Anna Mazzolini

• Presentation
• CV

Architect by formation, urban policy expert and researcher, I have been working at the interstice between practice and research in and for countries in transition in Sub-Saharan Africa, through an interdisciplinary approach merging anthropology, material culture, urban planning and policy development issues.

I have started working on urban upgrading and urban policy issues in Mozambique still as a student of Architecture, through several participatory planning activities with UN-Habitat. After a II Level Post-graduate Master in Regional Planning and Policies I have started working on the field as a UN-Habitat specialist in regards to urban upgrading of flooded areas, supporting both the local and central government in terms of strategies and innovative local-based participatory approaches to urban management (Quelimane and Maputo).

This experience allowed me to become project manager of a 4 years project of urban upgrading in Beira, Mozambique, where I lived, from 2008 to 2012, focusing on substantial systemic changes in the urban management and infrastructure provision. Progressively shifting towards ethnography and anthropology, I returned to the academia after the field experience, through a PhD in Regional Planning and Public Policies from the IUAV Faculty of Planning.

During the PhD I had also the possibility of applying research to practice and especially policies, following several national programmes and being main advisor and responsible for national policies such as the National Housing Policy in Mozambique, the National Urban Policy in Angola and the Strategy of Intervention in Informal Neighbourhoods in Mozambique.

I remained attached to the academia through a Post Doc in anthropology from Aarhus University, focusing on the interdisciplinary subject of the rising middle class in Africa and its impact in terms of territorial and spatial arrangements, and a Post Doc in urban development at a centre of Excellence (DAStU) of the Politecnico di Milano., linking mobility and urban planning.

During my research periods, I have aimed to provide evidence for both policy reform and local activism, engaging with local civil society, towards more equitable and inclusive cities. I have continued to consult on participatory urban upgrading, urban inequality trends, climate resilience and post-disaster response, land management, slum upgrading, water and sanitation, supporting the central government and municipalities of Mozambique, as well as a number of international organisations (Cities Alliance) and research institutes (IHS, Rotterdam). This dual profile has influenced my increasing interest in long-term research on policy impacts, transnational/global urban planning influences on local politics, and I have explored these aspects particularly through the deep unfolding and understanding of life trajectories, including ethnography and micro-level research.

In 2021, I started working for the United Nations on a more permanent basis. From 2021 to 2023, I was the main person responsible for the development of Mozambique's national urbanisation policy for UN-Habitat, working with key ministries and the presidential cabinet. At UN-Habitat, I developed my skills in urban and territorial analysis, particularly in relation to metropolitan areas, internal migration, integrated and intersectoral spatial planning, municipal finance and decentralisation.

Receiving a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2022 allowed me to make a significant shift towards academia and the areas of research I feel most committed to, such as home-making, climate-induced displacement, life trajectories and kinship. The fellowship also allowed me to return to live intensively in the field, in remote areas, collecting invisible life histories as a solid basis for an epistemological reset of post-emergency policy-making.

 

Current research

Through Marie Curie HOme WAves  project (HOWA - Home-making and life trajectories in flood-risk areas of Central Mozambique) I am investigating how home-making is reshaped in materiality, sociality and temporality under flood exposure and displacement, and which life trajectories are enacted by- and entangled with- the act of home-making pre-and post-flood experiences. I will be working in flood prone areas and resettlement sites in central Mozambique, in a time in which disaster-driven displacement of already vulnerable people is becoming more frequent, adding complexity to the local dynamics of planning, accessing the land, conceiving citizenship and/or “othering” certain groups of population through land management and resettlement. Different type of settings (urban areas, resettlements and transitional sites) will be explored, making use of clusters of methods guided by the house biographical approach, revealing the links between risk and spatial and social belonging.

Considering homes as speaking subjects telling us about the entanglements between individual paths, kinship, the environment and the broader socio-political context, I privilege housing construction, home-making and land access practices micro-scale analysis as means to understand broader life trajectories tendencies, continuities and disruptions. My current research shift aims at dealing with disaster-related displacements as moments of material and symbolic disruption, in which home making and re-making emerge as a non-spoken language of social re-positioning and aspiration.