The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-boom Luanda

Описание: ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr. Claudia Gastrow is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on processes of city-making in Central, Southern and Eastern Africa, exploring how materials, objects and design can illuminate our understanding of the making of political imaginaries and contemporary capitalism. Her book, The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Making in Oil-Boom Luanda (UNC Press, 2024) investigates the relationships between politics, aesthetics, and the built environment in urban Angola. Her work has appeared in City and Society, Antipode, and Africa, among other places. She currently serves as an associate editor for the African Studies Review and as a board member of the African Studies Association. Her new projects explore Cuban-Angolan collaboration in urban planning and architecture in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the afterlives of South African sub-imperialism and racial imaginaries through processes of urban financialization in East Africa and the Indian Ocean.

ABOUT THE TALK
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From 2002 until about 2014, Angola underwent a petrodollar fueled post-conflict national reconstruction program, characterized by large-scale state investments in infrastructure and housing. Focused on Luanda, Angola’s capital, The Aesthetics of Belonging explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. As government infrastructure projects became catalysts of both displacement and inclusion, forms of aesthetic dissent unexpectedly emerged from the materials, architectures and historical construction practices of the city’s self-built neighborhoods. Tracing the ambiguous experiences of new city-building in contemporary Africa, the book shows how widely circulating assumptions about what constitute desirable urban aesthetic forms have hindered possibilities of imagining not only more equitable cities, but more democratic polities.