Fantasias globais e realidades locais. O Projecto de Reconversão Urbana do Cazenga e do Sambizanga, Luanda

• Autor(a) principal: Miguel Luís Gonçalves Dias
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/132326
• topic: Artes; Arts

The dissertation analyzes PRUCS, a major urban renewal project in Cazenga and Sambizanga, Luanda's most densely populated municipalities. Initiated in 2010, PRUCS envisaged the radical restructuring of an extensive area of informal settlements, as part of the ambitious post-conflict strategy of transforming Luanda into a world-class city similar to Dubai or Singapore. Based on the assumption that the real estate market, catalyzed by the exponential increase in oil incomes during the post-conflict period, could finance the operation, with the fall in the price of oil in late 2014, and the collapse of that market, the project abandons the large urban renewal plans, and takes a posture better suited to the Luanda's territorial and socio-economic realities. By analyzing the PRUCS trajectory, I argue that large-scale urban renewal models are not reproducible in the context of a large African metropolis like Luanda. Nevertheless, I also make the argument that the intermediate technical-bureaucratic structures created to implement these plans can, through the acquired experience and knowledge, contribute to the future design of more just and adequate urban policies. We begin by situating this analysis in a discussion around recent academic literature on urbanism in the Global South, in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa. Subsequently we outline a brief history of the stages of urban transformation in Luanda, namely the colonial, post independence and adherence to the free market periods, focused on the formation and expansion of informal settlements. Then, a chapter is devoted to the major urban transformations in Luanda in the period after the end of the civil war in 2002, and the final chapters describe the two phases of the PRUCS trajectory, the first dedicated to the elaboration of major urban renewal plans and the second to the resettlement of populations.