Housing middle-classness: formality and the making of distinction in Luanda

On 11 July 2011, President José Eduardo dos Santos opened the first phase of the
new satellite city of Kilamba. Made up of a series of green, blue, yellow and pink
Chinese-designed high-rises, the initial phase of 20,002 apartments was meant to
house approximately 80,000 people and included schools, clinics and new infrastructure.
As the flagship project of the Angolan state’s post-conflict housing
programme, Kilamba was, as Buire (2014: 300) has argued, ‘politically crafted
to be the shop-window of the Angolan miracle’, an indication of the country’s
new-found prosperity. Local media and publications from the ruling MPLA
(Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) advertised Kilamba as proof
of the post-conflict state’s care for the population and its capacity to overcome
the wreckage of Angola’s twenty-seven-year civil war. However, as much as
Kilamba was meant to be evidence of the new, it reproduced long-standing
links between the state, formality and urban distinction.