Where to place newly arrived men from the metropolis, uprooted from their families, and at high risk of “cafrealization”? The answer to this question intertwines the hygiene and the moral issues, often discussed in colonial society. Since, these men were believed to be more exposed to deviant behaviours, planners needed to create programmatic responses to address them. Using “zoning” as an urban segregation technique, this program was often placed near leisure areas, apart from the other housing types, in areas where it was easy to maintain a certain vigilance of its residents. The goal was not to disrupt the few settled European families. In the Luanda, capital of Angola, only 20% of European descendants were integrated into their families, which gives us 80% of single men. Working mostly in public administration and commerce, they constituted a middle-class population that required a residential solution. Only healthy, hygienic, and structured housing would appease these urban dwellers (Costa, 1948). Meanwhile, pragmatic proposals emerged for migrant peasants, consolidated as schematic solutions: dormitory, kitchen, storeroom, and shared bathrooms. Without aesthetic concerns, it was based solely on hygienic solutions (Macedo, 1948). The Colonial Public Works agencies systematized identical solutions. The functional approach was maintained, and aligned batteries of shared rooms and services were accessed and interconnected by galleries that guaranteed some sort of collective housing experience (Aguiar 1952). These visions' speculative and essayistic nature contrasted with their implementation on the ground. In Angola, celibate housing was essentially a program for highly skilled displaced workers on construction sites or natural resource exploitation areas, as in the Diamang case. Through administrative and photographic documentation and fieldwork missions, this article aims to understand the impact of housing for single people on the design of colonial lodgement. Projects accomplished after the second world war, such as the residential blocks built during the construction of the Mabubas Dam or the Jamba mining complex will serve as a framework to assess the balance between the well-being of these workers and the response to a moral problem posed by colonial society.

--