Out of Time and in Place: Housebuilding and Urbanisation in a Mozambican Locality

This article examines housebuilding, temporality and small settlement urbanisation in Mozambique. It studies residents who are building next to homes built by their grandparents and parents, on the same or adjacent plots of land, where they grew up. Taking a cue from the residents who claim that they are ‘building their city’, this article explores who is building, how and why. Such building is ‘out of time’ because houses are built out of past attempts to modernise the nation towards shared futures that have never been reached. Inverting this, contemporary housebuilders imaginatively and physically inhabit their own individual futures while producing new modernities. Moreover, such building is ‘out of time’ in the sense of being outside of linear time. Older houses embody material and social fragments from the past that remain in the present, and the way they decay and new ones are produced is anachronistic, reflecting Morten Nielsen’s ‘swelling of time’, in space. Yet, this growth is also happening ‘in place’, led by natives, in the place they grew up, filled with memories and sentimentality. Following this, the article proposes a different analytical framework for thinking about small settlement urbanisation, through the notion of spatial and temporal entanglement.