INVITE | Book discussion | IN THE SKIN OF THE CITY - Spatial Transformation in Luanda by António Tomás | 8 Feb | 7pm | ONLINE

WiSER invites you to an online book discussion  

IN THE SKIN OF THE CITY
Spatial Transformation in Luanda  

by António Tomás

With In the Skin of the City, António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomás shows how the city’s physical and social boundaries—its skin—constitute porous and shifting interfaces between center and margins, settler and Native, enslaver and enslaved, formal and informal, and the powerful and the powerless. He focuses on Luanda’s “asphalt frontier”—the (colonial) line between the planned urban center and the ad hoc shantytowns that surround it—and the ways squatters are central to Luanda’s historical urban process. In their relationship with the state and their struggle to gain rights to the city, squatters embody the process of negotiating Luanda’s divisions and the sociopolitical forces that shape them. By illustrating how Luanda emerges out of the continual redefinition of its skin, Tomás offers new ways to understand the logic of urbanization in cities across the global South.

António Tomás will be in conversation with Teresa Caldeira (University of California, Berkeley)

António Tomás is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and author of Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist.

Teresa Caldeira's research focuses on the predicaments of urbanization, such as spatial segregation, social discrimination, and the uses of public space in cities of the global south. She has been studying the relationships between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratization. She is the author, amongst many other publications, of City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paulo.

Thursday, 9^th February 2023
6pm (Johannesburg time)
Register for the event here