The Co-PI, Samuel Shearer, under the supervision of the PI, Charles Piot, will explore how urban planning projects are managed, debated, and implemented in contexts undergoing rapid socioeconomic transformation. The research focuses on Kigali City Master Plan - a fifty-year urban planning project that the Rwandan government and its planning partners call a model of sustainable urban growth, environmental design, and economic development. Financed by international investors and outsourced to architecture firms in Singapore, and Boulder, Colorado, the Kigali City Master Plan is emblematic of flexible forms of urban planning that activate global networks of capital and expertise. The Master Plan also promises to demolish much of the city's current built environment to produce something entirely new: a holistic urban project, a vector of capital flow, and an entrée into the world economy. In the process hundreds of thousands of Kigali's residents will lose dwelling and work places. Yet surprisingly, those residents who are most vulnerable to losing their homes also dream along with urban planners and government officials of the better future the plan promises. Through informal interviews, participant observation, and critical analysis of the Master Plan and related media, this research will investigate this paradox and will examine the relationship between urban growth practices and the ideals that provide the vital energy for large-scale planning projects.
In addition to anthropology, this research engages debates in urban studies, architecture and African studies. The research will examine how built spaces, are produced by social, political, and economic processes. This study will use the theoretical and methodological toolkit available in anthropology, geography, and political economy to engage debates over the planning process and its implementation and asks how the inhabitants of Kigali will share the social costs of producing their new city. In doing so, it aims to produce knowledge on a crucial question: how humans will inhabit a world that is increasingly becoming urban. The research also contributes to the training of a graduate student in anthropology.
Forty percent of Africa’s population now lives in cities. By 2050 the urban population of Africa will triple to 1.23 billion or what will then be sixty percent of the continent’s total inhabitants. According to an often cited 2010 UN Habitat Report, The State Of African Cities: Governance Inequalities and Urban Land Markets, most of this growth is expected to continue in peripheral urban areas that lack formal planning, basic infrastructure, and security. If better planning practices are not implemented immediately in urban Africa, the environmental and social costs of this growth may be catastrophic. At the same time, there are many recognizable benefits of urban growth, including easier service provision and potential economic development. This research on the Kigali City Master Plan explores one proposed solution to issues of urban growth, not just in Rwanda, but throughout Africa and potentially the world. The Kigali City Master Plan is a 50 year urban planning project described by the Rwandan government and its planning partners as a model of sustainable urban development. It is designed as a holistic plan to eliminate the problems of urban informality (slums), infrastructural and service shortages within the city, and economic inequality. Designed by and large by architectural firms in Singapore, and Boulder, Colorado, the Kigali City Master Plan also illuminates the current global trade in expertise. Using Kinyarwanda as a primary language of investigation the researcher worked with various populations across the city who have been affected by the Kigali City Master Plan. This research explored the costs and benefits of particular urban design practices, the impacts of these on the lives of city dwellers, and their appropriateness in contemporary urban settings. It also examined the unintended consequences of the Kigali City Master Plan’s implementation and explores how the city’s inhabitants solve many of their own urban design problems without the assistance of government experts. The outcomes of this research, which will published as a PhD dissertation, show how the inhabitants of Kigali share the social costs of producing the new city. These results also critically assess many contemporary urban planning tools, including baseline statistic reports, censuses, and GPS mapping tools. The outcomes show that many of the technologies used in contemporary urban design often lead to misunderstandings about the city, its users, and their needs. It suggests that community based approaches to urban design are more effective than large-scale holistic master plans.
