Abstract
Reconstructing the City
Critical urban study is as much about the methodology of the case study as it is about the finer details of description and analysis wrought from the research endeavor itself. In his masterful tome on Luanda’s historical-political condition, In the Skin of the City (“Skin”), Antonio Tomás writes for and in relation to singularity: Tomás details his aims as “hailing Luanda as a singular city and … bringing back singularity as a fundamental precept to understanding the formation of the modern urban condition.” 1 Tomás’ analysis is a generous mélange of ethnographic and historical study of Luanda’s changing urban condition over time, offering palimpsests of a changing city. Such depth is only gained through engaging faces of the city on its own terms over time, as a Luandense himself. Tomás’ earlier work includes a book on intellectual and pan-Africanist leader Amilcar Cabral, and he brings wider insight and keen historic sensibility to this longitudinal “extended case.” 2
“Skin” begins by engaging the work of Luandan photographer Antonio Ole from the late 1960s and 1970s, and draws from it a focus on scale and attention to texture. Ole documented façades at the scale of the house, the informal settlement, and the proliferation of apartment buildings, drawing attention to the musseques or poor neighborhoods whose urban textures created the asphalt frontier (fronteira do asfalto). This asphalt frontier separated different parts of the city like an “invisible line,” producing differing forms of representation and spatial practice across its barrier. 3 By bringing attention to the margin as a locus within the city, as well as movement and change in the city over time, Tomás continues to be attentive to the texture of forms of separation after Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975.
The work is divided evenly into six chapters in three parts that describe the spatial and figurative morphology of the city—“Formation,” “Stasis,” and “Fragmentation.” Through this structure, Tomás ties ethnographic narrative and archival research into a non-linear story of change that centers the importance of the historical and the role of observing changes in the city in relation to other formations: from the emergent political claims of the bairro to the politics of the nation-state. Much of his analysis is oriented modularly according to various spatial processes that unfold locally and the associations that can be drawn out across various scales in the post-independence period: for instance, the street, the apartment building, the market place. Salient to the architecture of Tomás’ work is the way he sets up parallels between time periods centered around key sites in the capital. The focus of “Skin” changes accordingly from the first part of the book to the second, as Tomás moves from study of the sobrado (townhouse) buildings housing Elinga Teatro and the struggles for space in the city here, to the reconfiguration of space around the marketplace and the emergence of Roque Santeiro as a focal point for the peripheral city. In the third part of “Skin,” the refurbishment of the colonial center of Cidade Alta becomes our pivot. Hence, in each part of the book, Tomás discusses changing power dynamics that unfold over the historical durée of Luanda’s revaluation and expansion.
Part 2 of “Skin” is of particular interest in its detailed analysis of the post-independence interconnections that developed through technologies of circulation in the 1980s, and the dialectics of dis/connection and durability/impermanence that manifest around them as the city produced peripheral space. In Chapter 4, for example, Tomás discusses the growth of the cement industry as an export commodity in in the 1980s through the Angolan company Cimangola, which permitted increased construction in the peripheries of the capital. With the emergence of informal transport networks and interconnections through the auto-industry, Tomás details how the logics of centrality in the capital were decentered, giving way to the fragmentation and urban expansion of later periods. In a particularly evocative reading of the “alternative city center” around the Roque Santeiro marketplace, Tomás details how the “mental city” morphed over time, creating new forms of orientation for Luandans rather than earlier modernist forms: “the whole new city, the informal city, was then closer to the mental city then the city built by the Portuguese,” Tomás surmises. 4
Described as an “ethnography of tracing associations,” “Skin” is at its best when it focuses on the interconnections between various urban processes, inscribed locally, as well as the borders that enable such urban remaking. 5 If for Luanda, Tomás is both flaneur and guide, it is through the figure of the squatter that he centers his analysis of rebuilding, interconnection and fragmentation. Part 3 of the book draws attention to the fragmentation in Luanda’s later post-independence years, including its post-conflict past where to walk around the capital is to confront such fragmentation and blockade. In contrast to the flaneur in Paris, walking in Luanda involves dislocation: Tomás writes, “for while the presence of the [Parisian] flaneur is about continuity and permanence in the city, that of the squatter is about its discontinuity and fragmentation.” 6
The Single and Singular Case
Writing on methodological design in qualitative and ethnographic research, sociologist Mario Luis Small dissects questions of generalizability that have been used in the social sciences to scrutinize the representativeness of the single case comparatively across contexts. 7 He points to the turn toward demographic research on immigrant and minority neighborhoods where questions of method threw this representativeness into question—how do you generalize from the single case? Small enumerates thus, “when ethnographers today describe conditions in, for example, one poor black neighborhood in St Louis, MO, many of their readers in urban poverty literature expect to be learning about the conditions in poor black neighborhoods in general—in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, and perhaps even London and Rio de Janeiro—not merely that neighborhood in St. Louis.” 8 Researchers often expect to extract empirical detail from these studies on low-income neighborhoods that hold in seemingly similar settings elsewhere, Small contends, despite the exact causal mechanics of this relationship being unclear and shrouded in a kind of pseudo-scientific mystery.
In the context of Tomás’ tome this well parsed methodological point finds new resonance. The focus on case study research of the single case as equally valid exemplar in the contemporary urban studies literature is of significance here: when can a case begin and end with itself, without necessary comparative taxonomy? When is the African city a valid set unto itself, much like Mike Davis’ Los Angeles or David Harvey’s Paris? 9 Tomás’ extended study of Luanda’s development over its urban life-course begins with the city itself, and ends with relational meditations on Harvey’s Paris. Arguably through this it evinces ongoing academic divisions of labor where the Southern city cannot begin and end entirely on its own, as self-referential in theoretical as well as empirical terms. This division of labor between empirics and theory has been noted in critical social theory scholarship, and bears remembrance in this discussion of the African city as single case. 10 As much of the world system of urban scholarship leans toward a particular division of labor, geographically and in terms of theory formation, such comparative urban study at its most helpful can draw attention to “ordinary cities.” 11 Yet, it often evades the deeper engagement of longer-term single case studies, the symbolic depth they offer, and the relational political economy they illuminate. The non-linear trajectories of many cities in the Global South instead call for more research through relational circuitries and transnational relational analysis, where detailed single case studies are treated as not directly comparable in their own right, but illuminative of one another. 12
If singularity is in question, however, it is surely also because Southern urban relations do not begin and end alone. Cities of the South inhabit ongoing life-worlds of colonial, postcolonial, and in the case of Luanda, post-conflict aftermaths that began not in isolation but through trajectories of extractive violence, materialist interconnection, worldmaking and debt. It is through this sensibility that I have read Tomás’ keenly rendered study of his own city. Tomás’ positionality as a native/outsider intellectual is salient here: more is known than can effectively be enumerated on the page, born of familiarity and the defamiliarization necessary to undertake long-term research on one’s own home. In writing on the singularity of the single case, however, Tomás is also compelled to engage theorists of planetary urbanization—that overarching theorization of “uneven worldwide capitalist development” that seeks to fix the generalizability and reproducibility of the urban as unit in the wider relations of late capitalism. 13 He is hence focused on the one hand on the centrality of the periphery within Luanda in understanding the city’s growth, on “writing a description of the city through the notion of the margin itself rather than through what such a margin separates.” 14 On the other, he finds himself entangled in the dilemma of responding to debates he seeks to argue against, to show “the extent to which the urban in Luanda is not a modern process.” 15
If the focus on the appropriate audience of address is a dilemma that Tomás struggles with in responding to debates on planetary urbanization, he is not alone. How do scholars of cities in the Global South engage dominant formulations of urban theory without privileging comparative debates over and above the singularity of the Southern city as a valid theoretical locus in itself? Approaches to South-South relational comparison might be one avenue to grapple with this, offering different kinds of circuitries and retheorization. For instance, recent scholarship on Luanda includes relational analysis by Ricardo Cardoso, who examines Luanda from Salvador in a form of “Southern Atlantic urbanism.” 16 Cardoso’s initial work focused on the oil fueled construction boom in Kilamba, Luanda. 17 Claudia Gastrow’s incisive work on the aesthetics of urban change in the capital adds to a growing grouping of Luanda focused scholarship, as a subset of scholarship on the African urban, the post-conflict urban, or other such urban constellations. 18 This growing scholarship on Luanda, then, is perhaps the best existing response to the need to write faithfully on the single case—one in which Tomás convincingly evinces the case for Luanda as a set of itself.
