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In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired American and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The firms produced promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. However, to make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed and its residents converted to consumers of green housing and service delivery systems.
 
Kigali is an ethnography of a city that is being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt for the end of the world. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Kigali residents as they navigate the catastrophes induced by sustainable urbanism, this book offers a searing critique of capitalist solutions to climate change and an account of the city’s popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism.

Samuel Shearer is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

What motivated you to write this story of urban redevelopment and focus on Kigali, Rwanda in particular?

Kigali is one of several cities across the African continent that has recently committed to green, finance-driven, urban renewal. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Kigali as only another “case” of urban design in Africa. The city is often boosted by journalists, development gurus, and mayors of other cities as a model of sustainable urbanism that other urban centers should follow. The Kigali City Master Plan extends far beyond the city limits, coming from offices in the United States, Singapore, and United Nations agencies. And, unlike the post-industrial cities that feature in most of the critical scholarship on sustainability, Kigali did not have a measurable carbon footprint that needed to be managed when the sustainable planning process began. 

So, my initial motivation was to try to track the blurring relationship between urban planning and marketing and the far-flung but often disconnected agents from all over the world that brought this project into being. But as the project developed, I realized the story of how the people who are scheduled to be evicted from the city manage to reclaim urban space through unauthorized repair and recycling was also central to the story of urban renewal and offered alternative ways to understand sustainability.

You discuss how many residents experienced the city as being “destroyed so that it could be rebuilt for the end of the world.” Can you share an example of how everyday people in Kigali navigated or contested this process?

Kigali’s international teams of consultants and mangers have consistently classified most of the built environment as “informal,” meaning not in line with the plans, zoning, and building regulations. They have demolished tens of thousands of homes and businesses in efforts to make the city “sustainable.” But all this destruction has not reduced the number of “informal” structures or the well-run illicit street economies that support the popular city. 

Throughout the book I show how ordinary residents repair their homes and lives from the destructive processes of sustainable urbanism by shutting down Kigali’s famously “efficient” networks of surveillance long enough to get access to new land and to rebuild illicit (but durable) housing faster than city authorities can tear a neighborhood down. Kigali residents do this, not by resisting the government, but by engaging with some elements of the state— community police units, utility companies, and low-level leaders—against upper-level officials and consultants who write plans.

What was an unexpected or surprising insight that unfolded as you were conducting research for the book?

Scarcity, as an idea, often drives sustainable urbanism. In Kigali, scarcity appears in the notion that the city’s “natural” features (its wetlands and forests) are scarce and therefore must be protected from humans. In addition, there is apparently a scarcity of housing and services in the city (despite an excess of “informal” housing). 

One surprising insight that I learned during my research is that scarcity is not just a descriptor or a projection, but a quality that must be achieved to make new markets for green commodities. For example, housing market reports in Kigali treat scarcity not as a shortage, but as effective consumer demand for new built houses. One case that illustrates this in the book is a model sustainable house that was intended to solve the problem of a shortage of affordable housing in the city. This house, which was designed by foreign consultants and built with Rwandan labor checked all the boxes of sustainability. It was built with low-cost, local materials, and used near zero-carbon building techniques. To avoid taxing the city’s service grid or polluting its ecologies the house was outfitted with off-grid green infrastructure. Water came from a rainwater catcher, electricity from a photovoltaic device; its cooking fuel from a biogas converter that also eliminated the problem of sewage. The house not only promised to address a shortage of low-cost housing in the city but to convert housing scarcity into a new market for more houses and off-grid green tech that would save the municipality money on public services. 

Issues arose when the pension fund decided to build 250 of these houses so they could be sold to residents in the city’s “informal” settlements. When the estate was finished, no one wanted to buy the houses. The project could not be abandoned without the pension fund losing its investment. So, the scarcity of housing and services that appeared in market reports had to be brought into reality. To fill the empty houses, city authorities demolished an entire neighborhood and forced the people who once lived there to purchase houses in the sustainable estate. 

In the book you critique the idea of sustainable urbanism as a capitalist solution to climate change. How do you define sustainable urbanism, and what was one of Kigali’s alternatives?

I define sustainable urbanism the way consultants and managers in Kigali define it: a project that aims to achieve a synergy between market growth and nature conservation. This (frequently critiqued) definition of sustainability is not unique to Kigali. For me (and many others), this version of sustainability is better understood as green capitalism: a concept that captures the contradictions of trying to find capitalist solutions to problems created, in large part, by capitalism. 

What I call the alternatives in Kigali are popular cultures, construction technologies, and recycling economies that are environmentally significant but rendered unsustainable by city managers, not because they threaten the environment, but because they threaten the promise of Kigali as a new market for foreign investment.  One of my favorite alternatives to sustainable urbanism are amatafari ya rukarakara, or air-dried bricks that have been used to build houses and shops in the city’s popular neighborhoods for over a hundred years. These bricks are made with earth that, because it is rich in clay and laterite, can dry in the sun into a durable, near zero-carbon, construction material that is water, fire, and earthquake resistant. And because earth—and the knowledge of how to work with it—is everywhere, these bricks are affordable. Earth construction is a problem for city authorities because the availability and affordability of earth allows Kigali landowners to build their own houses and neighborhoods outside zoning and building codes while outcompeting “sustainable” housing estates built by foreign investors.       

Your research brings together anthropology, urban studies, environmental humanities, and African Studies. For readers coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, what lessons do you hope they take away from this book?

The urban humanities approach in this book brings together ethnography, urban theory, ecocriticism, and Africanfuturist perspectives on the city. I am indebted to the scholars who came before me: Ato Quayson, Kenda Mutongi, and Garth Myers to name a few. My takeaway from this work  is that cities are made by more than policies and infrastructures. Cities are also made by popular cultures, ecologies, mediascapes and dreams. In addition, there are scholars such as Cajetan Iheka whose brilliant work on popular African media sharpens the debate on popular city building in urban studies.   

As a FirstGen author, what was the publishing process like for you? What advice would you give to other FirstGen scholars out there?

The publishing process was demystified thanks to the support from UC Press, the FirstGen program, and the series editors. I still made a lot of mistakes, especially in the final editing process when I suddenly lost confidence in the project and had to quickly pull myself together. But it was great to have the support of the press and the FirstGen program as they walked us through the publishing process.