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

Abstract

After 27 years of civil war, Angola entered the 21^st century as one of the most dynamic economies in the world. In a context of ‘infrastructures for resources’ policy, Luanda, its capital city, has been the first beneficiary of a veritable boom in the construction sector. This article explores the production of new housing patterns in the periphery of the city through the study of two housing projects located more than 20 kilometres from the central business district. Panguila is a relocation settlement for impoverished people evicted from the city centre; Kilamba City is marketed as a ‘New Centrality’ aimed at the emerging middle class. While of incommensurable scale and quality, both settlements illustrate the contradictions of the new forms of suburbanism produced in Luanda nowadays. Built on ethnographic material, the article reads the aspirations of Panguila and Kilamba City inhabitants against the official view on these settlements propounded by the National Reconstruction Programme. It shows that individual dreams of home ownership meet top-down attempts to discipline urban behaviours, while demonstrating that neither is reconciled with the pragmatism of practices on the ground. The article eventually suggests that new suburbs in Luanda represent less a rupture with previous urban patterns than they continue the production of a certain socio-spatial order.

Key words:

• Angola
• Luanda
• urban identities
• periphery
• suburbs
• urbanism
• discipline

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Sylvia Croese, Ricardo Cardoso and Konstantin Kastrissianakis for their comments and suggestions on a previous version of this article. I would also like to thank the reviewers and editors of African Studies for their useful comments. Final revision of the original paper received the support of a European Research Council Advanced Grant titled ‘Youth Experiences of Citizenship in Divided Societies: Between Cosmopolitanism, Nation, and Civil Society’ (ERC 295392).

Funding

This work was supported by the French Institute in South Africa (IFAS) and by the Major Collective Research Initiative ‘Global Suburbanims: Governance, Land, and Infrastructure in the 21st Century’ funded by the Canadian SSHRC at York University.

Notes on Contributor

Chloé Buire was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Urbanism & Built Environment Studies (CUBES) based at the University of the Witwatersrand at the time of this research. She is now a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University.

Notes

1. In 2012, Mercer, one of the agencies responsible for these rankings, had placed Tokyo on top of the list. Luanda has been in the top four for several years in a row, mainly due to the informalisation of the market that accompanied the civil war (Messiant 2008) and to the proportion of expatriates living on living allowances paid by their company (figures from homelessinternational.org). Human rights activism in Angola is represented by local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) occasionally supported by international networks like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International (Development Workshop, Omunga, SOS Habitat), and by the work of activists like Rafael Marques de Morais (makaangola.org) or the collective of youth called ‘A Central’ (centralangola7311.net).

2. After preliminary fieldwork in June 2009 and February 2011, I spent a total of nine months doing ethnographic fieldwork in Luanda between 2012 and 2013.

3. The method used here does not intend to provide a quantitatively representative sample of the inhabitants of a city whose population, estimated between five and eight million, has not been officially counted since the last colonial census of 1974.

4. Following local usage, I will refer to ‘the New City of Kilamba’ simply as ‘Kilamba’ in the rest of the text.

5. Roque notes the use of the word ‘atraso’ to qualify the musseques by opposition to the ‘development’ associated with the city. Atraso means both a delay (estar atrasado means being late), hence a certain developmental backwardness, but can also be said of someone with a mental disability (ser atrasado means being retarded).

6. All names have been changed.

7. A note on methodology: I spent four months following a family whose members are divided between a main family house close to the inner city and various new houses in Panguila. Living with them in the city, I regularly visited the relatives in Panguila on week-ends, getting to know the place, its history, and the way it was appropriated on the ground. I eventually spent a week in Panguila, interviewing residents, community representatives and the representative of the Ministry of Construction and Planning. My observations were complemented with an unpublished report submitted to the World Bank by the Angolan NGO Development Workshop (Development Workshop 2011).

8. Helena, Panguila, ITV, 29 October 2012.

9. Cecilia, field notes, November 2012.

10. Edna, in a relationship, two children, moved to Panguila around 2006 and bought her own house with her partner in 2011, ITV 30 October 12.

11. Ana, single, two children, her brother bought her a house in Panguila in 2011, 15 September 2012.

12. Despite the establishment of a multi-party democratic system in 1992, the MPLA that was in power at the time of the one-party regime and remained so since then is still commonly referred to as ‘the Party’.

13. Field notes, 29 October 2012.

14. Representative of the Ministry for Panguila, ITV 29 October 2012.

15. A notable exception to this general silence around housing scandals in Panguila is the online newspaper O País, which published various stories where three or four families are forced to share a singe house or where a person evicted from the city receives the key to a house already occupied (Sérgio 2010; Anonymous 2012; Bambi 2012a, 2012b).

16. A note on methodology: My work on Kilamba remains preliminary and is essentially based on informal conversations with the target-group of the project, i.e. young Angolan professionals well integrated in Luanda social fabric but without the means to own their house yet. These discussions took place both before and after the opening of Kilamba to public sales (2012–2013) and part of them happened through social networks like Facebook when I could not physically be present in Luanda.

17. JE dos Santos, Kilamba City inauguration speech (Angop 2011).

18. All figures regarding Kilamba are to be read as uncertain indicators. While the figures may be contested, the very fact that they are untraceable and the general confusion around the procedures are eloquent about the lack of transparency of the process to access the flats to this date.

19. See Marques de Morais 2011 for an insight into the intertwined networks that link Delta Imobiliaria to the national oil company Sonangol and other magnates of the regime. On the role of Sonangol and its branches in Angolan contemporary politics, see Soares de Oliveira 2007.

20. SONIP was created in 2011 to distribute houses on behalf of the Ministry of Construction and Planning. Its internal management has been re-organised in 2013 to face the pressing needs of Kilamba City.

21. These critics are widespread on the streets of Luanda even if not always published in the local media. They received a particular voice during the 7^th Architecture Forum held at University Lusíada de Angola in October 2012, when the president of the Architects' Society and the President of Kilamba City were invited to present the project that was still empty at the time. For a general overview on re-segregation processes in Luanda since the end of the war, see Udelsmann Rodrigues 2009.

22. This stereotypical portrayal is not based on quantitative inquiry but on the crossing of informal discussions both in Kilamba and in other parts of Luanda. I hope to be in a position to strengthen this account through further research in Luanda in the years to come.

23. Publication on Facebook, 21 February 2013.

24. Ibid.

25. Facebook page Moradores do Kilamba, description of the group.

26. Local authors indeed talk of mussequisation (see Udelsmann Rodrigues 2009; Roque 2011).

27. ITV 29 October 2012.