Cement citizens: housing, demolition and political belonging in Luanda, Angola

Gastrow, Claudia

doi:10.4324/9781351265645-6

Cited by 13 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…This is usually associated with a material and aesthetic formality in the sense of officially planned urban grids and access to public infrastructure such as sanitation, water and electricity. In contrast, the term musseque is associated with supposedly 'deviant' forms of urbanism, often described as 'disorganized', emphasizing the lack of aesthetic properties that accompany understandings of desirable urbanism (Gastrow 2017). However, these terms do not describe just physical attributes or location.…”

Section: Transnational Class-making and New City Building In Luandamentioning

confidence: 99%

Housing middle-classness: formality and the making of distinction in Luanda

Gastrow¹

2020

Africa

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As one of the primary personal sites of financial investment, expression and public performance, housing has stood at the centre of contemporary studies of class in Africa. This article adds to the existing literature on housing and class by exploring residents’ desires for formal housing in post-conflict Luanda, Angola. Luanda's residents increasingly believed that access to formal housing, not necessarily always legally but rather aesthetically defined, was a primary means of affirming middle-class status. By highlighting the links between class, urban formality and the state, the article argues that formal housing became a means for both the state and Luandans to produce middle-classness. Existing beliefs about comportment and urban aesthetics, which anchored subjective understandings of class in the house, intersected with a political economy in which the state played a central role in enabling access to new residences. As such, formality has become a key means through which middle-classness is transforming urban landscapes, opening up discussions about aesthetic belonging, financial stability and the role of the state in the making of Africa's middle classes.

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Section: Transnational Class-making and New City Building In Luandamentioning

confidence: 99%

Housing middle-classness: formality and the making of distinction in Luanda

Gastrow¹

2020

Africa

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“…Literature on state society relations in Angola, although with different outlooks, generally points to the existence of an authoritarian postcolonial elite of rent seekers maintaining a state system of clientelistic relationships by virtue of parallel and unofficial channels. 47 Although more recent work has shed light into trade-offs and informal relations of dependency between the elites, state institutions and the population in the maintenance of this system, 48 virtually all literature recognises the authoritarianism of the regime and the disenfranchisement of the ordinary population. Soares de Oliveira refers to the exclusion of the poor, a mindset that considers poverty unsightly and that has presided over the reorganisation of Luanda.…”

Section: The State the Povo And The Maanmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Memory of Concrete: Politics of Representation and Silence in the Agostinho Neto Memorial

Martins¹,

Cardina²

2019

Kronos

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Focusing on the Memorial António Agostinho Neto (MAAN) in Angola as the case study to analyse materialisations of memory, the article attempts to read the political representations of this monument by analysing its main narratives, questioning its silences and unpacking its impact on public memory. To do so, the article is divided into three parts. The first section engages with the relevant academic literature on southern African memorialisation and provides a brief description of the MAAN. The second and third sections consider Richard Werbner's notion of elite memorialism to produce a two-dimensional analysis, referencing the absence of MPLA narrative and symbols in the MAAN while noting how it became inaccessible to the ordinary Angolan population, a result of more ample dynamics of state society relations in the country. It concludes that the logics of social hierarchy that have promoted the marginalisation of segments of the population have impacted the MAAN's ability to contribute to the new ways Angolans are imagining the nation.

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“…Nor is the phenomenon unusual on the African continent (Falola & Okpeh 2008; Myers 2011) or globally (Doshi 2013; Harms 2013). More commonly, planned large-scale urban evictions in the global South are associated with, among other things, various projects of “improvement” and “upgrading,” and the creation of “new urban zones” (Harms 2013; Roy 2013; Collins 2016); with elite and middle-class “urban fantasies” of creating “world class cities” (Robinson 2002; Watson 2013); with projects of “accumulation through differentiated displacement” of elite-controlled “bulldozing states” (Doshi 2013; see also Gastrow 2017); and with the drive of neoliberal capitalist expansion more generally (Harvey 2003; Roy 2006). But they are equally part of more overt, manipulative, or sinister projects of political or economic exclusion driven by states or party-states, often with context-specific class, race, ethnic, or religious dimensions or even narrower party-political agendas (Hammar 2008; Yiftachel 2009).…”

Section: Locating New Mazwi In Zimbabwe’s Politics Of Displacementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Displacement and Resettlement in Zimbabwe: The Paradoxes of Propertied Citizenship

Hammar¹

2017

Afr. stud. rev.

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Abstract:This article examines what urban displacement and resettlement can reveal about the nature of, and co-constitutive relationships among, property, authority, and citizenship. It focuses on an unusual case in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where long-term illegal squatters living under constant threat of violent displacement by various local and national authorities were formally resettled by the Bulawayo City Council on peri-urban plots with houses. What surfaces are some of the paradoxes of propertied citizenship and of attaining seemingly “proper” lives in conditions of sustained marginality, a result that is not entirely unexpected when impoverished squatters are resettled far outside the frame of the city and its possibilities.

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Cement citizens: housing, demolition and political belonging in Luanda, Angola

Cited by 13 publications

References 1 publication

Housing middle-classness: formality and the making of distinction in Luanda

Housing middle-classness: formality and the making of distinction in Luanda

A Memory of Concrete: Politics of Representation and Silence in the Agostinho Neto Memorial

Urban Displacement and Resettlement in Zimbabwe: The Paradoxes of Propertied Citizenship

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