Claudia Gastrow, "The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda" (UNC Press Books, 2024)

Oct 31, 2025

Claudia Gastrow, an anthropologist and assistant professor at North Carolina State University, delves into the urban transformation of Luanda, Angola, after the civil war. She discusses how the post-war rebuilding efforts, fueled by oil wealth, often neglected the intrinsic value of informal neighborhoods, or musseques. Gastrow highlights the aesthetic dissent that emerged in response to government designs, framing local urbanism as a form of political critique. As she reflects on the impact of halted development projects, she raises questions about the future of these communities.

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INSIGHT

Belonging Is Material And Sensory

Belonging in Luanda is experienced through the built environment, not only formal legal citizenship markers.
Aesthetic judgments about design, materials, and comfort register political inclusion or exclusion.

ANECDOTE

Immersive, Mixed-Method Fieldwork

Gastrow conducted 18 months of immersive fieldwork across musseques, NGOs, and state offices in Luanda.
She combined interviews, archives, photographs, and planners' pamphlets to map competing urban narratives.

INSIGHT

Musseques As Indigenous Urbanism

Musseques are products of centuries of local building practices and house-building industries, not mere disorder.
Reframing them as indigenous urbanism challenges planners' normative idea of a 'proper' city.

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After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola’s capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program—in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate—involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda’s existing “informally” constructed neighborhoods, or musseques.

The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Dr. Claudia Gastrow’s archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Dr. Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous—a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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