a fitting retrofit | a tale of two cities Boavista is a peculiar part of Luanda. Its receding plateaus planaltos - overlook a magnificent strip of prime Atlantic coast. Tucked in between is a sloping sleeve of cliffs moving gently in some places, abruptly in others, toward the elongated coast. Atop lie Luanda’s infamous musseques - the decrepit settlements vicariously gobbling up the city. The musseques phenomenon started as far back as the 1950’s during the last period of Portugal’s four hundred year rule over Angola that ended in 1975. The characteristic Angolan city-slums have constantly been growing, spreading from the city’s inner parts to its outskirts, littering the coast, and hanging on the steep slopes above. But musseques are also about vibrant communities, a market place, and a struggle to exist in a classic case of African poverty. Extended families live in cubatas - huts made from scraps of tin cemented with mud; they have no running water, no power, and no sanitary infrastructure. Frequent outbreaks of malaria and cholera have become mundane, so is violence and oppression. Alcohol and drugs help deal with a hard life and dismal prospects; the lurid living conditions a credible reflection of the chaos, apathy and welfare of the people in them. Retrofitting musseques is not a new concept; the idea has been shifted around as far back as 1979, a few years after Angola took its independence and at the onset of a devastating civil war that ended in 2002. The urgency to dissect the musseques phenomenon became the more pressing as their size, function, and influence exploded. The recommendation of the Urban Growth and Management Plan for Luanda City, sponsored by the World Bank and approved by the government of Angola in 2000, was to develop the capital city into versatile development typologies encouraging diversity and growth, and restructuring existing arrangements namely unplanned settlements that have developed around vital industrial areas. It has now become an accepted fact that the city cannot continue on the same unipolar path if the goal of local and national authorities is to transform Angola’s capital into an integrated metropolitan area and a west African modern hub by 2030. The Boavista case Boavista spreads over 180 ha of different terrains and functions. The slopes bordering the area to the south and south-west are covered with trash where it is too steep for a hut to stand, the sporadic settlements resuming a little further down on more level grounds. Imagery of the eastern parts of Boavista reveals thickly clustered musseques wrapped around winding footpaths and unpaved roads; this part of Boavista has been earmarked for urban renewal which means clearing the area to make way for modern infrastructure. Implementation calls for the limited resettlement of some musseques dwellers or the improvement of their living conditions. But this is not about bulldozing perforated tin sheets or implementing waste collecting initiatives and it’s not about laying power lines and sanitation work either. For Boavista’s musseques residents being poor is being denied their basic human rights; lacking business opportunities, equitable access to the banking system, the right to own land or property, all part of the cycle of misinformation and ignorance they often find themselves caught up in. Conventional urban resettlement activities rely on preset universal guidelines to avoid involuntary displacement whenever possible, encourage community participation, and follow up on the integration into the new community. Actual application is an entirely different matter; resettlement programs almost always end up being touchy subjects causing temper flair-ups and implied injustices. Largely due to an enduring experience in Angola for more than 30 years, Dar’s socio-economic program works in tandem with the urban infrastructure and development design authorities to propose limited resettlement schemes for some areas of the city and rehabilitation recommendations for other established communities. The program, an integral plan of the Government of Angola’s legal and administrative directives to provide better economic opportunities and safer living conditions for the entire population, has begun to bear its fruits. Dar’s Concept Resettlement Plan (CRP) is fixed by the available conditions, environmental concerns, and employment generating activities. New modern housing communities, some already thriving, others still under construction and earmarked for urban development, are being designed; the largest at this time are Zango and Panguila. These housing schemes have saved thousands living in flood-prone corridors and unstable cliff areas, cleared the way for transportation and infrastructure networks, and came to rescue severely polluted areas with well planned environmental regeneration provisions. The Transport Master Plan, part of our Integrated Urban and Infrastructure Master Plan for Luanda and Bengo, follows an alternate approach in predicting future traffic patterns to that of other proposed schemes. Traffic models for the musseques, the airport and port relocation plans, and the urban authorities’ desire to limit the physical expansion of the city to a manageable population of 8 million within the Ring-Road habitable area, aspects that other planners have failed to consider, are at the core of Dar’s Transport Master Plan. 15