Colonial Angolan cities were built according to the racial, economic
and social stratification of the time. After independence, ideologies of
social egalitarianism, together with massive migration towards urban
centres, profoundly changed this spatial organisation, creating socially
and economically mixed areas in the cities. This spatial blending lasted
until very recently, when new, closed districts began to be built and
when the old ‘rich’ bairros began to be bought up and renovated by
upper-class families. The new urban segregation, which is a tendency
documented, for example, in the former apartheid cities or in the cities
of other developing countries, is essentially the result of new social and
economic differentiations.
