Work

Unseeing urban divides in Luanda and Maputo

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Taking China Miéville's novel The City & The City as our point of departure, we develop the idea of "unseeing" as a central cultural skill to make sense of, and live with, contemporary urban inequality. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Luanda and Maputo, we posit unseeing as a useful heuristic to capture the processes by which divisions between disparate urban lifeworlds are produced and upheld. While unseeing is a necessary, entrained social practice to live with the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, urban life also offers opportunities for moments of "breach" that reveal both the forces that reassert social division and the potential of practices that seek to force people to see rather than unsee.

Source: Environment and Planning D Society and Space

DOI: 10.1177/02637758251344823

Authors: Jon Schubert, Jason Sumich

Institutions: University of Basel, University of Essex

Language: English

Topic: Urban and sociocultural dynamics

Subfield: Urban Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Sustainable cities and communities, Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,900