The Nova Cidade de Kilamba (Kilamba New City) is a housing development thirty kilometers South of Luanda. Initiated in post-colonial Angola in 2008, the project’s website describes it as: "Part of President José Eduardo dos Santos’ election promise to build one million houses within the next four following years. After the end of the civil war which troubled the country up until 2002, Angola has been experiencing the emergence of the middle-class citizenry. Trapped between shantytowns and Luanda’s lavish properties, the members of Angola’s middle class found themselves searching for permanent and affordable quality housing." The project comprised of seven hundred pastel-colored buildings planned to house over half a million people; it was divided into twenty-four neighborhoods that included hospitals, schools, and stores. Kilamba, however, was not exactly affordable, to begin with, and it was a ghost town for quite a while after the inauguration of its first apartments in 2010. In 2013, prices were lowed, and the rent-to-buy police readjusted which quickly filled the cheapest flats.
The idea of a new city is representative of Luanda’s ‘new’ modernity which is based on suburbanization and the middle-class. Described as “distinctively modern,” Kilamba has been criticized for being unfit for the Angolan dweller. A resident interviewed by scholar Claudia Gastrow complained that the construction of Kilamba had been a mistake. “He claimed, were not for the ‘normal citizen’ because ‘the Angolan likes spaces ... he likes to be in the shade in big open spaces, to lunch with the family ... He prefers a yard [quintal], or a large verandah that is similar to a yard, rather than closed spaces like this living room, like this.’ Another common complaint is that the Kilamba apartments are made for small nuclear families, which is not the case for the majority of Angolans. Nonetheless, the project gained a lot of visibility and in 2017 a New York Times article noted that “the new towns — each with tens of thousands of people living in dozens of nearly identical high‐ rise towers — were new to Africa. If they looked as if they had been plucked out of Asia, it is because they were built by Chinese construction companies.”
Tellingly, a lot of the criticism regarding Kilamba relates in some way or another to the project’s Chinese builders: the state-owned China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC). “The Angola–China connection soon became the economic foundation stone of the country’s reconstruction. This partnership took the form of a system of oil-backed credit lines negotiated between the Chinese state and Chinese private investors with the Angolan state.” Websites like Central Angola 7311 voice protests that the Chinese are re-colonizing Angola and taking Angolans construction jobs under the excuse that they are more qualified, however, their buildings are poorly done according to the article’s authors. Reinforcing this rejection of foreigner architecture, an urban planner from Luanda referred as Yvette argued: “There is no coherence in the architecture that is being created here because they order a building from who knows where ... from the Egyptians, from the Israelis ... There is no coherence, there is no coherence, there is no dialogue, they are not in search of an African identity.”