Angolan cities: Urban (re)segregation?

Angola's planned and unplanned urban growth: diamond mining towns in the Lunda Provinces

“…With the onset of the war, the mining cities' spatial and urban structure radically altered. Indeed, the population of the musseques shifted from the periphery into more central neighbourhoods, as observed in other Angolan cities (Rodrigues 2009). The civil war also triggered a massive exodus from the formal mining areas.…”

Intimate Encounters with the State in Post-War Luanda, Angola

“…Panguila redefined the borders of the city; it reshaped the relationship between centre and peripheries, and created new forms of socio-spatial differentiations through which the Monteiros would now navigate in order to access the state (Buire, 2014;Udelsmann Rodrigues, 2009 After Avo's death, the family designated Helena to take care of the house in Panguila. At the beginning, Helena's responsibility was simply to maintain the house and prevent its occupation by strangers as often happened at the time.…”

The Dream and the Ordinary: An Ethnographic Investigation of Suburbanisation in Luanda

“…In Luanda, the assumption of an irreducible opposition between 'the formal' and 'the informal' is best captured with the terms cidade (city) and musseques (place of red sand) in kimbundu. The historical core of the city built by the Portuguese colonisers mainly between the 1940s and 1970s is locally referred to as 'the city', a cidade, while the surrounding neighbourhoods that developed massively since the 1950s without ever being part of any master plans are called musseques (Robson & Roque 2001;Jenkins, Robson & Cain 2002;Oppenheimer & Raposo 2007;Udelsmann Rodrigues 2009). By asking city-dwellers what it means to live in the city or in the musseques, Sandra Roque (2011) shows that the idea of cidade as the only 'urbanised place' is not only related to the material assessment of infrastructures but goes with a profound disdain towards life in the musseques.…”