Crumbling modernisms: Luanda architectonic utopias after the boom

Abstract

In Luanda maybe more than elsewhere, controlling the city landscape is synonymous with controlling the polity at large. Despite a tremendous political change in Angola during the twentieth century, the paper traces how the modernist plans elaborated in the late colonial period (1945–1975) have influenced the planning imagination of Luanda until today. It argues that the construction boom that reshaped Luanda at the end of the war in 2002 can be interpreted as a modernist promise to break the middle class free from a hopeless urban fabric by promoting a specific urban aesthetic rather than facilitating social transformation. These continuities are, however, complex and fragile. What happens when the utopia of a city under control starts to lose power? Reflecting on two urban projects built around half a century apart, this paper explores how the kinesthetic experience of the city might constitute an unexpected form of ideological dissent able to disrupt modernism at large. The trajectory of Kilamba City, in particular, is the epitome of the oil-fed reconstruction frenzy of the late 2000s that brutally ended in 2014. Looking at how residents, planners and even state media relate to this project suggests that the unsustainability of a utopian suburban life eventually triggers new political subjectivities and directly challenges the modernist ideology that endured for so long.