Garmendia-Briceño, al. Garmendia-Briceño, al. 2010; Bhattacharya, Romani and Stern, 2012; Whitfield , 2015; Lall, Henderson and Venables, 2017), promoting public-private partnerships (among other mechanisms) to fill in fiscal gaps within the public sector's funding capacities for infrastructure (Foster and Garmendia-Briceño, 2010; Collier and Venables, 2016), creating efficiencies in the et al. local-level provision of housing and services (Romer 2010; Henderson , 2016), or promoting the capacity of African cities to enhance their own-source revenues (Turok, 2016; et al. Collier , 2017; Franzsen and McCluskey, 2017). With the exception of Turok's work on financing urban development across African cities (Turok, 2012, 2016) and that of those working et al. on property taxation reforms across the continent (Collier , 2017; Franzsen and McCluskey, equity 2017), little attention is paid to questions about the of who benefits, who pays, and how, for this next big push in growth-oriented activities. This article is an effort to move toward a more critical, grounded analysis of the financial architecture behind urban development in low-income, urban environments in African countries and its distributive justice implications, taking the capital city of Mozambique as a take-off point. Maputo is one of the most rapidly changing and diverse capital cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, while Mozambique represents one of the lowest-income but fastest growing economies on the continent (PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 2013; The Business Year, 2014; World Bank, 2014). Since the formal end of its post-independence civil war in 1992, the country - and its capital - have fully embraced a free-market economy and have hosted a growing portfolio of development aid agents, emergency and humanitarian assistance programs, and, since the discovery of natural gas offshore of the country's northern provinces, increasing foreign investment interests (Plank, 1993; Harrison, 2002; Pitcher, 2002; Warren-Rodríguez, 2008; Manning, 2015; Hanlon, 2017; Morton, 2019). Much of these outside interventions come in as investments in both economic and social infrastructures - from aid for health, education, and capacity building, through to loans for energy, roads, telecommunications, and water systems. The diversity of external interests in these systems , coupled with the central and local government's own efforts therein, make Maputo an ideal environment in which to explore how the mixture of the financial architecture behind urban development in lower-income urban environments across similar capital cities is shaping the distribution of material benefits from urban development and local governance therein. Toward this end, I leverage insights culled from 18 months of fieldwork in the Mozambican capital of Maputo over the period of 2009 to 2015, during which I conducted repeated, semi-structured interviews with 12 key informants within the municipal government administration, five officials working on urban development issues at the national level, and 13 foreign development professionals working across six major bilateral and multilateral organizations with long-term, active portfolios in Maputo city. In addition, I used extant data and analyses through 2019 on aid, foreign investment, and public finance, and complemented this with a spatial analysis of building footprints between 2000 and 2017 to present an in-depth case study of shifts across the urban landscape in Maputo during a period of extensive growth in physical investments. I present two arguments about Maputo's experience that are of wider relevance for other African capitals hosting diverse and growing foreign interests. First, I show that the physical footprint of the community of international development professionals and their foreign national private- sector counterparts is deepening an amenities divide between elite residents and the majority of the domestic population. This is because of the increasing density of international actors in the their capital city and living needs, as well as how those needs are treated by the public sector. In