In the United States, suburbanization on the peripheries of cities from Detroit to Birmingham is linked to the rise of the middle class. Similarly, cities in the developing world appear to be replicating this process as the outskirts grow faster than the cores.1 In sub-Saharan Africa, new suburban upper- and middle-class “landscapes of privilege” are sprouting up across the continent.2 At the same time, governments from South Africa to Angola have embarked on social housing provision on city peripheries as well.
Several distinct features of suburbanization in Africa differentiate it from the United States and Europe. First, unlike the compartmentalization of residential and commercial spaces evident in Europe and the United States, these spaces are often interlaced and interwoven on the peripheries of Africa’s rapidly growing cities. Although the initial purpose of a new suburb may be simply to provide housing, other activities such as beauty salons, small supermarkets, and street traders hawking cigarettes and SIM cards will likely appear within months after construction. Second, older suburban spaces are rapidly transforming from single-story, colonial buildings to the high-rises of today, while new residential or industrial developments contribute to emerging suburban centers beyond the city core. Third, as in China, the state (increasingly in partnership with the private sector) is often a central actor in shaping suburban growth, for instance, through the financing and design of suburbs for the purpose of relocating middle class as well as poor residents out of rapidly reconfiguring city centers.3
The suburbanization of Luanda, the capital of Angola, exemplifies the larger processes occurring across Africa. Heterogeneous suburbs increasingly characterize Luanda’s landscape, radiating north, south, and east from the city’s historic center on Africa’s west coast. A decade ago, Luanda’s suburbs largely consisted of sprawling informal settlements—musseques—that were the result of an influx of displaced people from the countryside, owing to a long period of civil conflict following independence in 1975. Replicating the pattern seen in cities of other developing countries, there was little urban planning, or property and land management, in these areas during the war. The construction industry collapsed, and investment in the maintenance of the colonial housing stock or the construction of new houses came to a standstill. (fig. 5.9.1)
Considered a safe haven during the war, the capital of Luanda saw its urban population grow from approximately 500,000 residents at independence to over 3 million inhabitants by 2002. Since the end of the war, this growth has continued unabated, reaching 6.5 million out of a total population in Angola of 24.4 million by 2014.4 Between 2005 and 2010, estimates indicate that average urban growth of 5.79 percent per year in Luanda was higher than in any other southern African city.5 Luanda is currently the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Africa after Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa, and Johannesburg. The pressure that population growth has put on the city’s precarious infrastructure and services means that 75 percent of city dwellers still live in unplanned informal housing and depend on the informal sector for their survival.6
Following the end of the war in 2002, political stability and an economic boom have attracted a growing number of skilled, educated foreigners and contributed to an emerging Angolan urban middle class. Until recently, increasing levels of oil production in Angola coupled with a rise in global oil prices from 2002 to 2008 and again from 2010 to 2014 allowed the government to rely on oil revenues to invest in housing and public infrastructure projects as part of postwar reconstruction. In an effort to improve urban living conditions and to address a substantial housing backlog in the context of massive urban growth, the government pledged in 2008 to build one million houses across the country.7 Over the past few years, an assemblage of international and national private-sector actors have arisen to acquire land, plan developments, undertake construction, and conclude real estate transactions.
The presence of Chinese companies and workers in housing investment and construction is particularly noteworthy, but other foreign companies are also engaged in urban and suburban development. More than fifty state-owned and four hundred private Chinese companies were operating in Angola by 2010, with sixty thousand to seventy thousand Chinese workers, shopkeepers, traders, managers, and company directors residing in the country. By 2011, China had provided about US$14.5 billion US dollars in credit to Angola through the China Export Import Bank, the China Development Bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, largely to finance infrastructure and construction projects.8 In return, almost half of Angola’s oil production is exported to China, making it China’s second-largest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia.
Other countries have also extended lines of credit to Angola for housing, infrastructural development, and reconstruction. As of 2015, firms from China, Brazil, Portugal, Israel, and elsewhere were financing, designing, and building nearly ninety housing or mixed residential, office, and commercial projects in Luanda’s center and suburbs.9 In that sense, Luanda’s postwar growth mirrors the “turbo-urbanism” that characterized Prishtina after the end of the war in Kosovo.10
In theory, postwar city planning largely perpetuates colonial plans for the expansion and deconcentration of city growth. It is rooted in functionalist, growth-pole thinking and driven by top-down, technocratic approaches to city planning, with little regard for the needs of the poor. This viewpoint is illustrated in “Angola 2025,” Angola’s official vision for the future, which largely follows a late-colonial master plan, adopted just before independence in 1975, for the expansion of the capital into small satellites around the city center. The urban vision articulated by “Angola 2025” is expected to transform Luanda into a true world-class city, or “a modern, efficient, creative and unified metropolis” that connects the country to the outside world.11 To realize this aspiration, urban redevelopment has consisted of the establishment of the old colonial center on the coast as the political and business heart of the city. Dozens of skyscrapers occupied by oil companies, banks and government ministries, have arisen in the city’s baixa, the old colonial city center, over the last decade. Redevelopment of the bay of Luanda was mostly completed in 2012. A four-lane bridge links up a new, walkable seaside promenade lined by palm trees with the Island of Luanda, a peninsula historically home to a fishing community, followed by the informal settlement of internally displaced people during the war. Following their removal, the island mainly sports trendy beach bars and restaurants for a high-end clientele. (fig. 5.9.2)
Farther down the coast, the dome of the new National Assembly building and a gigantic rocket-shaped mausoleum honoring the first president of Angola, Agostinho Neto, telegraph the importance of political power across the landscape. Both are part of the politico-administrative center that is being redeveloped. In the future, it will be connected by road to the southern part of the city, Luanda Sul. A new ring road extends the city toward the southeast, accompanied by the construction of large-scale housing settlements, officially designated as new centralidades—centralities—such as Kilamba, Zango, and Cacuaco, while the government is targeting the northern part of the city for a large-scale upgrading program.
Whereas an overarching modernist vision appears to drive urban redevelopment, in practice, planning decisions regarding where to locate peripheral sites for housing or commercial development follow multiple disconnected logics. Politically, housing policy reflects the state’s desire for legitimacy in the aftermath of a destructive civil conflict. On the one hand, this is articulated through the construction of new suburbs in order to serve a growing, ill-housed but politically strategic middle class. On the other hand, the government has chosen to upgrade—rather than clear—older, dilapidated areas such as Cazenga and Sambizanga, because they were the birthplaces of urban resistance against the Portuguese during the colonial period. Economically, new suburbs also embody the efforts of domestic business interests and political elites with international connections to profit from housing provision. Here, low land values and informal land occupation by the poor favor the selection of peripheral sites for clearance and new construction. Spatially, the location of the new suburbs to the east and southeast of the new ring road reflects the redesign of the outdated colonial politico-administrative borders of the city and greater metropolitan area. Moreover, the locations, compositions, and socioeconomic conditions of suburbs embody indigenous influences and preferences, as well as design styles from abroad and the influence of New Urbanism. Thus, despite the existence of a modernist planning agenda, these multiple logics, actors, and interests have produced a polycentric, highly differentiated, and unequal city, which the urbanists Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin have termed “splintering urbanism” in their examination of other cities.12 The landscape of Luanda now boasts highly networked luxury enclaves, business parks, financial hubs, and special economic zones, but informal settlements, ordinary spaces, and internet deserts also define the city.
Working in tandem with the private sector, the Angolan state has spearheaded the expansion and construction of highend suburban developments with diverse housing models and residential designs. Under a public-private partnership with the Provincial Government of Luanda, the Brazilian construction and engineering firm Odebrecht built the country’s first luxury residential compound, Atlântico Sul, in Talatona, as part of the development of Luanda Sul.13 The construction of Angola’s first shopping center, Belas Shopping, and the residential and business complex, Belas Business Park, followed.14 Smaller, gated communities that mimic locations worldwide then proliferated. We now see the single-family homes with matching garages and swimming pools in the back garden associated with Alphaville (outside São Paulo, Brazil) or Kendall (in Florida) reflected in Talatona, which is becoming its own city. Condominiums in this zone replicate the exclusivity that typifies gated communities in Brazil, Dubai, or the United States. They resegregate urban space in Angola along class lines, rather than the racial lines of the colonial period.15 (fig. 5.9.3)
Purchase prices for high-end units in some exclusive gated enclaves in Talatona can run into the millions of dollars. Admission to these luxury developments is limited to those who have a car and work for oil companies or the state. Of course, to purchase a freestanding home with a landscaped yard or a condo with amenities such as a pool or fitness center, buyers must also be able to finance their purchases either through their employers, from their own savings, or through access to credit.16 However, credit is extremely rare, as mortgages are not yet common in Angola, even among those with formal jobs.
The growing differentiation in residential property markets evidenced in Luanda Sul is reinforced by the government’s housing policy. There is little effort to make subsidized financing available to low- and middle-income families in order to assist with self-help building. Instead there is a focus on direct housing provision to the poor; for the middle class, state subsidies for housing purchase are restricted to a very limited number of buyers. Moreover, many new government-sponsored housing projects are consciously targeted at different socioeconomic strata of society, as illustrated by the examples of social housing in Zango and middle-class housing in Kilamba.
In Zango, the largest social housing project in Luanda financed by the state, thirty thousand houses have been built to accommodate residents displaced from areas in the city targeted for urban redevelopment. Odebrecht has also been the main contractor for the construction of this social housing southeast of the city. In terms of its typology, social housing in Luanda resembles the semidetached housing units provided by the South African government to house South Africa’s poor under the Reconstruction and Development Programme. Lined up row after row, quarter after quarter, houses in Zango are painted in different colors from green to yellow and orange to purple as they stretch out for miles along the main road.17 (fig. 5.9.4)
5.9.4 Zango, a social housing development south of the capital, designed and constructed by Odebrecht, a Brazilian firm
Apart from social housing, which mainly consists of basic shelter for low-income groups, there has been an increasing focus on the construction of mixed-use developments following the Chinese mass housing model. Several of these are designed to serve the middle class. Perhaps the most infamous is Kilamba, located some 16 miles (25 kilometers) from the historic city center. When fully occupied, Kilamba will house nearly one hundred thousand middle-class Angolans in a small city that mimics many of the Chinese instant cities on which it was modeled. Funded by a $3.5 billion oil-backed line of credit and built by CITIC, a Chinese state-owned construction firm, Kilamba follows a standard, modernist grid pattern of development. Initially ridiculed by journalists as a ghost city when it remained empty for a year after its grand opening by the president of Angola, the project’s twenty thousand three- to five-bedroom units are now filling up after the government lowered prices and made houses available through a state-subsidized mortgage scheme designed for Kilamba. Currently, fifty-three thousand residents live in twenty-four blocks containing a total of 710 buildings of four, eight, and twelve stories, as well as schools, basketball courts, and common green space.18 Shops and restaurants have already started to occupy the ground floors of designated buildings in each block.19 (fig. 5.9.5)
5.9.5 Kilamba, a new mixed-use, suburban development 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from Luanda, built by the Chinese Firm, CITIC
Yet the majority of city and suburban dwellers still live in overcrowded but vibrant informal settlements, which pepper the landscape in and around the old city core and the new suburbs. Initially, many occupied the empty houses left behind by the Portuguese settlers, as well as land in informal settlements predating independence. Over time, new arrivals to the city built their homes at increasing distances from the city center on whatever vacant space they could find: farm land, but also on former waste dumps, such as those in Boavista, an informal settlement close to the harbor of Luanda.20
Thus different typologies of informal settlements can be distinguished in Luanda, depending on when and where they emerged. Some are laid out according to minimal planning regulations; those houses are built with permanent construction materials such as blocks and cement, or have been expanded or upgraded over time. More recent peripheral settlements are less formally organized, with more flimsy construction materials. In the absence of public support or public goods provision, all city dwellers—whether in the center or on the periphery—have had to adopt private solutions to address the deficiencies in public services. In the city center, residents have come to rely on purchased generators and water pumps to make up for the degraded colonial electricity and water networks. In more peripheral settlements, an ever-growing number of residents accesses water and electricity through informal connections and private vendors at high cost.21
These informal settlements “interrupt” the city rather than exist in confined, enclosed spaces, separate from the central business district or the suburbs. In spite of efforts to create zones of exclusivity for the wealthy, Luanda’s rich and poor live closely together, with luxury air conditioned office buildings and new apartment blocks often standing side by side with dilapidated colonial villas or informal shacks. During their daily commutes, drivers of the newest, most expensive SUVs buy goods from vendors standing on potholed roads or alongside major new expressways. Like many governments elsewhere, the Angolan government prefers the eradication of informal settlements and their replacement by orderly new cities, rather than the in situ upgrading of services and infrastructures in what are perceived as disorderly and unorganized slums.22 This approach means that most residents of informal settlements have benefited little from urban development interventions, with local land and property markets remaining largely informal, and access to affordable housing finance limited.23 (fig. 5.9.6)
Suburban development in Luanda is far-reaching in scale and very ambitious. While it has not met the desperate need for housing by low-income residents, it has produced new forms and imaginaries of suburban life.24 As in Brazil, the association of homeownership with a dream come true is a ubiquitous trope. Television and newspaper advertisements extol the virtues of marble entrances and five-bedroom mansions in exclusive neighborhoods. Even at the highest levels, the official housing policy is called “My dream, my house.” In a recent survey, residents in the new middle-class suburb of Kilamba, when asked why their new apartment was “better” than where they lived before, answered that one reason was “it’s mine,” “I own it.” Kilamba residents were also overwhelmingly satisfied with the quality of their new homes, the neighborhood, the proximity to schools and the schools’ quality, the availability of electricity and water, and other amenities.25
But the enchantment declined when asked about commute times. While the majority of respondents expressed satisfaction or partial satisfaction with the distance to work, the majority of them commuted more than an hour each way. Twenty percent spent between two and three hours to get to work. Owing to the lack of investment in public transportation, most suburban development is predicated on and privileges the car. Yet traffic jams and hours lost in the car undercut the fantasy of middle-class suburban living.26 As the urban core gets redeveloped, those with sufficient funds might drift back to the historic city center, while those without will continue to pursue their dream for a house of their own.
Suburbs across the African continent are rapidly transforming. Economic and natural population growth, aided by government intervention, increasingly reconfigures urban peripheries into a mix of sprawling formal and informal development. The accelerated suburban development that has taken place in Luanda over the last decade reflects both the diversity and the demand exhibited elsewhere in cities such as Lagos, Accra, Maputo, and Nairobi. The pace, location, and timing of construction in the suburbs do not represent a rejection or abandonment of the inner city as they did in the United States during the 1960s. Rather, they are a consequence of overcrowding and insufficient housing in the city center. In that respect, the redesign of the urban core currently proceeds in tandem with expansion of the peri-urban and suburban areas. Owing to the delays in urban infrastructural expansion occasioned by Angola’s long conflict, demand for decent housing by all socioeconomic groups is likely to remain high for the foreseeable future.
Top-down and state-led suburban growth has improved the quality of life for some by increasing the formal housing stock and providing packaged subdivisions with amenities from basketball courts to health clinics for the middle class. These new, organized suburban spaces are contributing to the emergence of new imaginaries and “consumption-related identities” for elites and the middle class.27 Cellphones are ubiquitous; cars, televisions, and computers are common in middle-class neighborhoods, and access to the internet is rapidly expanding, aided by the efforts of skilled computer technicians from Spain, Portugal, and other European countries who have moved to Luanda looking for work in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Revenue from the sale of oil has allowed the Angolan state to drive and reshape suburban expansion in unprecedented ways; yet the assumption that these efforts adequately address the postwar needs of urban residents is misplaced. Current levels of social housing provision, or state financing for Chinesestyle pop-up cities are both inadequate and unsustainable over the long term. Even in Luanda, where most expenditure is targeted, no more than a small fraction of the population is experiencing the benefits of new suburbs and centralities. The majority of urban residents encounter much more precarious living conditions, with inadequate shelter and insecure rights to housing and land. In addition, residents in many other cities of Angola confront similar or worse conditions. Unless the provision of housing can be distributed more widely, the heterogeneous, fragmented nature of suburbs will continue.
Importantly, the investment in suburban residential development needs to be matched by investments in infrastructure and services, such as public transport. As in the past, Luanda’s suburbs continue to be plagued by limits to the capacity of public utility companies and local governments to deliver basic services and manage local land and property markets. The low levels of autonomy, capacity, and resources of local governments mean that requests for services or adequate infrastructure by those without connections get snarled up in bureaucratic backlogs and red tape. The lack of a formal property market, the scarcity of affordable housing finance, and long commute times often mean that only the well-connected fully enjoy the advantages and amenities of new housing developments.
Furthermore, oil prices are volatile and, at the time of writing, just experienced precipitous decline. Oil revenues, therefore, may not provide a reliable source of financing in the future. The Angolan government has made repeated pledges to diversify the economy away from oil, but as the African politics expert Ricardo Soares de Oliveira notes in a recent publication, “There is no sign of structural transformation and the economy’s full possibilities remain untapped.”28 Angola so far does not have a strong domestic construction industry and continues to import most of its cement from abroad. In the absence of alternative revenues, state-led housing provision will likely slow down considerably. Going forward, the way that the government addresses these issues will determine the degree to which residents must rely on private and informal solutions to address public failure, and to fulfill the aspirations of suburban living.
2 James S. Duncan and Nancy G. Duncan, Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb (New York: Routledge, 2004).
3 Alan Mabin, Siân Butcher, and Robin Bloch, “Peripheries, Suburbanisms, and Change in Sub-Saharan African Cities,” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 167–90.
4 Government of Angola, “Resultados preliminares do recenseamento geral da população e da habitação de Angola 2014” (Luanda: National Institute of Statistics, 2014).
5 UN-Habitat, The State of African Cities 2008: A Framework for Addressing Urban Challenges in Africa (Nairobi: UN-Habitat, 2008), 137.
6 Development Workshop, “The Case of Angola: Strengthening Citizenship through Upgrading of Informal Settlements Cross Country Initiative,” Final Synthesis Report TF 0901110 presented to the World Bank, Luanda June 2011, 1.
7 Sylvia Croese, “1 Million Houses? Angola’s National Reconstruction and Chinese Engagement,” in China and Angola: A Marriage of Convenience?, ed. Marcus Power and Ana Cristina Alves (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2012), 124–44.
8 Lucy Corkin, Uncovering African Agency: Angola’s Management of China’s Credit Lines (London: Ashgate, 2013).
9 M. Anne Pitcher, “Geo-Coded Dataset of Luanda’s Suburban Developments” (unpublished maunscript, 2014).
10 Kai Voeckler, with Archis Interventions, Prishtina Is Everywhere: Turbo-Urbanism: The Aftermath of a Crisis (Berlin: Parthas, 2008).
11 Government of Angola, Angola 2025: Angola, a Country with a Future: Sustainability, Equity, and Modernity (Luanda: Ministry of Planning, 2007).
12 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001).
13 Paul Jenkins, Paul Robson, and Allan Cain, “Luanda City Profile,” Cities 19, no. 2 (2002): 139–50.
14 “Global Presence: Talatona Residencial,” Odebrecht, accessed December 31, 2014, http://www.odebrecht.com/presenca-no-mundo/en/home.
15 Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues, “Angolan Cities: Urban (Re) Segregation?,” in African Cities: Competing Claims on Urban Spaces, ed. Francesca Locatelli and Paul Nugent (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 37–53.
16 Anne Pitcher and Sylvia Croese, field work in Luanda, Angola, June 2014.
17 Sylvia Croese, “Post-war State-Led Development in Angola: The Zango Housing Project in Luanda as a Case Study,” (PhD diss., Stellenbosch University, 2013).
18 Joaquim Israel Marques, president of Kilamba, interviewed by Anne Pitcher, Casimiro Costa, and José Tiago, Kilamba, Luanda, Angola, June 19, 2014.
19 Allan Cain, “African Urban Fantasies: Past Lessons and Emerging Realities,” Environment and Urbanization 26, no. 2 (2014): 1–7; M. Anne Pitcher and Marissa Moorman, “City Building in Post-Conflict, Post-Socialist Luanda: Burying the Past with Phantasmagorias of the Future,” in African Cities Reader III: Land, Property, Value, ed. Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pieterse (Vlaeberg: Chimurenga and African Centre for Cities, 2015).
20 Paul Robson and Sandra Roque, Here in the City There Is Nothing Left Over for Lending a Hand: In Search of Solidarity and Collective Action in Peri-urban Areas in Angola (Guelph, Canada: Development Workshop, 2001).
21 Development Workshop and Centre for Environment and Human Settlements, “Terra Reforma Sobre a Terra Urbana em Angola no Period Pós-guerra: Pesquisa, Advocacia e Políticas de Desenvolvimento, Development Workshop,” Occasional Paper, no. 6, Development Workshop, Luanda, 2005.
22 Sandra Roque, “Cidade and Bairro: Classification, Constitution and Experience of Urban Space in Angola,” Social Dynamics 37, no. 3 (2011): 332–48.
23 Development Workshop, “The Case of Angola: Strengthening Citizenship through Upgrading of Informal Settlements Cross Country Initiative.”
24 Chloé Buire, “The Dream and the Ordinary: An Ethnographic Investigation of Suburbanisation in Luanda,” African Studies 73, no. 2 (2014): 290–312.
25 Allan Cain, Sylvia Croese, and Anne Pitcher, “New Housing in Luanda,” Household Survey, Development Workshop and the University of Michigan, June–August 2014.
26 M. Anne Pitcher, “Cars Are Killing Luanda: Cronyism, Consumerism, and Other Assaults on Angola’s Post-War, Capital City,” in Cities in Contemporary Africa, ed. Martin J. Murray and Garth A. Myers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 173–200.
27 Paul Knox, “Vulgaria: The Re-Enchantment of Suburbia,” Opolis: An International Journal of Suburban and Metropolitan Studies 1, no. 2 (2005): 33–46.
28 Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War (London: C. Hurst and Company, 2015), 210.
