Podcast Summary:
New Books Network (Oct 31, 2025)
Guest: Dr. Claudia Gastrow
Host: Dr. Miranda Belcher
Book: The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (UNC Press Books, 2024)
Episode Overview
This episode features a deep-dive conversation with Dr. Claudia Gastrow, anthropologist and urbanist, about her new book exploring the intertwined histories, politics, and everyday lived experiences of Luanda, Angola, during and after its oil boom. The book uncovers how large-scale government initiatives and local, so-called "informal" communities both produce and contest ideas of what belongs in the city and who gets to belong. Through a focus on urban aesthetics—how people perceive, judge, and build their environments—Gastrow reveals how both state and citizen stake their claims in Luanda's contested urban space.
Key Discussion Points & Insights
1. Origins and Evolution of the Project
- Gastrow’s Background: South African-born anthropologist with a long-standing interest in cities as sites of political and social change.
- Initial Research Focus: Expected to examine postwar urban policy and issues of citizenship and state-society relations.
- Unexpected Discovery: Found that politics and belonging were often expressed through minute details—house designs, materials, and local judgments of “good” or “bad” urban aesthetics.
"I moved from ... a more obvious political, legal question about how does displacement affect people's understandings and experience of the state to something much more rooted in notions of desire, beauty, the built environment, judgments of disgust. To understand the question of belonging as a much broader category."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [11:47]
2. Fieldwork and Methodology
- Immersive Fieldwork: 1.5 years living in Luanda, focusing on "museqs" (self-built neighborhoods), supplemented by further short-term returns.
- Methods:
- Ethnographic immersion—collaborating with NGOs, local organizations, and spending extensive time with residents facing demolition or fearing displacement.
- Archival research—using municipal libraries and newspapers to reconstruct the city's history, particularly during the under-documented civil war.
- Visual analysis—collecting pamphlets and state materials, examining how government promoted new construction.
- Interviews—with both displaced citizens and surprisingly receptive state officials.
"I did get, I would say, almost 100% response rate from [state workers]... state representatives were actually quite invested in explaining why they thought what they were doing was actually, in the long run, the best thing for the city."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [16:30]
3. Museqs: Indigenous Urbanism & Marginality
- Rethinking Informality: Contrasts "museqs"—commonly labeled as “informal settlements” or “slums”—with the perspective that these are sites of deep-rooted, indigenous urbanism, not mere products of state neglect.
- Historical Continuity: Traces lineage from centuries-old building traditions and the lived experiences of freed and enslaved Africans to current marginalized urban areas.
- Politics of Belonging: Residents see themselves as urban autochthons—city-builders with historical legitimacy—yet are rendered marginal by state narratives and policy.
"...these areas were not an outcome of just poor planning. These areas actually were part of a long history of city building... and their practices of construction could be traced back... centuries."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [21:37]
4. The State, Oil Boom, and Urban Aesthetics as Politics
- Government’s Construction Drive: Postwar and oil-rich state prioritized high-visibility construction of infrastructure and housing to project stability, legitimacy, and care for citizens.
- Performance of Care and Comfort: State propaganda leveraged images of new buildings and promises of modern amenities to signal postwar recovery, hoping to legitimize its continued rule.
"Domestic and sensorial comfort were in fact, the ultimate sign of state care... the way that these images are presented and the kinds of projects being proposed are speaking to sort of domestic demands, historical demands about what makes people feel included in a state."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [28:17]
- Spectacle vs Substance: Many projects became spectacles ("oil spectacle") but often fell short in terms of improving everyday life, sometimes exacerbating uncertainty and danger for many.
5. Contradictions of Postwar Reconstruction
- From Safety to Insecurity: During war, government neglect allowed for self-construction and relative “security”; after the war, large-scale demolitions displaced thousands, creating a new, unexpected form of precarity for the urban poor.
- Legal Erosion: Laws stripped long-established dwellers of their rights, drastically increasing their vulnerability.
"...for people in museq areas... all that certainty at a legislative level, at kind of everyday level, at a neighborhood level just disappears. And so it becomes a site of incredible uncertainty and sort of danger..."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [38:32]
6. Aesthetics as Political Dissent
- Forms of Critique: In authoritarian contexts, direct dissent is risky, but criticism of building design (calling it “ugly” or “foreign”) emerges as a coded but potent form of protest.
- Foreignness and Exclusion: New state buildings, often built by foreign (notably Chinese) firms, are perceived as not designed for Angolans, deepening resentment and debates about belonging.
"To say that something was poorly designed was ultimately you saying, this government, the state doesn't know who to design things for, doesn't know what Angolans really want."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [44:14]
7. After the Oil Boom: Slowdown and Unfinished Dreams
- End of the Boom: Sharp drop in oil prices around 2014–2015 forced government projects to stall or remain unfinished, exposing the limits of dependency on resource-driven development.
- Perpetual Limbo: Many displaced people cannot return, and half-completed projects linger as reminders of both promise and loss.
"...these projects start to slow down because the government can't even get enough forex and foreign exchange to pay suppliers... a perpetual delay of the projects."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [51:35]
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
-
On everyday urbanism as political:
"My attention really got pulled to the ways in which these sort of broad scale political narratives... were being felt and critiqued through these very, at times, micro questionings about design and about the built environment."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [05:50] -
On displacement after the oil boom:
"For people in museq areas who had thought that if nothing else was certain, at least they would be left to... having built this home and having some location of certainty, that certainty gets removed from them."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [37:08] -
On unfinished projects:
"There's kind of this long, almost like morbid afterlife of these projects that were very destructive and then the money ran out, but people don't quite want to let go of them in very disturbing ways."
— Dr. Claudia Gastrow [52:15]
Highlighted Timestamps
| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:54–07:18 | Gastrow’s introduction & research trajectory | | 07:50–12:31 | Evolution from “citizenship” to “aesthetics of belonging” | | 12:55–17:45 | Fieldwork methodology & challenges in Luanda | | 18:35–25:27 | Museqs: indigenous urbanism and historical continuity | | 26:26–34:34 | Oil boom, government propaganda, and state legitimacy | | 35:03–39:57 | Paradox of increased danger postwar—rise of evictions | | 40:48–48:02 | Critique of government via building aesthetics (“ugly”/“foreign”)| | 48:45–52:51 | Collapse of oil revenue and unfinished government projects | | 53:23–56:56 | Gastrow’s new research directions |
Closing & Further Reading
Dr. Claudia Gastrow is continuing to explore the construction of state and belonging in African cities, both by delving into Angola’s socialist past and, in a new comparative study, analyzing the flow of international capital shaping urban landscapes in Nairobi.
Recommended:
The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (UNC Press, 2024) for anyone interested in urbanism, African studies, anthropology, or post-conflict societies.