Abstract:
Urban sprawl is the growth of a continuous urban spot from and over a non-urbanized peripheral space,
usually within the boundaries of the same administrative division. The scale on which this phenomenon
occurs takes on dimensions that go beyond the analysis of the city or its historical formation, moving this
to a regional scale, where different conurbated nuclei interact with each other through commuting
movements. The intense and permanent flows of people, goods and capital characterize the metropolized
space. For this reason, it is important to understand how the mobility of these people and goods is carried out, both in terms of accessibility and in terms of transportation. Therefore, the way these displacements
are made interferes in the quality of life of those who make the trip and this is directly linked to the concepts
of sustainable mobility and consecutively to the patterns of land occupation. For this study, we will focus
on the Metropolitan Area of Maputo, characterized by its polynuclearity and dependence on the City of
Maputo. The Maputo, Matola and Boane axis is proposed as the study area. We intend to reflect on urban
sprawl, its implication and relationship with sustainable mobility. We argue, however, that the lack of
regulatory instruments and territorial actions that promote an interrelationship between urban transport
policies and land use planning, coupled with a weak definition of the role of the main actors, may be
contributing to the unsustainability of mobility in the Area. We seek to identify how urban planning
interferes in mobility decisions, as well as references for the construction of a Public Policies model,
adapted to the reality of the case study. The methodological option allows us to produce knowledge that is
more directed to African or Sub-Saharan African cities, having as an empirical base the study area in
question, since most of the studies and analyses are carried out in developed cities, in a context of
metropolization that is still different from African cities and/or of recent democratization.
