Since the end of colonial rule in Africa and other parts of the so-called “third world countries,” Africans have sought to renegotiate their colonialized spaces—land, labor, and urban environments—by reexamining the aesthetic qualities that should define an African city. This remapping of African city aesthetics is not just a technical exercise, it is a postcolonial decolonization effort aimed at dismantling what colonial authorities once called “European” and “native” spaces. Angola, a former Portuguese colony that gained independence in 1975 and experienced a destructive civil war, saw the large-scale demolition of houses in its capital, Luanda. These demolitions targeted structures labeled “cabanas de chapa” (corrugated iron shacks) and musseques.
The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) believes that urban and political belonging are fundamentally shaped by ingrained aesthetic orientations rooted in urban materialities that distinguish and categorize who and what can be included in the city (2). While there was an urgent need to address the “seemingly intractable problems of the African cities” (3), the state’s reliance on the oil boom as the primary mechanism for urban transformation ultimately worked against the material and social realities of the musseques—long-standing sites of Indigenous urbanism. What emerged instead was a form of “cut-and-paste” urbanism (177), detached from local histories and practices.
Claudia Gastrow’s The Aesthetics of Belonging explores how aesthetics mediate political belonging in Luanda during the country’s postconflict oil boom. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Gastrow examines state policies and programs related to aesthetics, dissent, and public life under the MPLA governments of José Eduardo dos Santos and João Lourenço. Her central argument is that aesthetics are not neutral; they actively structure inclusion and exclusion, reshaping what counts as “Indigenous urbanism,” which, in Luanda, is located in the musseques, often dismissed as “informal areas” (2).
Following the demolition of musseques and the influx of oil revenues in the early 2000s, the Angolan state launched an ambitious program of “national reconstruction” to rebuild a country devastated by decades of war (3). While these projects disproportionately displaced lower-class residents, Gastrow demonstrates that they were primarily designed to satisfy the consumer demands of elites, international corporations, and an emerging middle class. Land and housing became sites of intense negotiation, as concrete-block, self-built homes competed for space and legitimacy. These struggles were not merely about infrastructure; they were contests over the very conditions under which urban belonging could be claimed. Residents of neighborhoods such as Iraque and Baghdad, for instance, expressed pride in the corrugated iron houses they constructed, complicating state narratives of urban deficiency. In this sense, Luanda’s redevelopment reflects broader global tensions over urban renewal, dispossession, and belonging.
The discovery of oil as Angola’s primary revenue source deepened social and political divisions. Gastrow shows that the oil boom created a “culture of immediatism,” where the pursuit of quick wealth and the symbolic power of consumption transformed everyday life. Although the boom provided jobs, it also led to a political elite that invested oil profits in lavish lifestyles in cities like Cape Town, Lisbon, and Dubai. Encouraged by the MPLA, this pattern of wealth accumulation contributed to poor management and an overreliance on private developers to build elite urban spaces. In her final chapter, Gastrow argues that even after the oil crash of the mid-2000s, these patterns continued, revealing deeper changes in the aesthetic and political life of Luanda.
Chapter Five offers one of the book’s most compelling interventions through the concept of “aesthetic dissent.” Gastrow illustrates this through the example of Yvette, an Angolan-Portuguese urban planner, showing that dissent is not simply about expanding existing aesthetic categories but about fundamentally reworking the conditions under which recognition itself becomes possible. Drawing on Heather Dorries’s formulation of indigeneity as a “political relation,” Gastrow situates Indigenous urbanism within architectural and spatial practices. In Luanda, she argues, urban Indigeneity is not fixed but emerges relationally through everyday engagements with space, where musseques embody “a relational identity of personhood” (11). Yet, under a dominant “Western model” (149), state and private developers imposed aesthetic standards tied to “design, form, appearance, and architectural features,” marginalizing these alternative urban forms.
Indigeneity in Luanda, therefore, must be understood through social and political interactions shaped by Portuguese colonial deprivation of infrastructure, resources, and rights. Colonial planning imagined Luanda as a city that would stand in opposition to “traditional African practices and identities” (69–72), effectively erasing the historical entanglements of race, class, and belonging embedded in musseque life. Gastrow’s analysis exposes how this erasure persists in postcolonial urban projects. Her concept of “the aesthetics of class” (Chapter Four) captures how infrastructure, social services, and notions of comfort are distributed along class lines in the capital. Importantly, she moves beyond treating musseques as spaces of lack or underdevelopment, instead situating them within longer histories of African labor, settlement, and urban life. As she notes in Chapter Two, residents actively build concrete-block homes and, in doing so, produce “an Indigenous urbanism.”
The Aesthetics of Belonging stands as a significant contribution to the study of postconflict urbanism, the built environment, and the politics of space in Africa. Gastrow demonstrates that national reconstruction projects in Luanda failed to recognize the aesthetic and political legitimacy of musseque life, even though these spaces have long coexisted within the city. While grounded in Angola, the book pushes historians, sociologists, and geographers to rethink the histories of planning and the making of the “new city” across African contexts.
