In the Skin of the City: spatial transformation in Luanda, by António Tomás, traces, in an innovative fashion, four centuries of urban shifts in the Angolan capital city, from the first slave trade-related precolonial fortifications to the post-independence era (1975 onwards), including the urban sprawl driven by the prolonged civil war (1975–2002). The latter also comprises the first waves of urban expansion beyond the centre–periphery dichotomy, as in the cases of Luanda Sul and Kilamba centrality (2000–2010s).

However, the reader should not expect a linear, Cartesian historical narrative of one of the most populous cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Inspired by the work of the artist António Ole, Tomás prioritizes what he calls the ‘skins of the city’ as his object of analysis. These ‘skins’ are border surfaces that promote material and symbolic segregation in the city over time. Building on Roberto Esposito’s concept of Immunitas – and perhaps also influenced by Olivier de Sardan’s accounts of the semi-permeable membranes that separate public and private spheres in African bureaucracies – Tomás proposes to consider the permeable nature of these instances of separation, for, like any skin, they allow fluids and materials, objects and individuals to flow through. Hence, the ‘skin of the city’ allows the author to escape from simplistic analysis, which reduces the complexity of facts, to adopt a manifold perspective that reveals how these ‘skins’ operate across Luanda’s history. The so-called ‘asphalt border’, for example, which in colonial times separated the settlers’ formal city from the informal settlements of the indigenous people, could be crossed by the presence of white settlers who lived in musseques (slums). At each historical juncture, different elements shaped these urban ‘skins’. During the colonial period, such elements included the fort, the street, the neighbourhood and modernist apartment blocks. Following post-war national reconstruction, they emerged as new urban centralities, urbanizações (‘social’ housing developments), the State Land Reserve and urban planning legislation. Rather than being interested in studying the bodies that fit into each space, Tomás sets out to analyse the construction of these ‘skins’, their negotiations and dissolutions. The idea of the book is to explain the city through its margins rather than explain what the city separates. And rather than thinking of these edges as static, the author wants to approach them sociologically.

The book is divided into a deeply theoretical introduction and three sections – ‘Formation’, ‘Stasis’ and ‘Fragmentation’ – each composed of two chapters. Although Tomás does not claim to be a Lefebvrian, it is possible to identify a regressive–progressive movement in his methodology when analysing the ‘skins of the city’. In ‘Formation’, for instance, the author begins with the recognition that remnants of the city’s slave-owning past persist in the built environment – a heritage that Angolan society seeks to forget and appears to repudiate by demolishing slave trade sobrados (housing). From this starting point, Tomás undertakes a temporal progression, adding other historical elements that resulted in new spatial and social divisions during colonial times and since independence. In ‘Stasis’, it is by crossing the ‘asphalt border’, during the popular appropriation and nationalization of the colonial built stock, that the author narrates the early constitution of the ‘right to the city’. During a more contemporary period, in ‘Fragmentation’, Tomás shows how legislation creates a market moving forward from the dichotomy of ‘city of the asphalt–city of the musseques’.

The book also innovates in the sources it chooses for data collection. Beyond consulting Angolan and Portuguese archives, analysing documents, plans and legislation, or undertaking interviews with key players, the research methods are enriched by wanderings in the public space and autobiographical resources – memories of his own childhood and adolescence, records of time perceived by the author through his own body. It required a deep knowledge of the city to be able to navigate the nuances of history and to identify, in time and space, those ‘invisible skins’ that divide the city at each historical moment.

Tomás does not cover the period of more recent transformations in Luanda, notably those transforming the territory in the aftermath of the oil boom (2014 onwards), materializing recent private-led capital flows from countries such as Brazil, China and even Angola. This makes one wonder how the concept of ‘skin’ would apply when new areas begin to be developed by the market outside the borders of state reserves, far from access to basic infrastructure. In other words, how to perceive new developments that arise for the consumption of a capitalized population in areas previously destined for indigenous settlements.

In the Skin of the City offers a critical analysis of Luanda’s historical transformations and serves as a valuable resource for researchers interested in African cities, urbanism, urban anthropology and political science, providing key insights into the evolving urban and social fabric of the Angolan capital.