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

Oct 31, 2025

Claudia Gastrow is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Urbanism, focusing on Angolan urbanism. She discusses how Luanda’s transformation post-civil war was undermined by mass demolitions that disregarded local building traditions, known as musseques. Gastrow emphasizes how aesthetics influence belonging and political claims. She highlights critiques of the government's foreign-inspired designs as a form of dissent. The conversation also touches on the impact of oil price fluctuations and the future of urban planning in Angola.

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INSIGHT

Belonging Is Aesthetic And Embodied

Claudia Gastrow reframed citizenship questions into the broader issue of belonging tied to urban aesthetics and material design.
She shows people signal belonging through judgments of beauty, materials, and embodied sensory experiences of the city.

ANECDOTE

Immersive, Cross-Scale Fieldwork

Gastrow spent a year and a half living in Luanda doing immersive fieldwork across musseques and archival research in the municipal library.
She combined interviews with residents, NGO workers, and nearly 100% response interviews with state planners to map competing city visions.

INSIGHT

Musseques As Indigenous Urbanism

Musseques are historically continuous, skilled sites of incremental housebuilding with artisanal industries and deep urban roots.
Gastrow argues they constitute an indigenous urbanism wrongly framed as informal or unurban by planners.

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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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