D avid M orton . Age of Concrete

How does one approach and make sense of the material form of housing in an African city such as Maputo? David Morton’s beautifully and eloquently written book provides multiple and equally interesting answers, and he does so by charting the city’s—and thereby Mozambique’s—rocky course from the 1940s, when it was a Portuguese colonial capital, and through various political upheavals until the present age, concentrating on the postindependence (1975) decades. The book takes its title, Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique, from Morton’s quite intriguing ambition of linking the material form of concrete to aspirations of modernity and general uplifting. This works exceptionally well, for instance, when outlining the intimacies among the radical political projects of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party Frelimo—Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, the country’s liberation movement and still dominant party—Maputo’s changing urban populace, and the city’s material...

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