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Wednesday: Film Breakfast!

Welcome to KTH Global Impact days Film Breakfast! Join us for breakfast and watch the film "Blocos Urbanism: From Oil to Infrastructure in Luanda,” a 24-minute research-based film by Jens Ergon and Henrik Ernstson followed by Q&A.

We offer breakfast

We will offer a light breakfast for participants in this morning event. The amount is limited: First come, first served.

Time: Wednesday 2 April, at 08:15-09:00.
Where: Arenan, Teknikringen 1, KTH Campus. Find a map on KTH Places

Blocos Urbanism poster
Blocos Urbanism poster

Prof. Henrik Erntson will start the event with an introduction, and after the film he will stay for dialogue and questions.

The film Blocos Urbanism: From Oil to Infrastructure in Luanda is the result of a longer research project led by Professor Henrik Ernstson into “petro-urbanism,” on how the extraction of oil is channelled into housing and infrastructure developments in Luanda, the capital of Angola.

The major trading partner in this exchange has been China that delivers housing and infrastructure in exchange for buying oil. This large-scale production of infrastructure has also reconfigured Angola’s building industry, not least cement production, which has led to the mass production of small cement blocks, so called “blocos,” which has reshaped the wider peripheries of the urban majority.

The film develops an audiovisual argument to highlight the contradictions and impacts of this oil-to-housing "South-South" collaboration and trade exchange with images from Luanda and interviews with the researchers that took part of the project, including Ricardo Cardoso, Jia-Ching Chen and Wangui Kimari. The film will be followed by Q&A with Henrik Ernstson.

For the interested, here are two publications from the project:

Blocos Urbanism: Capitalism and Modularity in the Making of Contemporary Luanda , which won the Best Article Award 2023 in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

The Invisible Labor of the “New Angola: Kilamba’s Domestic Workers , in Urban Geography. For findings and insights, visit their Situated Ecologies website here.

Henrik Ernstsson, portrait

Henrik Ernstson

Professor Henrik Ernstson is developing a situated approach to urban political ecology with a particular focus on southern and postcolonial urbanism. He mainly combines urban political ecology, urban studies, STS, social movement studies, and interdisciplinary research in urban and landscape ecology. He has extensive international collaboration with co-workers, practitioners, and urban artists in South Africa, Uganda, Nairobi, Angola, the UK, Italy, the USA and Sweden, and he has led various interdisciplinary research groups with studies in Cape Town, New Orleans, Stockholm, Kampala and Luanda.

References

Ergon, Jens, and Henrik Ernstson. 2023. Blocos Urbanism: From Oil to Infrastructure in Luanda (24 min, Documentary Film, Colour), written with Ricardo Cardoso, Jia-Ching Chen and Wangui Kimari. The Situated Ecologies Platform: Stockholm. vimeo.com/859728871  

Cardoso, Ricardo, Jia-Ching Chen, and Henrik Ernstson. 2023. Blocos Urbanism: Capitalism and Modularity in the Making of Contemporary Luanda. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Online. doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13199

Kimari, Wangui, and Henrik Ernstson. 2022. The Invisible Labor of the “New Angola”: Kilamba’s Domestic Workers. Urban Geography :1–18. doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2145818