In the Skin of the City

With In the Skin of the City, Antnio Toms traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nations capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Toms shows how the citys physical and social boundariesits skinconstitute porous and shifting interfaces between center and margins, settler and Native, enslaver and enslaved, formal and informal, and the powerful and the powerless. He focuses on Luandas asphalt frontierthe (colonial) line between the planned urban center and the ad hoc shantytowns that surround itand the ways squatters are central to Luandas historical urban process. In their relationship with the state and their struggle to gain rights to the city, squatters embody the process of negotiating Luandas divisions and the sociopolitical forces that shape them. By illustrating how Luanda emerges out of the continual redefinition of its skin, Toms offers new ways to understand the logic of urbanization in cities across the global South.