Luanda continues to offer much to learn from. Through a rich and carefully argued ethnography of the Angolan capital, The Aesthetics of Belonging equips us with invaluable tools for understanding the practices, power struggles and contestations through which cities and urban life are produced in contemporary Africa. At the core of the book is a refusal to treat the city as a mere backdrop to social life. Instead, Claudia Gastrow approaches Luanda, its manifold materialities and their varied aesthetic orientations as generative forces in the shaping of political worlds. This is both an ethnographic account and a theoretical intervention: it reflects her own intellectual trajectory over more than a decade of sustained engagement with the city while positioning the book in dialogue with longstanding traditions of urban theory that have historically marginalized African cities as empirical exceptions rather than sources of theoretical insight. Not only do we learn a great deal about Luanda, but we also gain an insight into something fundamental about the urban condition. We come to recognize the ‘multiple registers of aesthetic belonging’ (p. 10) that lie at the heart of urban life in Africa and far beyond.
Grounded in fieldwork conducted during and after the Angolan oil boom of the 2000s and early 2010s, and attentive to the longer histories that precede it, the book’s five core chapters trace how oil-fuelled material transformations turned aesthetics into a key terrain through which political belonging was both constituted and contested. While state and private investors converged around a new aesthetic consensus, Gastrow shows that everyday forms of dissent emerged in its wake. Following this tension across multiple domains – from the state’s politicization of aesthetics in post-conflict reconstruction (Chapter 1), to residents’ practices of occupation and construction (Chapter 2) and the moral economy of materiality shaping understandings of belonging (Chapter 3), then to the infrastructural differentiation of class (Chapter 4) and, ultimately, to dissent articulated through aesthetic critique (Chapter 5) – the analysis focuses on a period of rapid urban transformation marked by large-scale redevelopment, speculation and the destruction of existing neighbourhoods and livelihoods. Indeed, demolition emerges here not as an unfortunate side effect of oil-fuelled development but as a constitutive practice through which urban order, visibility and value are produced. In this sense, as residents who had lived through demolitions urged Gastrow to make public, ‘the “new Luanda” was built on the destruction of lives, families, and futures’ (p. 99).
Yet The Aesthetics of Belonging is far from reducing Luanda to a narrative of loss. One of its central contributions is its sustained engagement with the musseques, the self-built neighbourhoods where the majority of Luandans live. Rather than treating these areas as informal, provisional or awaiting incorporation into a future city, Gastrow reframes them as expressions of what she calls Indigenous Black urbanism. This concept allows her to challenge dominant urban imaginaries that position musseques – and many of the neighbourhoods that constitute cities across the continent – as marginal or deficient, instead presenting them as foundational sites of urban production. In her account, the musseques are not remnants of a pre-urban past, but forerunners of the city: places where residents have long assembled the material and infrastructural conditions that make urban life possible. At the heart of this argument is a close examination of the spatialities, place-making traditions and construction processes through which musseque houses have been – and continue to be – built, as well as the ways in which residents articulate claims to recognition and belonging through them. As Gastrow asserts, as ‘the elementary units of the city’, musseque houses ‘called the city into being and with it generated the grounds for political dissensus during the oil boom’ (p. 95).
Against the world-city aesthetic consensus of the new Luanda – while still yearning for its promises of comfort – the Indigenous Black urbanism of the musseques foregrounds aesthetic regimes rooted in centuries of fugitive settlement and construction. These regimes neither reject modernity outright nor uncritically embrace it. Instead, The Aesthetics of Belonging shows how Luandans navigate emerging urban worlds through ambivalence and negotiation, complicating binary accounts of resistance and collaboration. In Luanda, Gastrow suggests, ‘the relationship to new urban worlds is not one of absolute embrace or rejections, just as politics is not defined by total collaboration or total resistance’ (p. 169). What emerges, then, is not a romantic celebration of the musseque but a compelling call to take seriously the political and aesthetic worlds forged within spaces long dismissed as provisional.
By foregrounding the material histories and aspirations embedded in musseque construction, The Aesthetics of Belonging invites scholars and practitioners to rethink how urban futures might be imagined when we embrace the ‘narratives and plots winding through the city’ (p. 181) rather than elite visions of order and modernity. In doing so – and speaking as both a planner and a student of Luanda – the book not only sheds new light on the Angolan capital and its specific processes of urbanization but also opens up broader conversations about Indigenous and Black urbanisms across the globe, reminding us that the grounds for planning more just cities often lie latent in the very spaces most routinely erased by dominant planning imaginaries.
