In Luanda maybe more than elsewhere, controlling the city landscape is synonymous with controlling the polity at large. Despite tremendous political change in Angola through the twentieth century, the paper traces how the modernist plans elaborated in the late colonial period (1945-1975) have influenced the planning imagination of Luanda until today. The construction boom that reshaped Luanda at the end of the war in 2002 can indeed be interpreted as a modernist promise to break the middle class free from a hopeless urban fabric by promoting a specific urban aesthetic rather than facilitating social transformation. These continuities are however complex and fragile. What happens when the utopia of a city under control reveals its weaknesses? The paper eventually shows how the economic crisis that hit Angola in 2014 directly affects the ability of ordinary residents to embrace this new urban life and open hybrid forms of occupation and new political subjectivities.