DIY Verticality: The Politics of Materiality in Luanda

Abstract

AbstractA growing body of work has highlighted the centrality of verticality to the making of contemporary urbanism, pushing scholars to begin conceptualising inequality, politics, and planning as multi‐scalar in nature. This paper builds off these interventions to argue that verticality should be understood as a fragile and unstable achievement, a fragility heightened when the oft‐taken for granted workings of the state and private sector, which enable the appearance of verticality as a seamless achievement, fail. Drawing on research conducted in Luanda, Angola, this paper explores how residents, planners, and real estate developers discuss the difficulties of maintaining the experience, materiality, and imaginations of verticality as embodied in the architectural form of the high‐rise. The paper shows that in the context of ongoing urban decay and the seeming abnegation of most state responsibility for provision, urban residents are forced to engage in the production of a DIY verticality—constantly patching and repairing buildings to keep them viable, actions which in turn pull them into relationships of privatized belonging with the city. As such, the paper argues that the material politics of the high‐rise in Luanda both highlights the fragility at the heart of verticality as well as the shifting forms of privatized belonging immanent to this fragility.