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

Abstract

Since the end of the war in 2002, Luanda has become an iconic site of urban transformation in the context of a particularly entrenched oligarchic regime. In practice however, urban dwellers are often confronted with a 'deregulated system' that fails to advance a coherent developmental agenda. The paper narrates the trajectory of a family forcibly removed from the old city to the periphery. It shows how citydwellers experience the control of the party-state through a series of encounters with authority across the city. Questioning the intentionality of a state that appears at the same time omnipotent and elusive, openly violent and subtly hegemonic, the paper reveals the fine mechanisms through which consent is fabricated in the intimacy of the family.

The optimistic utopia: sacrifice and expectations of political transformation in the Angolan Revolutionary Movement

“…), both from other political parties and within the ruling party itself, as well as its traditional totalising control of the mainstream media within their reiterated ambition of promoting what has been called the ‘New Angola’ (Schubert 2017) – the top‐down imposition of a utopia of a modern, oil and diamond‐fuelled country that evolved from a Marxist‐Leninist, Soviet agenda in the 1970s to a neoliberal Dubai‐inspired regime in the 2000s. Thus the early independent, ‘revolutionary utopia’ of the 1960s and 1970s (as the Angolan novelist Pepetela once famously put it), imbued with an inherently optimistic socialist ontology, eventually became, through ‘depoliticizing tactics’ (Péclard 2013; Schubert 2017) that consistently produced a refraction between state and citizenship (Tomás 2012; Buire 2018), one of fear, resignation and fatalism for a majority of Angolans. While the optimistic stance that stems from the officialist New Angola narrative is still operative in the local public space, it is countered with a growing acknowledgement of its phantasmagorical character, exemplified in the regime’s muscular tactics of repression of dissent (e.g.…”

“…1960s and 1970s (as the Angolan novelist Pepetela once famously put it), imbued with an inherently optimistic socialist ontology, eventually became, through 'depoliticizing tactics' (Péclard 2013;Schubert 2017) that consistently produced a refraction between state and citizenship (Tomás 2012;Buire 2018), one of fear, resignation and fatalism for a majority of Angolans. While the optimistic stance that stems from the officialist New Angola narrative is still operative in the local public space, it is countered with a growing acknowledgement of its phantasmagorical character, exemplified in the regime's muscular tactics of repression of dissent (e.g.…”

Not So Much about Informality: Emergent Challenges for Urban Planning and Design Education

“…How can the quality of life be improved if the global economy depends on low salaries to compensate for the costs of the distance between production and markets? How can slums be reduced if people are being evicted from city centres, like in post-war Luanda [63], due to the massive global investments in real estate in the city centre? Structurally speaking, change occurs by intertwining these various levels.…”

“…In fact, countries where informality flourishes are at peace and experiencing economic growth. In this case, the gentrification of central urban areas is contributing to the expulsion of old residents to the periphery, where they can only find affordable houses on the informal market [63]. The more integrated these aspects are in future approaches, where the urban fabric is not only addressed as the result of physical form, the better students will be prepared for future planning and design challenges when it comes to informality.…”

IT-Oriented Infrastructural Development, Urban Co-Dependencies, and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Politics in Pune, India

“…While considering the exclusionary nature of the initial sovereign action involved in the establishment of these new spaces of capital, this article goes on to emphasise the need to move beyond, and understand the complex 'afterlives' of these 'globalised' infrastructural spaces-through the reconfigured materialities, changing power relationships and everyday micropolitical cultures that scaffold them. Contrary to their fabled depiction in studies of global urbanisms, neither the state nor (global) capital are overarching, monolithic units "that can be seized 'outside' ordinary social life" (Buire, 2018(Buire, , p. 2223.…”