba.

The evolution of the spontaneous living culture creates new forms of living in the city connected to local cultural expressions and the environment. These are placed in relation to the traditional and contemporary living cultures, settlement trends and the natural environment.

Covering a history of housing in Mozambique and unpacking four settlement types in Pemba, this book is written for academics, professionals and researchers in architecture and planning with a particular interest in African architecture and urbanism.

1
Introduction

Spontaneous Living Spaces, a research project

Spontaneous Living Spaces² is a research project that was born in 2011 to investigate the culture of living through self-built houses, analyzing the relationship between public and private and environment and built up in different socio-economic and cultural contexts.

Self-building, in its formal and informal forms, represents a large part of the urban landscape in developing countries. Self-built houses arise from the need for shelter, the haste to achieve it and limited economic possibilities and are often considered temporary at the time of their construction, but then, in many cases, instead of being destroyed or abandoned, they evolve, becoming a constituent part of the city and often characterizing its landscape. Losing their initial temporary nature, it is necessary to consider these settlements as an integral part of the urban fabric; therefore, they must be recognized, documented and studied as a development stage of the urban organism in which it is possible to identify elements and characteristics of contemporary living. Furthermore, having not been designed by professionals, they represent the direct response to the local cultural needs of living, and studying them allows a greater understanding and a deeper analysis of the place of socio-cultural dynamics (Del Bianco, 2017).

The spaces’ documentation and study is done through an integrated typo-morphological analysis at various scales, from the urban to the objects scales, and uses several instruments, among which is the architectural survey for spaces and functions, photo reportage, videos, interviews and historical documentation to trace the evolution of the settlements and of the houses’ typologies.

To date, three case studies have been developed, and they can be compared to highlight the living spaces in different cultural contexts. The three case studies are: (1) the favela Guapira II in Sao Paulo, called Jardim Filhos da Terra (2), Pok Fu Lam, a historical neighbourhood of Hong Kong and (3) four selected neighbourhoods of Pemba, an intermediate Mozambican city and the object of this book.³

These cases represent examples of self-building in a comparable climatic zone, all of which are located between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn (Figure 1.1a). To date, the research used the climatic element to facilitate the cultural comparison but, objectifying the creation of an atlas of the spontaneous living, in the future, case studies not belonging to this area will not be excluded.⁴

Figure 1.1 Framing of the research case studies and localization. (a) Spontaneous living spaces location map. (b) Mozambique with highlighted Pemba and Cabo Delgado region

Source: Corinna Del Bianco

Conceiving the house as a cultural phenomenon resulting from a whole range of socio-cultural factors seen in their broadest terms and adapted to local climatic conditions, site, economical possibilities, technologies and materials (Rapoport, 1969), the research considers the forms of living as cultural expressions; therefore, understanding their diversity makes it possible to gain a deeper knowledge of the context, taking into account its tangible and intangible nature and its traditional knowledge for their conservation, communication and enhancement in respect of the local cultural identity and to design, responding to culture peculiarities and to environmental interactions.

From a methodological point of view, each case study follows a specific path but always goes through three phases: (1) the preliminary documentation, (2) the field survey and (3) the consequent reorganization and analysis of the information acquired. This leads to the determination of the prevailing typologies of the surveyed area and, where possible, to detect the characteristics of variance and permanence from the traditional house. The activities of an on-site survey and contact with the local community are of fundamental importance as it is the interviewed inhabitant who, sharing her/his spaces, experience and memory, consents to the comprehension of the space, of its evolution and of its potentialities, in respect to her/his real needs. Considering that this type of documentation is particularly invasive, the action can be difficult and risky, and the modalities of involvement of the community need to be specifically tailored and then studied and tested. All of the on-site procedures were developed with the help of a local and attentive guide able to accompany and to act as a ‘cultural interpreter’ and, in some cases, also a linguistic one. Firstly, the guide’s role is necessary to explain and let the inhabitants appreciate the research work that is aimed at the enhancement of the local culture, thus facilitating the delicate process of interpersonal knowledge that allows access to the houses which will then be documented and analyzed. For example, in the Sao Paulo case study, the main difficulty was to obtain the inhabitants’ trust to engage in dialogue and to gain access to their private spaces. Therefore, the main factor in establishing this trust relationship was achieved by taking part in the local school activities and clearly explaining the study to the teachers and the kids the work to be done. In this way, they became part of the research explaining it to the other community members, allowing the establishment of the trust relationship that made the survey possible. The Chinese case study was a completely different situation as residents of Pok Fu Lam, which stands out among the districts of Hong Kong for its low density and historicity, have a strong awareness of its cultural value, so the inhabitants did not offer any resistance to the survey operations. However, the guide of the Red Cross added considerably to the on-site work, as the organization is particularly present and active within the neighbourhood. Instead, in the Mozambican case study, the difficulties were both linguistic and cultural. Therefore, it was essential to have a guide who could interpret by speaking the dialects of Makua, Makonde and Mwanì, as well as Swahili and Portuguese, fluently. In fact, frequently, the people interviewed speak dialects or minor languages on the one hand, and on the other they have unusual religious rites and beliefs that must be understood as they reflect on some of the spaces in the house.

This work of connecting with the local community reflects on the icono-graphic apparatus and on the photo reportages with portraits of the inhabitants taken within their houses. The photo reportage is a precious tool to represent and contextualize the research. In fact, each case study has its own photographic apparatus that can broaden the view on the inhabitants’ daily lives.⁵ As for the case of Mozambique, the research is accompanied by two photographic projects: Tides and Capulanas. The first gives a representation of the importance of the sea, with its tides, in the locals’ daily life and family economy, while the second documents an element of the local costume, the capulana,⁶ intended as part of the local cultural heritage.⁷

In conclusion, the documentation of the local culture of living, carried out by this research, is important for the conservation and valorization of the local knowledge, in particular as that knowledge concerns the relationships between the community and the surrounding natural environment, which make it considerably part of the local cultural heritage.⁸ Therefore, Spontaneous Living Spaces’ work is addressed to the inhabitants for the awareness of their cultural value, to planners and designers to design with respect for the local urban and architectural identity and for the preservation of the diversity of cultural expressions, and to municipalities, GOs and NGOs working on site for a sustainable development aimed at meeting the objectives set by Agenda 2030. The information collected is also important for documentation purposes aimed at the recognition, conservation and enhancement of forms of heritage, both tangible and intangible, which characterize the local culture and urban landscape, acknowledging the contribution of UNESCO (2003) Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and to UNESCO (2005) Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Finally, the results of the research are also addressed to the academic public and to research centres that investigate the topics of living, self-construction and urban design, as well as those who carry out studies on the larger scale of the Global South and developing countries.

Understanding Africa’s great cultural opportunity

When it comes to Africa, it is necessary first of all to keep in mind that we are talking about a continent of about 30,000,000 km² which represents a quarter of the emerged lands of our country, which includes 54 countries and about 1 billion people, with a growth rate of 2.6%, and, therefore, in 50 years it is expected to reach 2.2 billion, or a quarter of the world population of which, to date, only 45% lives in urban areas. In addition, the continent is made up of 60% of unused arable land and has a third of the global natural resources (Sarr, 2018).

Thinking about the development of this continent, so vast, populous and rich in resources, and to understand the reasons that led to its backwardness, it is necessary to take into account some fundamental facts that have characterized its history. For example, the continent has always been subject to ‘non-determination’, as the beginning of its colonization dates back to 146 B.C., when the Romans began occupying the northernmost areas. When the most recent European colonizations began in the 16th century, Africans had an important demographic advantage, as they represented, with their estimated 100 million inhabitants, 20% of the world population. This advantage was dramatically interrupted by the slave trade, which led the African population to represent, in the 19th century, just 9% of the world population (Sarr, 2018). The slave trade was one of the largest and most enduring extermination works ever carried out: it is estimated that 24 million people were relocated, and about 200 million died in the traffic due to the capture, transportation, raids and wars or diseases that were introduced by the Europeans and that exterminated entire ethnic groups with diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis and pneumonia (Sarr, 2018).

In addition, the imposition of political and economic power on dominated cultures has further stopped the local development, which has generated ‘dominated’ psychological dynamics.

The colonization process in Africa did not end with independences but continued with other comparable relationships, despite the fact that once free, states acquired a greater capacity for self-determination and negotiating power. In fact, as reported by Pádraig Carmody in The New Scramble for Africa (Carmody, 2016), both the economic policy of colonialism and the current footprint of contemporary foreign trade, in particular the Asian one,⁹ is based on natural resources,¹⁰ and usually the benefit for the local population is little.

These are only hints to the complex factors and dynamics that have determined the disadvantage of the continent compared to the colonizing countries that now try, in various ways, to provide aid for the development ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Essential glossary
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Studying Mozambican self-built houses in the city of Pemba
• 3 An interpretative framework of habitation in Mozambique
• 4 Understanding Pemba
• 5 Unpacking four settlement types in Pemba
• 6 Conclusions
• Index