"Bocado-bocado": Modos de pensar e fazer arquitetura e urbanização

Abstract

This work seeks to develop readings on the urban phenomenon of the most densely populated area in southern Angola - and the country's second largest urban concentration - comprising the administrative territories of Lobito, Catumbela, and Benguela. Throughout various moments in the country's recent history, the region has asserted itself as a major hub of human attraction. However, this demographic relevance represents only part of the case's significance. The urban mosaic in question stems from sophisticated urban strategies that confer a combination of strategic potential in global mobility. This prominence, however, manifests in markedly different ways across the fragments of the emerging urban pattern. The mentioned density has reproduced itself under precarious conditions and within frameworks ill-suited to human organization. Today, most of the population depends on their own management of scarcity, and forms of detachment from alternative realities are increasingly evident. The investigation proposes a research path focused on life within these neighbourhoods - while remaining broad and multi-scalar, as only such an approach can dismantle the current dynamics and complexities of the urban. The study unfolds across three distinct phases, which also structure the organisation of this document. By observing life at the scale of the home-through first-hand fieldwork testimonies-it explores aspirations and contrasting urban rhythms. Shared themes emerge from these accounts, allowing an exploration of collective dynamics. This piece is thus situated within the wider mosaic: large in population yet peripheral to the major economic, geopolitical and strategic forces-therefore with limited capacity to alter its own conditions. The work aims to promote a reflection on the role of architecture in interpreting complex, heterogeneous urban modes that are deeply marked by vulnerability to precarious living conditions.