Claudia Gastrow

Claudia Gastrow

Claudia Gastrow

Claudia Gastrow is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg. She is currently working on completing her first manuscript entitled The Aesthetics of Belonging: Building Politics in Oil-Boom Luanda as an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow affiliated with the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. The manuscript explores how the built environment came to mediate understandings of political belonging in Luanda, Angola following the end of the country's civil war in 2002. More broadly, her work explores the intersections of politics and urbanism in Africa and has appeared in City and Society, IJURR, Africa, Antipode and Politique Africaine. She is beginning a new project on African-financed real estate investment and how it shapes financial circuits and urban form in Africa.

Speaker for HMUI Urban Conversations Event: Proliferating enclaves:  "De-risking" and the making of usable space in urban Africa