Part of review forum on “The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda.”

Claudia Gastrow’s The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda explores one of the most consequential transformations taking place across the African continent in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the significant increase in people moving to and residing in cities, and the expansion of cities. Following the cessation of decades of civil conflict, Luanda experienced tremendous growth and circulation of wealth amidst an oil boom. Increased urbanization has shaped contestations around access to land, housing, money, and other economic resources, as well as governance, belonging, and environmental sustainability. The Aesthetics of Belonging touches upon all these themes through asking the following questions: Who belongs in the city? What forms of built environments, specifically housing, constitute a desirable form of urbanism? Who has the legitimacy to ask these questions and determine the responses? When, how, and why do contestations around these factors burst onto the scene and what is at stake?

Flush with “petrodollars” and foreign partnerships, Gastrow argues, state actors under the presidency of José Eduardo sought to construct a modern cityscape of high rise buildings, an airport, stadiums, and expansive housing projects to represent Luanda as a cosmopolitan city in an era in which megacities were springing up in Africa and elsewhere. These projects entailed the raising and destruction of musseques, so-called “informal housing,” built by Luanda’s poor inhabitants in expanding neighborhoods with materials ranging from concrete to iron. Cycles of removal, demolition, construction, reconstruction, and rehousing—often tinged with violence—ignited political debates and varied forms of individual and collective protest by Luanda’s poor for the right to remain in structures and neighborhoods they had built. Gastrow argues that “aesthetics,” “oil aesthetics” and “aesthetic politics”—meaning the design, materials, architecture of built environments—characterized how state and nonstate actors debated power and infrastructure in Luanda. Ordinary residents, Gastrow shows, articulated a conception of a “moral economy of materiality,” ideas about their right to construct homes and own property according to their tastes and sensibilities as fixing them to Luanda.

In five concise and elegantly written chapters, The Aesthetics of Belonging narrates life and loss in Luanda’s musseques based on multiple sources. It centers individual stories collected via ethical ethnographic research, analyzes images of homes, other structures, and maps, interprets video sources, and examines documents such as archival urban plans and government documents. Chapters One and Two outline the state’s vision of the construction of “the new Luanda” and justifications for demolition and removal. Chapter Three details individual and neighborhood experiences of demolition, compensation, and loss, effectively ensconcing these stories in the emotional landscape of those who expressed trauma amidst the macropolitics of the state’s evocation of the law.

In innovatively arguing for the concept of aesthetics as central to understanding lived experiences and political imagination of urbanism in Luanda and weaving this term throughout the book, Gastrow identifies multiple meanings of aesthetics. This includes but is not limited to: aesthetic regime, aesthetic criteria, utopian aesthetic, aesthetic inequality, aesthetic spectacle, aesthetic descent, aesthetic judgment, elite aesthetic, and aesthetic belonging. Gastrow defines aesthetics as “both the material aspects of buildings and infrastructure such as design, form, appearance, and architectural features and analytical understanding of the term as defined by almost unconscious judgments based on sensuous engagement with the world.” In the book’s latter Chapters Four and Five, aesthetics as both material and analytical show up as longings for comfort and nice things as articulated by residents of musseques. Luanda’s displaced residents and those under the threat of displacement articulate that paved roads, flush toilets, clean water, and electricity should be available in their neighborhoods as basic human rights. These chapters bring alive the embodied experience of living in and traversing Luanda’s musseques, akin to how Ayi Kwei Armah evoked the sights, sounds, and smells of Accra in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

The Aesthetics of Belonging is part of a new wave of studies of urbanity in pre-colonial, colonial, and today’s Africa that respond to Ato Quayson’s call in Oxford Street, Accra call for scholars to go to “the streets” to better understand and narrate the multifaceted experiences and visions of urbanism in Africa. In centering life, loss, community, and worldmaking from Luanda’s musseques, The Aesthetics of Belonging has showcased how beauty can be seen from the eyes of varied beholders.