- Spatial Planning to Avoid Urban Inequalities: Experiences in emerging small towns of Mozambique    111 kb by    Diamantini, Corrado | corrado.diamantini@ing.unitn.it    Short Outline The paper considers two small towns situated in the rural Mozambique in order to emphasize the negative impact that a rapid modernization can produce on fragile urban structures and to show how these impacts can be mitigated by planning choices. Abstract Planning practices carried out in small towns in sub-Saharan Africa are not much taken into account by scholars and policy makers, because it is believed that the problems addressed by these practices are negligible compared to those, far more considerable, affecting large and primate cities. On the contrary these small towns, often considered part of the rural world, are undergoing accelerated growth that more and more is producing within them those inequalities that can be found in large and primate cities. The problem that arises is how to control this process in the bud, by pursuing an effective urban cohesion, both physical and social. The paper addresses this problem with reference to two small towns - Caia and Sena - situated in a rural district of Mozambique that has been invested, in recent years, by rapid and intense transformations that have produced significant impacts on both towns. It's enough to think of the implementation of several major infrastructures and the resettlement of people affected by repeated flooding of the Zambezi River. In particular, the paper firstly analyzes the recent evolution of the two small towns and the way a physical and social division is occurring within them; secondly, considers the planning experiences – in which the author took part - which were carried out in both centres with the aim of maintaining their physical and social cohesion. The paper, taking also into consideration other planning experiences carried out in small and medium centres in Mozambique, intends to propose a methodological approach that makes the plan a useful tool to deal effectively with the negative impact that an accelerated transformation may have on small towns. Keywords small towns; rural districts; town planning; avoiding inequalities Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2010: Sustainable City - Developing World   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper