Aesthetic Dissent: Urban Redevelopment and Political Belonging in Luanda, Angola

Abstract

Over the previous decade, African cities experienced a wave of frenzied construction driven by imaginations of world-city status. While these projects provoked new discussions about African urbanism, the literature on them has focused more on the paperwork of planning than actual urban experiences. This article addresses this lacuna by investigating residents' reactions to the post-conflict building boom in Luanda, Angola. I show that Luandans' held highly ambivalent orientations towards the emerging city. Their views were shaped by suspicions about pacts between Angolan elites and international capital that recapitulated longstanding tensions over national belonging. These concerns were voiced via discussions of the very aesthetics of the new city. Buildings became catalysts for expressions of dissent that put into question the very project of statedriven worlding. The paper therefore argues that the politics of aesthetics are central to grasping the contested understandings of urbanism currently emerging in various African cities.

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation, Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

“…Some have also expressed their concern about the new scramble for Africa (Carmody ; Scholvin ; Southall and Melber ) and the ways in which the recent engagement of other emerging economies like Brazil, India and China is not necessarily in the best interest of Africa (Taylor ). Meanwhile the literature that has examined efforts to make African cities world‐class and destinations for global investment have highlighted the ways in which spatial inequality is exacerbated (Watson ) and low‐income urban inhabitants’ complex relationship with the aesthetics of world‐class urban projects (de Boeck ; Gastrow ). Thus, while there is rapidly emerging scholarship on the broader topic of “Africa Rising”, there is a paucity of literature on the ways in which the “Africa Rising” discourse impacts upon popular culture and identity.…”

“…(Chinwe Ohajuruka) 8 The presence of the African man dining, and at the centre, in the midst of an allwhite crowd is a re-write. He is not a monster, nor is he belated-he is on time and apparently beloved and desired, no longer alienated (Fanon 1967). He is chatting happily with two white women; the white man, who is also present at the table, does not seem threatened, nor is he trying to protect the white women.…”

“…I then connect the "Africa Rising" narrative to the SOA perfume and offer my initial interpretations of the perfume as both a counternarrative to Afropessimist discourses and reproduction of colonial discourses. I next focus on a re-reading of the commercial by arguing that the advertisement challenges panoptical time (McClintock 1995) through the use of scent and re-writes the narratives that position the African man as a belated monster (Fanon 1967) and that locate progress on the African woman's body. I then posit that the presence of the white gaze is an "unhappy technology" (Dosekun 2016) of Afropolitan Imagineering that serves to disrupt the historically privileged invisibility of the white gaze (McClintock 1995).…”

Peri-Urban Land Governance in Developing Countries: Understanding the Role, Interaction and Power Relation Among Actors in Tanzania

“…In Africa, it was estimated that the urban population would rise from 400 million people in 2010 to 1.26 billion in 2050, with cities such as Johannesburg, Khartoum, Casablanca and Dar es Salaam reaching a population of ten million inhabitants (Sow 2015). Ethiopian urban population is estimated to grow by 4.3% annually and increase by half a million every year (Adam 2014), while Luanda in Angola was noted as urbanising at a terrific rate (Mabin et al 2013;Gastrow 2017). Statistics however, show that Africa remains least urbanised globally (UNACTAD 2017).…”

‘One beer, one block’: concrete aspiration and the stuff of transformation in a Mozambican suburb

“…The cement industry even refers to sub‐Saharan Africa as ‘the last cement frontier’ (Zunga & Lopes‐Pinto ), and speaks of cement as the continent's ‘new oil’ (Hill & Hill ). Fuelling this consumption, alongside the spectacular projects of futuristic satellite cities, shopping malls, tower blocks, and ring roads (De Boeck ; Gastrow ; Pedersen & Nielsen ), are the millions of small domestic construction projects increasingly visible on the landscape, especially the peri‐urban landscape. The expanding suburb of Inhapossa in southern Mozambique is a case in point.…”