In the Skin of the City : Spatial Transformation in Luanda / António Tomás, De Gruyter eBound Foundation, De Gruyter eBound Foundation.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tomás, António, Author.

, De Gruyter eBound Foundation, Author.

Contributor:

funder.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Durham Duke University Press, [2025]

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

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.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Maps And Figures

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Frontier Within

Part I. Formation

Part II. Stasis

Part III. Fragmentation

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed January 05 2026)

ISBN:

1-4780-9446-X