Henrik Ernstson and his co-authors have won the 2023 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research prize for Best Article

Henrik Ernstson

Henrik Ernstson, Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Geography and co-authors, Ricardo Cardoso (National University of Singapore) and Jia-Ching Chen (University of California) have won the 2023 Best Article prize awarded by the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research for their paper, ‘Blocos Urbanism: How oil becomes housing and infrastructure’.

The article reveals interdependencies between oil extraction off the Angolan Coast, city planning, and the concrete blocks used in peripheral developments in the capital city, Luanda, built under the Angolan government’s ‘New Centralities’ scheme. 

Blocos urbanism conceptualises the influence of global economic forces on the economic, spatial and social development impacting the lives of Angolan people.

This article emerged from a study led by Henrik Ernstson at the University of Manchester, ‘Grounding and Worlding Urban Infrastructures: Situated challenges, risks and contradictions of sustainability through African Cities’ (GROWL). The project worked at the intersection of political ecology and postcolonial urbanism, focusing on ‘petro-urbanism’ in Luanda and comparative infrastructure studies in Kenya and Uganda.

You can read Blocos Urbanism, and watch an accompanying documentary film here on the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research website.