Living with ruination: building collapse and the political economy of materiality in Luanda, Angola

This chapter shows how objects shape politics. In Luanda, Angola's capital, the city's perceived post-independence decay has long been a point of political contention. Residents and state institutions have historically argued about the condition of buildings to negotiate power, responsibility, rights, and duties. Focusing on building collapse and other instances of urban ruination, the chapter provides a counternarrative to accounts that frame Luanda's post-independence history as one of continuous material and political decline. The city's buildings reveal their disintegration not to be a product of an ahistorical “failed state” but of distinct political and historical assemblages of power that have accreted in Luanda's cityscape. The built environment provides a means to trace the workings of structural violence and state power, as well as the political and economic processes that shape them, by showing how objects produce, mediate, and foreclose political relations.