Claudia Gastrow
Bio
I am an anthropologist of urbanism with a focus on processes of city-making in Southern, Central, East and Lusophone 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). 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 practices of real estate speculation in contemporary Nairobi, Kenya. It seeks to understand how the assessment and management of risk shapes the transnational production of African urbanism and the effects of this on urban form and politics.
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
- Belonging , Punctum Books (2025)
- Claudia Gastrow. The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2024. 240 pp. 6.12 × 9.25 in, 18 halftones. 3 maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper. ISBN: 9781469682181. , African Studies Review (2025)
- Complicating the master plan HudaniShakirah, Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2024), 258 pages, ISBN: 9780226832746 , Dialogues in Human Geography (2025)
- Living with ruination: building collapse and the political economy of materiality in Luanda, Angola , Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks (2025)
- Vanessa S. Oliveira, Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press (hb US$79.95 – 978 0 29932 580 0; pb US$26.95 – 978 0 29932 584 8). 2021/2022, xii + 173 pp. , Africa (2025)
- Tasha Rijke-Epstein. Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2023. 376 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper. ISBN: 9781478025290. , African Studies Review (2024)
- The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda , The University of North Carolina Press eBooks (2024)
- The Socialist Atlantic , (2024)
- 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 (2022)