Her current research interests focus on the colonial and post-colonial geographies of urban energy infrastructure and urbanisation in African cities, using Maputo, Mozambique as a case study. Idalina’s work adopts a multi-perspective approach, drawing intellectual and methodological insights from a diversity of disciplinary fields, including urban studies/geography, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Through her research, Idalina seeks to deepen our understanding of African urbanization, the governance of urban infrastructures in Africa, and what urban livelihoods emerge as a result.
Idalina welcomes prospective doctoral students whose research interests match hers, whether their projects focus on Africa or elsewhere. She is particularly keen to supervise students who may be interested in any of the research lines outlined below:
(1) Governance of Electric Urbanism in Africa
This research line explores the governance of electricity services in cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Idalina has been investigating the widespread turn to prepayment in electricity provision in the sub-continent as part of this research line.
The project Electric Urbanism – The Governance of Electricity in Urban Africa, uses the case study of Mozambique to examine how the transition to prepayment is re-shaping processes and practices of electricity production, distribution and consumption.
(2) Urban Electricity Practices in the Global South
Using a socio-technical and ethnographic perspective, this research line investigates everyday practices related to electricity infrastructures in contexts of weak infrastructure planning and provision, urban informality and poverty.
Idalina is currently involved in the project CESET – Community Energy and the Sustainable Energy Transition in Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique, a project led by Vanesa Castán-Broto at Sheffield’s Urban Institute. The project explores how community energy operates at different scales, in order to understand its potential to address energy access challenges in a just and sustainable manner.
Previously, Idalina was involved in the project Sustainable Energy Access in Mozambique: Socio-political factors in conflict-laden urban areas, also developed in collaboration with Vanesa Castán-Broto (PI) and Joshua Kirshner (Co-I) and funded by the British Academy Sustainable Development Programme. Idalina was the leader of the project’s Working Package 3 ”Everyday processes of symbolic and economic violence constraining energy access,” focused on how management practices of the electric network may enact forms of symbolic and economic violence that lead to inequality of service provision.
In the context of the Electric Urbanism project (see above), Idalina has been examining how prepayment is shaping access to electricity among lower income populations and how meters mediate practices of electricity consumption and other broader social practices and interactions.
(3) Colonial Urban Energy Landscapes
This research line examines the co-evolution of urban environments and energy infrastructures in colonial Africa as the product of historically contingent and context-specific socio-political processes.
Drawing mostly on archival research on urban services in colonial Maputo, Idalina is currently working on a number of articles and a book proposal on the electrification of Maputo, Mozambique since colonial times.
(4) Urban Governance in Conflict and Crisis
This research line focuses on strategies to deal with contention, conflict and crisis in urban politics and governance involving a variety of urban problems.
Idalina’s most recent project on Sustainable Energy Access in Mozambique: Socio-political factors in conflict-laden urban areas (see above), also looks at the ways in which conflicting agendas for electricity access are translated into specific modes of managing and planning Mozambique’s national electric grid.
One past collaborative project, Understanding the Dynamics of Urban Flexibility and Reconstruction, investigated notions of ‘urban flexibility’ in cities facing situations of crisis. The project looked at the intersection between urban planning, governance and urban development in the context of hurricane management in Cancún, Mexico and malaria control in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Another past project, Regimes of Exception in Urban Planning and Governance: The Case of the Polis Program, Portugal, studied the use of regimes of exception to govern urban rehabilitation projects in Portugal. This project was Idalina’s doctoral dissertation and it focused on an in-depth study of the implementation of the Polis Program (Programa Polis), between 2000 and 2006, in two Portuguese cities where it faced considerable conflict (Costa da Caparica and Viana do Castelo). The study focused on understanding how and why policymakers are increasingly using regimes of exception to harness the uncertainty and complexities of urban development processes, often with unintended consequences.
(5) Knowledge for Sustainable Urbanisation
This research line focuses on the production, circulation and transfer of knowledge about what constitutes ‘good’, ‘just’ and ‘sustainable cities’.
Idalina is interested in examining what kinds of knowledge and methods of knowledge production are needed in order to effectively understand and address urbanisation trends across the African continent. Her approach to this topic seeks to unsettle the dominance of Anglo-American models of what constitute ‘good’ cities and develop a more localised understanding of African urban environments.
One past project, The ‘Unplanned’ Country – Narratives of ‘Disorderly’ Urban development, sought to understand the intellectual origins and scholarly construction of a narrative that arguably defines Portuguese urban development as unplanned, disorderly and chaotic.
