Building Walls to Tame Time: Enclaves and the Enduring Power of Failure

Jason Sumich will present his paper exploring how the construction of enclaves became central to utopian projects of social engineering and how their legacies continue to shape contemporary society despite the failure of these initiatives. Drawing on the case of Maputo, Mozambique, he shows how enclaving functions both as a walled remnant of past utopian ambitions and as a proposed solution to current urban challenges, many of which originate from earlier enclaving efforts. He argues that, rather than solely reflecting the exclusionary tendencies of contemporary capitalism, enclaving persists as a highly malleable strategy for exercising power, even as its outcomes consistently fall short of their intended goals.

DATE | Tuesday, 18 November 2025

TIME | 12H30 – 13H30

VENUE | Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, UCT Upper Campus

Jason Sumich is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex. He is a political anthropologist who works on issues of class formation, post-socialism, the state, hegemony, citizenship, urban inequality and the politics of enclaving in southern Africa, primarily Mozambique. His current research explores emerging forms of urban governance and control, and he is a member of the project ‘Enclaving: Patterns of Global Futures in Three African Cities‘ funded by the Norwegian Research Council.  His monograph, entitled The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.