After 27 years of civil
war, Angola entered the 21st century as one of the most dynamic economies in
the world. In a context of ‘infrastructures for resources’ policy, Luanda, its
capital city, has been the first beneficiary of a veritable boom in the
construction sector. This workshop explores the production of new housing
patterns in the periphery of the city through the study of two housing projects
located more than 20 kilometres from the central business district. Panguila is
a relocation settlement for impoverished people evicted from the city centre;
Kilamba City is marketed as a ‘New Centrality’ aimed at the emerging middle
class. While of incommensurable scale and quality, both settlements illustrate
the contradictions of the new forms of suburbanism produced in Luanda nowadays.
Built on ethnographic material, the article reads the aspirations of Panguila
and Kilamba City inhabitants against the official view on these settlements
propounded by the National Reconstruction Programme. It shows that individual
dreams of home ownership meet top-down attempts to discipline urban behaviours,
while demonstrating that neither is reconciled with the pragmatism of practices
on the ground. The workshop eventually suggests that new suburbs in Luanda
represent less a rupture with previous urban patterns than they continue the
production of a certain socio-spatial order.