New Books: The Aesthetics of Belonging
In this episode, we’re speaking with Claudia Gastrow, author of The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda, published in 2024 by University of North Carolina Press. The Aesthetics of Belonging draws on archival and ethnographic research to explore the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of Luanda.
On Their Own Terms
Informal settlements are urban communities where most people build homes and live without formal approval from government authorities. Residents in these communities often lack access to basic infrastructure and services such as clean water, proper sanitation and electricity. At the same time, they face a constant struggle for inclusion in urban governance and decision-making processes. To address some of these challenges, governments, policymakers and urban planners promote participatory mechanisms – community meetings, local councils, and consultations – as tools to ensure that marginalized communities have a say in shaping their neighborhoods. But do these mechanisms genuinely lead to meaningful inclusion, or are they just tokenistic gestures? This question inspired us to conduct a study in Nima and Old Fadama, Accra’s largest informal settlements.
The Urban Turn in Comparative Politics
In this post, UAR Co-Editor Yue Zhang shares her article that was originally published in the Spring 2020 newsletter of The Organized Section In Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association (APSA).