Luanda and Maputo, two major Lusophone African capitals, are marked by growing socio-spatial inequalities. Their urbanized centers, traced by and to the colonial society and where today lives the population with more resources, differs from the dense and extensive residential sub-urbanized suburbs, once inhabited by the colonized society and where currently lives the lower income population. In the first years of the independence, in the context of a socialist ideology, planned economy and centralized planning, both countries aimed to diminish the socio-spatial inequalities inherited from colonialism, intervening in the suburbs. From the late eighties of the twentieth century, with the beginning of the economic and political liberalization, which led, in Mozambique, to decentralization (emerging in Angola), new actors emerging and inducing different models of city and of doing the city, diversifying the types of suburban interventions. Explosion, segregation and socio-spatial complexity of these suburbs are intensifying with the model of the neoliberal city, competitive and unequal. Taking as a reference these two big socio-political and urban periods, this paper returns, in a crossed and critical look, different types of interventions in the residential sub-urbanized suburbs. Its main objective is to reflect upon the circulation of influences and the sub-urban paradigms in which they are inscribed.
Socialist city; Neoliberal city; Sub-urban paradigms; Luanda and Maputo