Centralized Clientelism, Real Estate Development and Economic Crisis:The case of postwar Luanda

ABSTRACT

The article explores the role of Luanda's property and real estate development within the postwar Angolan system of centralized clientelism, drawing on the political settlements theory applied to urban analysis. It argues that profit-driven urban policies were fundamental to ensure Angola's political stability but detrimental to its development, leaving behind financial distress and a splintered urban landscape, which is a significant impediment to pursuing a much-needed economic structural change. The tensions in the urban realm between factions of the recent power reconfiguration constitute a fertile terrain to explore the relationship between political regimes and urban transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Luanda
• centralized clientelism
• political settlements
• real estate development and economic crisis

Conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The research for this paper was partially conducted under Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship at the Special Program for Regional and Urban Studies at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT, and, as a part of the doctoral research at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, The author would like to thank the comments of Neil Brenner, António Tomás, Bish Sanyal, Zoe Marks, Silvia Viegas and Silvia Jorge to the initial drafts, as well as the two anonymous reviewers.

2. With the exceptions of South Africa and Ethiopia.

3. Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola.

4. União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola.

5. Mainly China, Brazil, South Africa, Israel, and Portugal (Soares De Oliveira, 2015, pp. 249–260).

6. A public-private partnership between the Ministry of Finance, the Provincial Government, and Prado-Valladares – a real estate developer connected to the Brazilian construction company Oderbrecht.

7. Alves da Rocha, Interview Angolense, Jun 05 2010, p. 14. (quoted after Tomás, 2012, p. 110).

8. Recently it was reported the involvement of the National Social Security Institute (INSS) in some real estate ventures, although not in the cases here described (De, 2020a, 2020b).

9. I have consulted several property deeds wherein one day, a nationalized plot was sold at a meager price and a couple of weeks later presented as collateral.

10. For instance, the reinforcement of a power station was channeled to the Gika Complex.

11. I participated in these processes. See also Jornal De Angola (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miguel Dias

Miguel Dias holds a BArch and a MArch from the University of Porto,and is currently a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Architecture at the Univesity of Johannesburg, conducting research about public housing in Africa. He was a Humphrey Fellow at the Special Program for Urban Studies and Planning at Massassachussets Institute of Technology. He was a former senior advisor at GTRUCS a governmental agency in charge of one of Luanda's major urban renewal projects.