Mining and extractive urbanism: Postdevelopment in a Mozambican boomtown

By Joshua Kirshner, M. Power. 2015

113 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mozambique has attracted international attention in recent years following the discovery of huge reserves of coal and gas deposits. A major focus of Mozambique’s extractives boom is the province of Tete, once a remote outpost but now a hub of power generation for the southern African region and an emerging centre of global investment in coal extraction. Some of the world’s largest mining firms from both established and emerging economies have descended on Tete, investing billions of dollars in developing concessions to extract some of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves with wide-ranging implications for the region’s political economy and effecting significant shifts in relations between state, capital and territorial control. At the urban scale, Tete city and its expanding periphery are increasingly characterised by enclaves and spaces of enclosure, as some groups benefit from and are integrated into global circuits of production whilst others suffer displacement and dispossession. In seeking to trace the emergence of Tete’s resource economy, the paper contends that three distinctive spatialities have resulted from these developments, including the infrastructure networks being constructed around the extractive industries, the enclave spaces arising from the coal boom (and the particular labour geographies that shape them) and the new and distinctive urban geographies that are the product of Tete’s rapid urbanisation. The paper seeks to assess the impacts, stakes and challenges linked to investments in extractive activities and looks at how the costs and risks are being differentially distributed within and between the affected communities.

Subfields: Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89edfbf23323210f590b12396d89a2a90ff868d9

How researchers see this paper

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In Anthropology

1. S. Spiegel

In Sociology and Political Science

1. P. Newell
2. B. Brown
3. Adrian Smith
4. Brett Neilson
5. Lucy Baker
6. S. Spiegel
7. Sandro Mezzadra
8. H. El Bilali

In Urban Studies

1. Adrian Smith
2. Lucy Baker
3. H. Bulkeley
4. Zsuzsa Gille

Citations in the corpus

• Coal, Climate Justice, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition (2019, background): “D ow nloaded from http://direct.m it.edu/glep/article-pdf/19/2/149/1818369/glep_a_00501.pdf by guest on 01 August 2021 Kirshner and Power (2015) detail how the promise of increased revenues from coal in Mozambique’s Tete province has set in motion a new political economy geared toward transnational…”
• The political economy of energy transitions in Mozambique and South Africa: The role of the Rising Powers (2016, background): “In Mozambique rising power interest in the energy sector has predominantly concentrated on securing access to fossil fuel resources through resource diplomacy following the recent discovery of significant coal and gas reserves (Kirshner and Power, 2015).”
• On the multiple frontiers of extraction: excavating contemporary capitalism (2017, background): “…that rapidly develops around mining in many parts of the world, characterized by the proliferation and intertwining of enclaves and enclosures, can be taken as yet another form of urbanization where these processes take extreme although peculiar forms (see for instance Kirshner and Power 2015).”