Urban development and regional planning reflect the oftdebated new approaches to “agrarisation of urban fringes” which is meant to generate urban and provincial self-sufficiency in food and to reduce urban parasitism and regional disparities. This new prioryty – despite some inevitable shortcomings and failures – will in the long run lead to improvede living condition in Angola.

O Relatório Nacional de Angola para o Habitat III tem como referência os anos de 1996 (Aprovação da Agenda Habitat II em Istambul), 2002 (Alcance da paz efectiva em Angola) e 2008 (Lançamento do Programa Nacional do Urbanismo e Habitação), para monitorar os progressos alcançados pelo país no cumprimento das metas estabelecidas na Agenda Habitat II.

In the Habitat Agenda adopted in 1996, heads of state and governments committed themselves to two main goals, i.e., “Adequate Shelter for All” and “Sustainable Human Settlements in an Urbanizing World”, and to implement a plan of action based on these goals. In the Millennium Declaration, heads of state and governments committed themselves to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. They also committed themselves to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without adequate sustainable access to drinking water and basic sanitation.

Over the previous decade, African cities experienced a wave of frenzied construction driven by imaginations of world-city status. While these projects provoked new discussions about African urbanism, the literature on them has focused more on the paperwork of planning than actual urban experiences. This article addresses this lacuna by investigating residents’ reactions to the post-conflict building boom in Luanda, Angola. I show that Luandans’ held highly ambivalent orientations towards the emerging city. Their views were shaped by suspicions about pacts between Angolan elites and international capital that recapitulated longstanding tensions over national belonging. These concerns were voiced via discussions of the very aesthetics of the new city. Buildings became catalysts for expressions of dissent that put into question the very project of state-driven worlding. The paper therefore argues that the politics of aesthetics are central to grasping the contested understandings of urbanism currently emerging in various African cities.