Thinking Futures Through the Slum

In October 2011, I accompanied SOS Habitat, an Angolan housing rights organization, on a solidarity visit to a neighborhood in Luanda made up of people who had been forcibly removed from the city’s luxury leisure area, the Ilha. [1] The Ilha is a spit of land that sticks out from the bay of this coastal capital. Surrounded by ocean on almost all sides, the wealthy flock there for lunches with ocean views and beach dance parties. The area, however, was also home to a large number of
residents who lived in what Angolans would call the musseque or bairro,
autoconstructed neighborhoods woven in between the sites of elite consumption.