O bairro Prenda em Luanda. Entre o formal e o informal.

Abstract

Luanda is a dual city. Like most sub-Saharan African cities, it comprises an urbanized area, the result of more or less general or partial formal plans and projects, and areas of informal origin, organized and constructed by the hands of its inhabitants faced with a formal system unable to supply their needs. The latter, in Luanda called musseques, are formed mostly by dwellings, with a wide variety of constructive qualities, commonly self-constructed and lacking infrastructures. They contrast with the urbanized city center, a multifunctional area, where the majority of urban facilities and services are located, with buildings of permanent construction and access to the municipal sewage, water and electricity supply system. The distinction between formal and informal city, however, is not as simple as it might seem, since both have been growing in a continuous interdependent relation. Bairro Prenda is "in between", as an example of the encounter and interaction between formal and informal city. Born as a musseque, soon it was the target of a unique urban intervention in Luanda that sought to miscegenate the population rather than to perpetuate the existent spatial segregation - which remains notorious even now. Only one part of the plan of Neighborhood Unit number 1 was completed, but the construction of the neighborhood was carried on by its inhabitants in response to needs increased by the war, such as the lack of housing. The materialization of formal and informal construction processes combined, present-day Prenda is an almost self-sufficient neighborhood that offers a wide range of urban facilities, has wide public spaces with an extensive scope for intervention and combines different housing typologies - from self-built housing made of precarious materials to large villas, as well as collective housing blocks that are examples of the modernist architecture adapted to the tropics.