Claudia Gastrow
Bio
I am an anthropologist of urbanism with a focus on processes of city-making in southern, central and eastern Africa.
My book, The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores how urban aesthetics came to mediate contestations over political belonging in Angola’s capital, Luanda, during the country’s post-conflict oil-boom.
I am currently working on two new projects. The first studies Angolan-Cuban cooperation in construction and urban planning during Angola’s socialist period (1975-1992) to trace how Global South socialisms and Black Internationalism shaped urban life. It uses the lens of architecture and construction to understand the making of political ideologies, the everyday experiences of socialism, and the undoing of socialist worlds in the 1990s. My second project traces the transformation of racial capitalism through practices of real estate speculation in contemporary Nairobi, Kenya. It seeks to understand how colonial and racial legacies of finance shape the transnational production of African urbanism through risk assessment and the effects of this on urban form.
My academic research has appeared in City and Society, Africa, Citizenship Studies, Antipode and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. I have also written for a more general public in outlets such as The Conversation and Africa is a Country.
My research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences Research Council, the National Science Foundation and the Urban Studies Foundation.
Education
PhD Anthropology University of Chicago 2014
MA African Studies University of Basel 2007
BA (Honours) Historical Studies University of Cape Town 2006
B.Soc.Sci Historical Studies and Political Studies University of Cape Town 2004
Publications
- Aesthetics and the Making of Urban Futures in Luanda, Angola , International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2022)
- ‘If Angola were Libya’: protest and politics in Angola , Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa (2022)
- Capturing Poder Popular: Governance and Control in Early Socialist Luanda, 1975–c. 1979 , Socialismes en Afrique (2021)
- DIY Verticality: The Politics of Materiality in Luanda , City & Society (2020)
- Housing middle-classness: formality and the making of distinction in Luanda , Africa (2020)
- Urban States: The Presidency and Planning in Luanda, Angola , International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2020)
- Angola: Nationalist Narratives and Alternative Histories , Kronos (2019)
- RECYCLING CONSUMPTION: , Conspicuous Consumption in Africa (2019)
- Reflections on Angola's 1992 Election: A Photo Essay , Kronos (2019)
- Aesthetic Dissent: Urban Redevelopment and Political Belonging in Luanda, Angola , Antipode (2017)