{"title":"The Kigali story, the Singapore model, and rights to the city","authors":"Michael M.J. Fischer","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14308","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Three recent ethnographies of Kigali's urban planning and development provide a welcome addition to a long tradition of such ethnographies, including Lisa Redfield Peattie's famous fieldwork in the planning of Ciudad Guayana (<span>1968</span>; <span>1987</span>), Grace Goodell's ethnographic account of the disjunction between planning offices in Tehran and the urban settlements (<i>sharaks</i>) of the Khuzistan Development Project modelled on the Tennessee Vally Authority (<span>1986</span>), and Gökce Günel's ethnographic analysis of the disjunction between plans for, and implementation of, Mazdar City and Mazdar Institute in Abu Dhabi (<span>2019</span>).</p><p>Kigali, often dubbed ‘the African Singapore’, provides a model for thinking about new urban formations in Africa and elsewhere (see Pype, Adunbe & Fischer <span>2025</span>), the circulation of planning consultancies, and the key social issues of dealing with informal settlements, overcrowding, and rights to the city. Having worked in Singapore for the past decade or so, I was long interested in the claim of the Singapore consultancy, and town planning agency within Singapore (Surbana), to have provided the planning for Kigali as well as a number of other cities in Africa. It was one of several initiatives to sell Singapore's expertise (industrial parks in China; port management in Turkey). A two-week intensive visit to Rwanda, including to its new district hospital and University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, a poor region of the north – both initiatives of the anthropologist Paul Farmer and Partners in Health – in the company of Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin (a long-time ethnographer in Rwanda whose network gave access to several of Rwanda's strategists), enhanced my desire to further ‘read for the ethnography’.</p><p>‘Reading for the ethnography’ is my slogan for creating a detailed empirical basis for theory building, evaluation of ethnographic writing, cultural critique, and the transnational circuitry of post-globalization. Reading for the ethnography is the ‘ground-truthing’, or finer grained precision, of claims of theory, just as aerial photography requires on-the-ground verification and often alternative understandings: What is the evidence? How well does the text demonstrate linguistic and cultural competence in eliciting emic accounts? Are there other accounts in the literature, other histories of the specific places, or alternative explanations? In the present comparison of three ethnographies of the same city and administrative structures, I pay attention to the ethnographic facts that each adduces that I can use to create a mosaic understanding of different parts of the city, different local histories of settlement and redevelopment, and different evolving plans versus local resistance or counter-movements of residents, and how the interlocutors and informants evaluate, complain, or take advantage of changing effects of city planners, global financing, and of organic incremental growth and ad hoc solutions.</p><p>The three ethnographies are not quite like the elephant and the three blind men, but they present remarkably different accountings of how, where, and when things happened, even if at some points they draw upon similar generalizing language about financial and administrative logics and forces. I am interested in the way their empirical ethnographic materials complement each other to create a baseline for further inquiry – on Kigali, but <i>also</i> for comparative work across cities that face similar (but locally different) problems. I emphasize the ethnographic history of Singapore itself to counter the cliches, again looking for the precise ethnographic and historical evolutions in its experience, and the role of the Surbana town planning consultancy in Singapore and as it attempts to sell its experiences and expertise elsewhere. Writing about Kigali in transition must negotiate visionary ambitions and promissory publicity together with ‘ground truthing’, tracking emergent forms of social organization and struggles for rights to the city, along with gender relations, and visions of the good life.</p><p>The three ethnographies proved to be quite different in focus and evidentiary basis. Stephan Bock embedded himself in the urban planning ministries of Rwanda, and at the Surbana consultancy offices in Singapore, to examine the role of Surbana's master plans and building regulations for Kigali. Samuel Shearer embedded himself in the street vendor markets and informal settlements looking to how their residents try ‘to defend their collective resources against the liquidating processes of speculative urbanism’ (p. 5). Shakira Hudani focuses on three types of resettlement areas to which people evicted from informal settlements are moved. As the terms ‘master plans’ and ‘speculative urbanism’ indicate, the forces are not merely local or contained within nation-states, but are imaginaries and financial forces circulating the globe.</p><p>Kigali, Shearer suggests, has joined Singapore to be ‘on the forefront in a revolution of how cities are managed, lived, and imagined everywhere’ (p. 5). But Shearer is also an excellent guide to resistance and pushback from the people being managed. He takes a critical view of the master plan process ‘written by consultants in Singapore, funded by multinational investment corporations, to be exported from Kigali’ (p. 5). The ‘world class city’ for him does not actually produce the built environment it promises, but, ‘by activating global networks of capital and expertise with a compelling visual narrative about a city's future potential’, subverts the tactics available for use by the less advantaged city residents to have a stake in the city (p. 5). He claims the ‘international team of managers and consultants have “liberated” planning from the political and economic relations that paralyze planners in other cities’ (p. 5). His own excellent ethnography shows otherwise, or at least that it is not the whole story. Following Michael Goldman (<span>2011</span>), he asserts that the goals of ‘speculative urbanism’ are to create real estate investment opportunities. But, as Bock points out, money is required to build a city, and money-strapped Rwanda needed private-public investment to generate urban budgets but also ways to extract money from, and give ownership to, its own population.</p><p>As Beng-Huat Chua, Singapore's leading sociologist and loyal critic, demonstrates, the housing mechanism in Singapore <i>built the state</i> through forced savings that the state could then leverage (Chua <span>2024</span>). Rwanda, too, has a state mechanism to shape investment and growth: the national pension program (eligibility is paid contributions for fifteen years). Construction, in large part, is financed by three state-connected funds (Goodfellow & Smith <span>2013</span>). Rwanda's political-administrative structure of districts, sectors, cells, <i>imidugudu</i> (the smallest formal unit of a hundred or so households) and an informal <i>nyumbacumi</i> (person overseeing ten households) is analogous to the organization of Singapore's People's Action Party's voluntary organizations and community centres built into housing estates (though not down to the same formal degree of ten households). Goodfellow and Smith provide an overview of the struggle to organize the city of Kigali between 1994 and 2000, and to prevent the race riots that Singapore experienced in its early days of independence and government consolidation.</p><p>What is often called the ‘Singapore model’ is just one element of planning and design in a complex process of ‘from third world to first in one generation’ (in Lee Kuan Yew's famous tag line for ‘the Singapore Story’) or from low-income to middle-income country (in Paul Kagame's). Shearer, while criticizing aspects of Singapore's consultancy in Kigali notes that the whole idea was that the plan should pay for itself by attracting foreign capital. Furthermore, ‘what is called the Singapore model’ is ‘not because it follows that city's transformation, but because it conjures an idea of what global “city-ness” should look like, with Singapore as a reference’ (p. 131). The conjuring, he says, is ‘what Surbana sells’. It has sold ninety master plan projects in thirty countries mainly in Asia and Africa. These are promissory visions, and become integrated as one layer in cascades of implementation, with all the contingencies, blockages, and redesign involved. ‘Participatory planning’ is a buzz-word component (one that Lisa Redfield Peattie championed) but that Shearer points out in Rwanda today is often really participatory expropriation, letting coops and associations ‘purchase their own property and take out loans to develop that property’, often against the will (or lack of choice) of the participants (p. 139); a harsher version of the ‘forced savings’ that Beng-Huat Chua describes for Singapore.</p><p>So how did this process get started? Here Bock is helpful. Pundits, Bock says, regularly give Rwanda good marks for economic development and bad marks for authoritarianism and human rights violations. But such binaries, he argues ‘do not help to disentangle the complexity of relations and interactions’. He calls for multi-locale and multi-scalar ethnographic approaches. He watched Kigali develop from 2006 when there were only a few hotels and government buildings taller than a single storey, no traffic lights, and only mini-buses for public transportation. By 2011 there were cleared areas waiting for redevelopment, traffic lights, and larger buses.</p><p>In the immediate post-genocide years, emergency attention had to be given to cleaning up the city, disposing of the corpses, providing physical and food security, aiding orphans, and receiving waves of returning refugees and rural-to-urban migrants. There is an inexact parallel to the early post-World War II situation of Singapore, where both urban slums that grew during the war, and village kampongs, were cleared, and people were moved into high-rise apartment buildings. Kigali had World Bank ‘Tent, Temporary, Permanent Refugee’ and ‘Urban Infrastructure and City Management’ programmes, a UNDP cadastral information system, as well as preliminary city master plan efforts for a master plan with some advisors from the United States and Israel.</p><p>The first Kigali Conceptual Master Plan was produced by the Denver-based consultancy OZ Architecture in 2005–7. Singapore's Surbana was hired in 2008 to do a fuller master plan, and in 2015 <i>The Economist</i> dubbed Kigali ‘Africa's Singapore’. Kigali was, as Bock puts it, tidy and secure, with a well-run appearance, daily street cleaners, prohibition of begging, and banishment of plastic bags. Shearer is nostalgic for the earlier plan. Both he and Bock credit OZ with doing real site visits, walking the land, holding focus groups with residents, and building a qualitative database. They acknowledge that OZ had little to work with: there were no real maps, useful photographs, or documentation (whatever might have existed had been destroyed in the fighting in 1994 and the hurried exit of the previous administration). OZ developed a concept of ‘polycentric, semi-autonomous, mixed-use urban clusters, branching out from a public market and plaza’ into residences, health and education facilities with community gardens and greenbelts (Shearer, p. 125). They tried to expand on the existing informal settlement patterns, viewing the markets as assets to be maintained (traders and cooperatives paid taxes), and primarily recommending the settlements needed better infrastructure and land use regulations.</p><p>But a master plan is not just a blueprint: it is a tool to attract investors. OZ suggested a new city centre, did some detailed planning for four priority areas, and developed building standards. In 2009 an employee of OZ became head of Kigali's Urban Planning Department. But how to raise financing? Bock says references to Singapore kept coming up, and in 2008 visits were made to Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea. In 2011, Surbana won the tender for detailed planning of Kigali's Gasabo and Kicukiro Districts. A Surbana office was established within the Kigali planning department (the One Stop Center). Surbana promoted branding districts of Kigali in order to make it possible to visualize the plans and make them comprehensible to the wider public. This involved an inspection department (someone to show up on site), awareness programmes (often cast as ‘participatory planning’), and setting up a way for land owners to send SMS inquiries from their phones to see where their plot would be zoned in the master plan. Planners were open about the lag in producing the estimated 33,000 units of housing needed per year (only 6,000 built), and that investments naturally flowed into commercial space or higher end housing rather than affordable housing.1</p><p>Beng-Huat Chua, in ‘Singapore as model’ (<span>2011</span>), warns that the model cannot simply be transferred elsewhere, only relevant elements can be. The Singapore government owns 90 per cent of the land, and could do comprehensive planning, and with a good education system, Singapore could radically increase wages in the mid-1980s forcing labour-intensive manufacturing to exit, or invest in higher tech. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, this shift intensified to support ‘knowledge-based industries’ (finance, biosciences, pharmaceuticals). Surbana Urban Planning Group, as noted above, claims to have designed over 500 planning projects in thirty countries (in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Arabia). In Singapore it has helped create twenty-six comprehensively planned townships of over a million homes.</p><p>In Rwanda, the structure of the political economy was transformed from the agrarian Belgian colonial one, in which the peasants were given fixed amounts of land with contracts specifying the agricultural techniques to be used and production targets. Identity-cards, resident and work permits were issued, not unlike the Chinese <i>hukou</i> system, and <i>ujamaa</i> under Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. Under President Juvénal Habyarimana, the one-party state became increasingly totalitarian: migration to the city was not allowed; people found outside their communes were returned. Bock says 80,000 peasant households were resettled in uncultivated lands to expand production, subsequently requiring restoration by anti-erosion campaigns. Peasants were to produce export crops (tea and coffee). But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, global coffee and tea prices collapsed, and food security became a crisis. Pritish Behuria (<span>2020</span>) provides an overview, noting that in 1991 the World Bank and international aid shifted from supporting self-sufficient peasants, to calling for the free movement of labour and the development of market economies. For coffee, this meant moving up the value chain with specialty coffees, coffee bean washing, and alliances with international fair trade and branded corporate retailers.</p><p>Bock cites a 1996 Rwandan government declaration, ‘In a small country such as ours, without natural resources, the only viable option … is that of a dynamic private sector that can begin and sustain the economic diversification process’. Despite some longer-term budget support from the World Bank and IMF, the key issue was low capacity, especially as much of the 30-50-year-old generation was gone (evident still today in the very young high-level officials). And so, a key focus was to use international consultants for policy and regulations, but following Singapore, with an insistence that Rwandans had to become active participants in the planning processes, not just recipients of expertise.</p><p>Paul Kagame, officially elected President in 2003, had already been convening a series of meetings to plan the development of the country from low- to middle-income status by 2020 (‘Vision 2020’). Already, in 2000, a Rwandan team went to Harvard to learn about challenges of decentralization. A Poverty-Reduction Strategy Paper (2002) was used to qualify Rwanda for concessional debt relief from the World Bank, which also suggested learning from East Asian countries to create a globally competitive knowledge-based economy. The Rwanda Development Board (along the lines of the Economic Development Board of Singapore) was set up to serve as a ‘one-stop centre’ for investors, raising Rwanda's standing in the global ‘ease of doing business’ ratings, the context for <i>The Economist</i> dubbing Rwanda ‘Africa's Singapore’. The second five-year Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy for 2013-18 focused on hiring experts to mentor Rwandan counterparts, and to focus on urban land use and master plans.</p><p>Hudani argues that the planning apparatus of a developmental state is fundamentally opposed to a politics of inclusiveness, social justice issues of rights to the city, and incremental repair of physical and social habitat. She argues that one best understands Rwanda as a biopolitics of urban elites exercising control over the rural majority. This was the case in colonial times when the Belgians used Tutsi elites in a mode of indirect rule, and again today with the return of educated Tutsi and Hutu refugees (from violence in 1958, 1972, and 1994). Hudani's strong biopolitical claims depend upon her case studies of three different neighbourhoods and types of development (described below).</p><p>Shearer cites Henri Lefebvre's notion that three urban elements are always disrupting each other, ‘stitching, stretching, and ripping the urban fabric’: techno-centric planning, dissolution of the old built environment, and social practices (Shearer, p. 151). Rwandan scholars have studied the spatial injustice of urban renewal, using Google Maps and remote visual recognition tools to estimate wealth, parcel size, and housing quality. Many of these technical papers are heavy on statistical measures applied to inadequate data sets, with relatively minimal on-the-ground discussion with the people affected. Ethnographic ‘ground-truthing’ could help improve such exercises in conjunction with remote sensing data.</p><p>Missing in all three ethnographies, but central to the Singapore model, are accounts of scholarships to universities abroad as part of a national agenda to upgrade human capital. From 2000, Singapore funded 1,200 top students for PhDs and postdoctoral training at top universities abroad; and fast-tracked returnees up the ranks of the civil service or fostered starting their own research labs. Universities have been upgraded to world-ranked research institutions, a number of research institutes (Agency for Science, Technology and Research [A*STAR]) have been lavishly funded to kick-start science and technology research and development, along with inviting multinational investment. Rwanda is beginning to follow suit. The new Butaro District Hospital and associated University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), in collaboration with Boston-based Partners-in-Health and the Harvard Medical School, is intended to provide medical training for physicians and health care practitioners across the African continent. Its modern facilities, like the modern Faculty of Architecture and Environmental Design of the University of Rwanda in Kigali, were built with local materials, labour and attention to the environmental setting. Kigali's SEZ (special economic zone) hosts the inaugural site for BioNTech (one of the breakthrough innovators of the vaccine against COVID-19) to establish an mRNA vaccine research and development facility, to provide vaccines for countries in the African Union, the first such facility on the African continent (BioNTech <span>2023<i>a</i></span>; <span>2023<i>b</i></span>; Kansteiner <span>2024</span>; Pharmaceutical Technology <span>2024</span>). Missing also – part of the conditions of possibility but peripheral to the focus on the internal urban planning – are external sources of funding. For Singapore, this includes the offshore oil refineries on Jurong Island, and industrial parks on Batam island (Indonesia) and in Johur (Malaysia). There was once an ambitious tri-state cross-border economic zone, an ambitious plan promoted by President B.J. Habibie of Indonesia (Peachey, Perry & Grundy-Warr <span>1998</span>). For Rwanda, it includes the minerals extracted from eastern Congo through Rwandan-supported guerillas, and perhaps the peacekeepers it has deployed through the United Nations.</p><p>Urban ethnographies attempting to characterize emergent forms of social organization, imaginaries, and struggles for rights to the city, require a sense of historical trajectories. Gender relations are a theme and history that needs further excavation. Both Shearer's account of women street traders and heads of households, and also McMillin's (<span>2014</span>) recognition of an older East African pattern of women-led ‘possession cults’ that challenge patriarchy and forms of male power, are beginnings. For the educated middle classes, Rwanda has the distinction of more women in parliament than any other country, as well as a number of government ministers.</p><p>Shearer, a fluent Kinyarwanda speaker, begins with a lively anecdote of rock throwing by a local crowd at police, labourers and guards, who were sent to prevent locals from rebuilding a recently demolished house, owned by a woman street vendor, who couldn't afford to pay a bribe to her local ‘cell’ or community executive. Bribes (<i>akantu</i>, ‘a little something’) are tokens to keep exchanges and favours flowing, but, in this case, not only was the ask too much, but the executive invoked the city's master plan, which marked her house and the area for eventual demolition. The crowd not only confronted the demolition, but called a popular radio talk show as the events were happening. To add insult, the crowd chanted loudly the ‘patriotic’ work song, <i>tuzarwubaka</i>, used during weekly compulsory community service (<i>umuganda</i>).</p><p>Street vending, the livelihood of the house owner, is a subsistence strategy of women who peddle produce and ‘used’ clothing. They sell smaller units of produce that they have bought, or gained on credit, from shopkeepers or wholesalers, and thus make marginal amounts on the difference in price. Garments travel the world in large, 45 kg bundles, and are locally unbundled and sold as individual items in auctions. They are then mended or inventively refashioned piece by piece, and rebranded as ‘international’ (<i>mpuzamuhanga</i>) rather than as ‘used’, ‘seconds’, or ‘cast offs’. They are called <i>caguwa</i>. Local fashion is invented in this way. <i>Caguwa</i> is more than ‘fakes’ (for which there is also a market), or ‘used’. <i>Caguwa</i> employs thousands of <i>abaozi</i> (tailors), organized into sewing cooperatives, using pump sewing machines, coal irons, and stacks of replacement patches and labels, ‘mending, working stains and switching brand name tags’ (Shearer, p. 98). The street traders have their own pooling cooperatives, so each week or month someone gets to use the entire pool to pay down debts, buy something, etc. Many are single mothers, share child care with each other, and often live without men. Other modes of making a small living include sanitation cooperatives and companies (often owned by the army) that pay less than US$1.50/day, or slightly more for waste collectors and sorters (US$2/day); in the 2020s some machines for sorting were introduced.</p><p>Returning to the vignette, Shearer says, ‘The narrative of Kigali as an ordered state with a docile population, broke down, showing that the production and occupation of space is fiercely contested’ (p. 98). The police calmed the situation, took the radio station off air, and websites off line. The police convinced everyone to sit down for a meeting, arrested four, jailed them for a few days, and then quietly let them go.</p><p>For the city, street vendors, <i>akajagari</i> spaces, informal settlements, and underemployed young men are problematic morally (disordered, unhygienic), financially (not providing a tax base), and technically (on unsustainable slopes and wetlands). For Shearer, the vignette illustrates that ‘at stake for urban residents in the twenty-first century metropolis is how to defend collective resources against the liquidating processes of speculative urbanism’ (p. 24). Shearer provides ‘before and after’ satellite photographs of two razed <i>akajagari</i> informal settlements (‘slums’) where in July 2008 thousands of homes were demolished and looted by the soldiers and workers. The National Pension Fund had distributed compensation notifications to landowners, but only for the buildings, not the land, which it said belonged to the state. When the demolition bulldozers and work gangs came, people banged pots to alert others to save what they could. The residents also hired their own surveyors to appeal the inadequate compensation. Many families were just loaded onto trucks and taken to a new housing village (Batsinda) owned by the pension fund.</p><p>Shearer's ethnographic ear is powerful: none of the districts or neighborhoods of Kigali are called by their official names, but by names of war zones, other famous informal settlements (or slums), or are descriptively dismissive: Kosovo, Bannyahe (‘where do we piss or shit?’), Karabaye (‘[bad] things happen there’), Sodoma (Sodom and Gomorrah, in Accra, in the Bible), Dobandi (from French <i>des bandits</i>, i.e. gangster-ville), N'Djamena (in Chad), Kabakene (‘for poor people’). Shearer is nostalgic for the now razed Kiyovu cy'abaken and Kimicanga, which he says by the 1970s had become thriving cosmopolitan centres. Even though he agrees the one-party development state of Habyarimana was oppressive for most of the rural population, the middle and upper classes could live well from the booming coffee and tea economy, with foreign cars, fancy clothes, and electronics, and a music scene of rumba, reggae, igisope, and rhythm and blues. In 1989 the coffee prices crashed. In 1990 the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded from Uganda. The airwaves were taken over by anti-RPF, anti-Tutsi, state-sponsored propaganda. It was, Shearer says, the ‘evacuation of the world’: Indian and Omani traders left for Tanzania, and many ‘walked away from the city to wait out the war’, some going to the Congo where Mubutu welcomed them as a potential force to use against the RPF (p. 95). Shearer celebrates the ‘street festival atmosphere’ of the illegal street traders and vendors, but he is under no illusions that their various tactics of occupying space and oppositional gestures are a real alternative politics. He describes the demolition in 2014 of the Nyabugogo market built in 1977, and of other such market buildings, in an attempt to move vendors into new shopping malls in spaces away from their supporting populations, and designed more for showing off commodities than helping small businesses thrive.</p><p>In a final ethnographic chapter, he describes the corruption of the effort to provide water uphill to informal settlements such as Muganza on Mt. Kigali. Pipes, promised by a public-private scheme (the German utility Lahmeyer, contracted by the World Bank to privatize the Rwanda utility Electrogaz), never arrived, although the residents dug the ditches for the pipes. (The state cancelled the Lahmeyer contract and re-nationalized the utility.) Water infrastructure problems also exist further downhill, where residents have to descend to the wetlands and marshes for water. The dilemmas of capital costs for populations that can provide no tax base is not unique to Rwanda. Shearer at one point, in frustration, says that urban development in Kigali seems ‘less about social improvement and more about [rendering] a rural society governable by a predominantly urban, authoritarian, ethnically minority elite’ (p. 16) and that this elite has enough political and financial resources (in their transnational network of managers and consultants) to steamroll any attempt to block their speculative urbanism (p. 23). Indeed, he asks: how could a world-class city be designed and built within the limits of municipal finances?</p><p>Hudani provides case studies of three types of strategies to relocate people from informal settlements to make way for new development: (1) <i>eviction</i> to a new housing complex (Bannyahe); (2) an <i>urban finance frontier</i> (Bugesera), attracting capitalist investment at the expense of working-class or informal settlement residents; and (3) <i>model green village</i> (Rweru, a form of ‘villagization’ and deurbanization). She shows the march of calculations (rents, agricultural prices, time and labour costs, space metrics needed for urban habitation, made smaller and smaller as apartment blocks replace self-built houses with plots for growing food and raising animals) and the metrics of competitions among countries, cities, and districts, seeking capital, credit, and investment.</p><p>(1) <i>Eviction</i>. Situated on a steep gradient that the master plans designate ‘high-risk zones’, residents of Bannyahe were forbidden to upgrade or rehabilitate their houses, which they had built over time from bits of wood, then improved with dried mud brick and then with terracotta brick, as they waited for the state to evict them and offer them resettlement options: to relocate to a newly built housing estate (Batsinda) or accept a monetary settlement according to, increasingly contested, bureaucratic evaluations of their houses and land. Neither was really acceptable. The new apartments were small and the unit cost was far above the offered compensation. They could not get acceptable loan terms from the Rwanda Housing Bank (imagined by the planners), because it would not accept as collateral land titles or houses about to be razed (new housing construction not keeping pace with evictions). And they were being offered three-storey vertical mass housing in exchange for first floor houses with gardens. Many people owned multiple houses that provided rent that would be lost in the proposed resettlement. Bannyahe was earmarked for a ‘$56 million development by a Rwandan-Finnish investment consortium’. A total of 728 property owners objected. Two hundred sued in court for a fair monetary settlement (not the new apartments). They lost. They began to tear down their own houses in defiance, a form of anger that also happened in the countryside when the state tried to organize rural populations into group settlement schemes (<i>imidugudu</i>), and imposed new building code regulations, such as requiring metal roofs instead of traditional thatch. The residents of Bannyahe protested the absence of urban services in Bannyahe as abandonment by the state, using the same term <i>akajagari</i> that the upper classes used against them. <i>Akajagari</i> is unruly, disordered from the latter's perspective, and abandoned to self-help from the other. As Hudani puts it, ‘the transgressive political order that underlies Kigali's clean façade’ is achieved by the use of the state apparatus of security to give an appearance of order. Her chapter is titled, ‘Political abandonment’, that is, the ‘abandonment of promises of <i>urban inclusion</i> and <i>right to the city</i>’. Rather than upgrading informal settlements with infrastructure (municipal water, electricity, and sanitation), as in Istanbul's <i>gecekondu</i> and in other cities in which squatting and informal building led to political pressure for services and incorporation into the city, here, Hudani says, the master plan re-zones the informal settlement for investment by transnational capital.</p><p>Hudani describes Bannyahe as grown to over 1,600 households, the main market street at the top, and steep inclines towards the bottom where wetlands supplied water when uphill taps ran dry, where there were smaller market streets, and where Pentecostal and Protestant churches and some cooperatives provided a social fabric of collective life. As refugees returned, pressure built to reclaim property, leading to disputes over land.</p><p>(2) <i>The urban finance frontier of</i> Bugesera District lies just beyond the Nyabarongo river and the swamps surrounding it, marking the boundary of Kigali, and near where many bodies of the 1994 massacre were dumped. It has now become a new zone of capitalist investment. In the 1960s the Belgians moved Tutsi pastoralists from the Northern Province and elsewhere to these tsetse-infested low-lying marshlands, and tried to get Hutu to work as <i>paysannat</i>, the French term for land settlement schemes. Two of the churches (in Nyamata and Ntarama), where 10,000 and 6,000 Tutsi, respectively, were killed, are now genocide memorials. Hudani says that the intensity of the genocide massacres in Bugesera in 1994 indexed the large number of Tutsi relocated from elsewhere.</p><p>Today Bugesera District is an urban frontier, a zone of new investment, anchored by a planned new thirteen-billion-dollar international airport in Kanombe (60 per cent financed by Qatar Airways, with a projected capacity of serving 14 million passengers by 2032), as well as a new agricultural and technical university (in a government partnership with Warren Buffett who bought and donated the land), industrial zones, a bulk water supply facility, and a Chinese-built highway. The airport and other new constructions are regulated by the Green Mark Rating System of the Singapore Building Control Authority (BCA). The land on the way to the airport is being bought up by investors, recognizing it will rise in value. A One Stop Center (OSC) here, and in six other model cities, where all permits and administrative transactions can be done, has been established to speed up this development. OSCs also help create competition between districts, cities, and countries to attract investment, using the World Bank's performance-based ranking index of cities (aggregated time saved in investment and business processes). Rwanda is vying to be ranked among the easiest places to do business.</p><p>The 2012 decentralization policy was intended to increase competition over performance among districts, and institute more stringent regulations. District governments were mandated to hire twenty-four-hour cleaning services and rubbish removal on three-year contracts. Hygiene patrols (<i>isoku irondo</i>) provided oversight and enforcement. Hudani says there are over 13,000 workers (often poorly paid women) hired by 135 sanitation companies, operated and subsidized by the national defence forces, as well as local monthly communal labour (<i>umuganda</i>) groups. There are competitions (<i>isuku</i>, ‘order creation’) among districts (disciplined by <i>imihigo</i>, ‘vows to deliver’) announced on television, with performance score cards – to monitor target setting and delivery. Communal labour, Hudani notes, called ‘volunteering’, and ‘even quantified by the International Labor Organization’, is touted by cities to attract investment. Hudani says the urban poor are increasingly moved around from place to place in <i>waves of dislocation and dispossession</i>. Those who cannot comply with new building standards and sanitation codes are evicted, paralleling the rural poor whose land is collectivized and freed up for commercial agriculture or for conservation, and are resettled in new housing schemes (<i>imidugudu</i>) and green villages.</p><p>(3) The third strategy of removal is the <i>model green village</i>. Rweru was established in 2017 as part of a Rural Integrated Development Program (IDP). Rweru at first housed 144 families, later another 140 families, in clusters of four units (sharing a latrine and biogas digester), built of red brick with metal roofs. Funded by the UNDP's program ‘Ecosystems/Landscape approach to climate proof the Rural Settlement Program of Rwanda’, 416 such villages were to be built by 2024. Rweru is the show village that investors and foreign dignitaries are taken to see. Hudani calls it a Potemkin village. Villagers complain: the biogas isn't working; rainwater harvesting is not effective; the land is too small to grow crops; those resettled from lake islands complain they cannot farm or fish enough for their food needs and cannot easily leave to earn money.</p><p>‘Villagization’ was originally a rural resettlement programme for returning refugees. It was later justified as being a more rational means of crop production, supported by external funders, and modelled on programmes elsewhere, especially Julius Nyerere's <i>ujamaa</i> collectivized or co-operatized villages in Tanzania in the 1970s, putting row houses in the centre and agricultural land around it. Uganda and Ethiopia had similar schemes, as did South Korea under Park Chung-hee's development state (1963-79). In 2006, Hudani reports, South Korea's Saemaul Undong (SMU) or New Village Movement was introduced to Rwanda and eight other African countries. The promise was to promote self-sufficiency, productivity, popular participation in infrastructure management, discipline (diligence, self-help, cooperation), and integration of people from different places (at scale). In 2001 Human Rights Watch reported that between 1997 and 1999, a million people (225,000 households) were moved to <i>imidugudu</i> (collective villages) to bring the scattered population into more concentrated forms, and to break apart the social organizations of rural society (which Hudani says contributed to the genocide, but which she also suggests could support resistance to state planning). Especially after 1998, Hudani states that ‘many Rwandans experienced forced resettlement, and were coerced to destroy their own homes and relocate to sparsely inhabited <i>imidugudu</i> settlement areas’, where building materials rapidly became in short supply. The habitation/resettlement policy addressed the complexity of rival claims to houses and land in <i>gacaca</i> court disputes by moving people (willingly or not) into <i>imidugudu</i> villages. She is not clear, but it seems the green model village programme is an effort to re-imagine the earlier <i>imidugudu</i>, adding climate and ecological considerations (and metrics) to earlier collectivization.</p><p>Given these three examples, it is also not clear how the goals of urbanization are aligned. Hudani says Rwanda seeks a 35 per cent urbanization rate by 2024, up from 18-20 per cent. The scale of the problems <i>is</i> daunting: she claims that in 2007 60 per cent of the Rwandan population lived in extreme poverty, and 35 per cent were under-nourished.</p><p>The importance of Bock, Shearer, and Hudani's fieldwork reveals, as actionable and simultaneous, a multiple-fold helix of needs and processes in everyday urban negotiations, mobilizing citizen, as well as political will, beyond any simple technological, political, or economic fix.2 Singapore's Surbana was indeed important to Kigali, and Singapore remains an important referent: in planning, in provision of urban services, in education, in attracting foreign investment, and in deft use of branding. Cultural concepts of <i>akajagari</i> and <i>caguwa</i> open paths into not only experience-grounded epistemologies, but also dialectical aporia, to balance opposing imperatives or double-binds. <i>Akajagari</i> operates both as a disciplinary moral negative (unruly, unhygienic) and as a liberatory moral positive (porous, flexible), while <i>caguwa</i> similarly operates to transform clothing from ‘used’ or ‘second-hand’ or ‘factory seconds’ into inventive and distinctive styles. Films, such as Kivu Ruhorazoza's <i>Grey Matter</i> (2011) and <i>Fathers’ Day</i> (2022) provide insight into local narratives and psychological pressures, as do vignettes such as Shearer's account of resistance to demolition, and of local choke points (and thus money-extraction opportunities) in getting water to uphill informal settlements. Comparative examples of Singapore, Dharavi (Mumbai), and Manchester (England) can sharpen the realism of competing incentives and resistances at play.</p><p>The architect Roland Dierterle, defending the expense and flamboyance of the Kigali Convention Center in a poor country, says landmark projects demonstrate Rwanda's potential and show diaspora Rwandans they can be optimistic about returning home (Wild <span>2016</span>). He also defends the Convention Center as a model for sustainable energy development, a counter-concept to glass buildings. Bock similarly shows how public-private partnerships that bring investment can be incentivized and regulated to <i>prevent</i> finance capital from running wild.</p><p>Comparative perspectives are invaluable, not only the post-World War II reconstruction of housing in social democratic or socialist Europe and Singapore, but also the decay of those social contracts, most notably described for Manchester in England (Meek <span>2024</span>; Rose <span>2024</span>). Equally cautionary are contemporary fights over large-scale slums – Dharavi (Mumbai), Kibera (Nairobi), Orangi (Karachi), and Khayelitsha (Cape Town) – through private-public partnerships, or incremental improvements from shanties to working-class communities as in <i>gecekondu</i> in Istanbul, and <i>favelas</i> in Rio. The Dharavi case is particularly contested in the struggle over India's crony capitalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and businessman Gautam Adani, who was given the right to redevelop Dharavi, versus the civic groups that try to protect the rights to the city and the ecology of small businesses that provide an urban economic engine. Adani invokes the Singapore model, but not its social compact.</p><p>The three ethnographies of Bock, Shearer, and Hudani provide three very different perspectives, opening up the ‘model city’, ‘global city’, and ‘post-global city’ rubrics to more demanding realism about the circulation of finance and consultancies, as well as struggles to accommodate everyone's rights to the city, a matter not only of social justice, but of cultural liveability and long-term social and ecological sustainability.</p>","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 3","pages":"937-949"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2025-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.14308","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14308","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Three recent ethnographies of Kigali's urban planning and development provide a welcome addition to a long tradition of such ethnographies, including Lisa Redfield Peattie's famous fieldwork in the planning of Ciudad Guayana (1968; 1987), Grace Goodell's ethnographic account of the disjunction between planning offices in Tehran and the urban settlements (sharaks) of the Khuzistan Development Project modelled on the Tennessee Vally Authority (1986), and Gökce Günel's ethnographic analysis of the disjunction between plans for, and implementation of, Mazdar City and Mazdar Institute in Abu Dhabi (2019).
Kigali, often dubbed ‘the African Singapore’, provides a model for thinking about new urban formations in Africa and elsewhere (see Pype, Adunbe & Fischer 2025), the circulation of planning consultancies, and the key social issues of dealing with informal settlements, overcrowding, and rights to the city. Having worked in Singapore for the past decade or so, I was long interested in the claim of the Singapore consultancy, and town planning agency within Singapore (Surbana), to have provided the planning for Kigali as well as a number of other cities in Africa. It was one of several initiatives to sell Singapore's expertise (industrial parks in China; port management in Turkey). A two-week intensive visit to Rwanda, including to its new district hospital and University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, a poor region of the north – both initiatives of the anthropologist Paul Farmer and Partners in Health – in the company of Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin (a long-time ethnographer in Rwanda whose network gave access to several of Rwanda's strategists), enhanced my desire to further ‘read for the ethnography’.
‘Reading for the ethnography’ is my slogan for creating a detailed empirical basis for theory building, evaluation of ethnographic writing, cultural critique, and the transnational circuitry of post-globalization. Reading for the ethnography is the ‘ground-truthing’, or finer grained precision, of claims of theory, just as aerial photography requires on-the-ground verification and often alternative understandings: What is the evidence? How well does the text demonstrate linguistic and cultural competence in eliciting emic accounts? Are there other accounts in the literature, other histories of the specific places, or alternative explanations? In the present comparison of three ethnographies of the same city and administrative structures, I pay attention to the ethnographic facts that each adduces that I can use to create a mosaic understanding of different parts of the city, different local histories of settlement and redevelopment, and different evolving plans versus local resistance or counter-movements of residents, and how the interlocutors and informants evaluate, complain, or take advantage of changing effects of city planners, global financing, and of organic incremental growth and ad hoc solutions.
The three ethnographies are not quite like the elephant and the three blind men, but they present remarkably different accountings of how, where, and when things happened, even if at some points they draw upon similar generalizing language about financial and administrative logics and forces. I am interested in the way their empirical ethnographic materials complement each other to create a baseline for further inquiry – on Kigali, but also for comparative work across cities that face similar (but locally different) problems. I emphasize the ethnographic history of Singapore itself to counter the cliches, again looking for the precise ethnographic and historical evolutions in its experience, and the role of the Surbana town planning consultancy in Singapore and as it attempts to sell its experiences and expertise elsewhere. Writing about Kigali in transition must negotiate visionary ambitions and promissory publicity together with ‘ground truthing’, tracking emergent forms of social organization and struggles for rights to the city, along with gender relations, and visions of the good life.
The three ethnographies proved to be quite different in focus and evidentiary basis. Stephan Bock embedded himself in the urban planning ministries of Rwanda, and at the Surbana consultancy offices in Singapore, to examine the role of Surbana's master plans and building regulations for Kigali. Samuel Shearer embedded himself in the street vendor markets and informal settlements looking to how their residents try ‘to defend their collective resources against the liquidating processes of speculative urbanism’ (p. 5). Shakira Hudani focuses on three types of resettlement areas to which people evicted from informal settlements are moved. As the terms ‘master plans’ and ‘speculative urbanism’ indicate, the forces are not merely local or contained within nation-states, but are imaginaries and financial forces circulating the globe.
Kigali, Shearer suggests, has joined Singapore to be ‘on the forefront in a revolution of how cities are managed, lived, and imagined everywhere’ (p. 5). But Shearer is also an excellent guide to resistance and pushback from the people being managed. He takes a critical view of the master plan process ‘written by consultants in Singapore, funded by multinational investment corporations, to be exported from Kigali’ (p. 5). The ‘world class city’ for him does not actually produce the built environment it promises, but, ‘by activating global networks of capital and expertise with a compelling visual narrative about a city's future potential’, subverts the tactics available for use by the less advantaged city residents to have a stake in the city (p. 5). He claims the ‘international team of managers and consultants have “liberated” planning from the political and economic relations that paralyze planners in other cities’ (p. 5). His own excellent ethnography shows otherwise, or at least that it is not the whole story. Following Michael Goldman (2011), he asserts that the goals of ‘speculative urbanism’ are to create real estate investment opportunities. But, as Bock points out, money is required to build a city, and money-strapped Rwanda needed private-public investment to generate urban budgets but also ways to extract money from, and give ownership to, its own population.
As Beng-Huat Chua, Singapore's leading sociologist and loyal critic, demonstrates, the housing mechanism in Singapore built the state through forced savings that the state could then leverage (Chua 2024). Rwanda, too, has a state mechanism to shape investment and growth: the national pension program (eligibility is paid contributions for fifteen years). Construction, in large part, is financed by three state-connected funds (Goodfellow & Smith 2013). Rwanda's political-administrative structure of districts, sectors, cells, imidugudu (the smallest formal unit of a hundred or so households) and an informal nyumbacumi (person overseeing ten households) is analogous to the organization of Singapore's People's Action Party's voluntary organizations and community centres built into housing estates (though not down to the same formal degree of ten households). Goodfellow and Smith provide an overview of the struggle to organize the city of Kigali between 1994 and 2000, and to prevent the race riots that Singapore experienced in its early days of independence and government consolidation.
What is often called the ‘Singapore model’ is just one element of planning and design in a complex process of ‘from third world to first in one generation’ (in Lee Kuan Yew's famous tag line for ‘the Singapore Story’) or from low-income to middle-income country (in Paul Kagame's). Shearer, while criticizing aspects of Singapore's consultancy in Kigali notes that the whole idea was that the plan should pay for itself by attracting foreign capital. Furthermore, ‘what is called the Singapore model’ is ‘not because it follows that city's transformation, but because it conjures an idea of what global “city-ness” should look like, with Singapore as a reference’ (p. 131). The conjuring, he says, is ‘what Surbana sells’. It has sold ninety master plan projects in thirty countries mainly in Asia and Africa. These are promissory visions, and become integrated as one layer in cascades of implementation, with all the contingencies, blockages, and redesign involved. ‘Participatory planning’ is a buzz-word component (one that Lisa Redfield Peattie championed) but that Shearer points out in Rwanda today is often really participatory expropriation, letting coops and associations ‘purchase their own property and take out loans to develop that property’, often against the will (or lack of choice) of the participants (p. 139); a harsher version of the ‘forced savings’ that Beng-Huat Chua describes for Singapore.
So how did this process get started? Here Bock is helpful. Pundits, Bock says, regularly give Rwanda good marks for economic development and bad marks for authoritarianism and human rights violations. But such binaries, he argues ‘do not help to disentangle the complexity of relations and interactions’. He calls for multi-locale and multi-scalar ethnographic approaches. He watched Kigali develop from 2006 when there were only a few hotels and government buildings taller than a single storey, no traffic lights, and only mini-buses for public transportation. By 2011 there were cleared areas waiting for redevelopment, traffic lights, and larger buses.
In the immediate post-genocide years, emergency attention had to be given to cleaning up the city, disposing of the corpses, providing physical and food security, aiding orphans, and receiving waves of returning refugees and rural-to-urban migrants. There is an inexact parallel to the early post-World War II situation of Singapore, where both urban slums that grew during the war, and village kampongs, were cleared, and people were moved into high-rise apartment buildings. Kigali had World Bank ‘Tent, Temporary, Permanent Refugee’ and ‘Urban Infrastructure and City Management’ programmes, a UNDP cadastral information system, as well as preliminary city master plan efforts for a master plan with some advisors from the United States and Israel.
The first Kigali Conceptual Master Plan was produced by the Denver-based consultancy OZ Architecture in 2005–7. Singapore's Surbana was hired in 2008 to do a fuller master plan, and in 2015 The Economist dubbed Kigali ‘Africa's Singapore’. Kigali was, as Bock puts it, tidy and secure, with a well-run appearance, daily street cleaners, prohibition of begging, and banishment of plastic bags. Shearer is nostalgic for the earlier plan. Both he and Bock credit OZ with doing real site visits, walking the land, holding focus groups with residents, and building a qualitative database. They acknowledge that OZ had little to work with: there were no real maps, useful photographs, or documentation (whatever might have existed had been destroyed in the fighting in 1994 and the hurried exit of the previous administration). OZ developed a concept of ‘polycentric, semi-autonomous, mixed-use urban clusters, branching out from a public market and plaza’ into residences, health and education facilities with community gardens and greenbelts (Shearer, p. 125). They tried to expand on the existing informal settlement patterns, viewing the markets as assets to be maintained (traders and cooperatives paid taxes), and primarily recommending the settlements needed better infrastructure and land use regulations.
But a master plan is not just a blueprint: it is a tool to attract investors. OZ suggested a new city centre, did some detailed planning for four priority areas, and developed building standards. In 2009 an employee of OZ became head of Kigali's Urban Planning Department. But how to raise financing? Bock says references to Singapore kept coming up, and in 2008 visits were made to Singapore, Vietnam, and South Korea. In 2011, Surbana won the tender for detailed planning of Kigali's Gasabo and Kicukiro Districts. A Surbana office was established within the Kigali planning department (the One Stop Center). Surbana promoted branding districts of Kigali in order to make it possible to visualize the plans and make them comprehensible to the wider public. This involved an inspection department (someone to show up on site), awareness programmes (often cast as ‘participatory planning’), and setting up a way for land owners to send SMS inquiries from their phones to see where their plot would be zoned in the master plan. Planners were open about the lag in producing the estimated 33,000 units of housing needed per year (only 6,000 built), and that investments naturally flowed into commercial space or higher end housing rather than affordable housing.1
Beng-Huat Chua, in ‘Singapore as model’ (2011), warns that the model cannot simply be transferred elsewhere, only relevant elements can be. The Singapore government owns 90 per cent of the land, and could do comprehensive planning, and with a good education system, Singapore could radically increase wages in the mid-1980s forcing labour-intensive manufacturing to exit, or invest in higher tech. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, this shift intensified to support ‘knowledge-based industries’ (finance, biosciences, pharmaceuticals). Surbana Urban Planning Group, as noted above, claims to have designed over 500 planning projects in thirty countries (in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Arabia). In Singapore it has helped create twenty-six comprehensively planned townships of over a million homes.
In Rwanda, the structure of the political economy was transformed from the agrarian Belgian colonial one, in which the peasants were given fixed amounts of land with contracts specifying the agricultural techniques to be used and production targets. Identity-cards, resident and work permits were issued, not unlike the Chinese hukou system, and ujamaa under Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. Under President Juvénal Habyarimana, the one-party state became increasingly totalitarian: migration to the city was not allowed; people found outside their communes were returned. Bock says 80,000 peasant households were resettled in uncultivated lands to expand production, subsequently requiring restoration by anti-erosion campaigns. Peasants were to produce export crops (tea and coffee). But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, global coffee and tea prices collapsed, and food security became a crisis. Pritish Behuria (2020) provides an overview, noting that in 1991 the World Bank and international aid shifted from supporting self-sufficient peasants, to calling for the free movement of labour and the development of market economies. For coffee, this meant moving up the value chain with specialty coffees, coffee bean washing, and alliances with international fair trade and branded corporate retailers.
Bock cites a 1996 Rwandan government declaration, ‘In a small country such as ours, without natural resources, the only viable option … is that of a dynamic private sector that can begin and sustain the economic diversification process’. Despite some longer-term budget support from the World Bank and IMF, the key issue was low capacity, especially as much of the 30-50-year-old generation was gone (evident still today in the very young high-level officials). And so, a key focus was to use international consultants for policy and regulations, but following Singapore, with an insistence that Rwandans had to become active participants in the planning processes, not just recipients of expertise.
Paul Kagame, officially elected President in 2003, had already been convening a series of meetings to plan the development of the country from low- to middle-income status by 2020 (‘Vision 2020’). Already, in 2000, a Rwandan team went to Harvard to learn about challenges of decentralization. A Poverty-Reduction Strategy Paper (2002) was used to qualify Rwanda for concessional debt relief from the World Bank, which also suggested learning from East Asian countries to create a globally competitive knowledge-based economy. The Rwanda Development Board (along the lines of the Economic Development Board of Singapore) was set up to serve as a ‘one-stop centre’ for investors, raising Rwanda's standing in the global ‘ease of doing business’ ratings, the context for The Economist dubbing Rwanda ‘Africa's Singapore’. The second five-year Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy for 2013-18 focused on hiring experts to mentor Rwandan counterparts, and to focus on urban land use and master plans.
Hudani argues that the planning apparatus of a developmental state is fundamentally opposed to a politics of inclusiveness, social justice issues of rights to the city, and incremental repair of physical and social habitat. She argues that one best understands Rwanda as a biopolitics of urban elites exercising control over the rural majority. This was the case in colonial times when the Belgians used Tutsi elites in a mode of indirect rule, and again today with the return of educated Tutsi and Hutu refugees (from violence in 1958, 1972, and 1994). Hudani's strong biopolitical claims depend upon her case studies of three different neighbourhoods and types of development (described below).
Shearer cites Henri Lefebvre's notion that three urban elements are always disrupting each other, ‘stitching, stretching, and ripping the urban fabric’: techno-centric planning, dissolution of the old built environment, and social practices (Shearer, p. 151). Rwandan scholars have studied the spatial injustice of urban renewal, using Google Maps and remote visual recognition tools to estimate wealth, parcel size, and housing quality. Many of these technical papers are heavy on statistical measures applied to inadequate data sets, with relatively minimal on-the-ground discussion with the people affected. Ethnographic ‘ground-truthing’ could help improve such exercises in conjunction with remote sensing data.
Missing in all three ethnographies, but central to the Singapore model, are accounts of scholarships to universities abroad as part of a national agenda to upgrade human capital. From 2000, Singapore funded 1,200 top students for PhDs and postdoctoral training at top universities abroad; and fast-tracked returnees up the ranks of the civil service or fostered starting their own research labs. Universities have been upgraded to world-ranked research institutions, a number of research institutes (Agency for Science, Technology and Research [A*STAR]) have been lavishly funded to kick-start science and technology research and development, along with inviting multinational investment. Rwanda is beginning to follow suit. The new Butaro District Hospital and associated University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), in collaboration with Boston-based Partners-in-Health and the Harvard Medical School, is intended to provide medical training for physicians and health care practitioners across the African continent. Its modern facilities, like the modern Faculty of Architecture and Environmental Design of the University of Rwanda in Kigali, were built with local materials, labour and attention to the environmental setting. Kigali's SEZ (special economic zone) hosts the inaugural site for BioNTech (one of the breakthrough innovators of the vaccine against COVID-19) to establish an mRNA vaccine research and development facility, to provide vaccines for countries in the African Union, the first such facility on the African continent (BioNTech 2023a; 2023b; Kansteiner 2024; Pharmaceutical Technology 2024). Missing also – part of the conditions of possibility but peripheral to the focus on the internal urban planning – are external sources of funding. For Singapore, this includes the offshore oil refineries on Jurong Island, and industrial parks on Batam island (Indonesia) and in Johur (Malaysia). There was once an ambitious tri-state cross-border economic zone, an ambitious plan promoted by President B.J. Habibie of Indonesia (Peachey, Perry & Grundy-Warr 1998). For Rwanda, it includes the minerals extracted from eastern Congo through Rwandan-supported guerillas, and perhaps the peacekeepers it has deployed through the United Nations.
Urban ethnographies attempting to characterize emergent forms of social organization, imaginaries, and struggles for rights to the city, require a sense of historical trajectories. Gender relations are a theme and history that needs further excavation. Both Shearer's account of women street traders and heads of households, and also McMillin's (2014) recognition of an older East African pattern of women-led ‘possession cults’ that challenge patriarchy and forms of male power, are beginnings. For the educated middle classes, Rwanda has the distinction of more women in parliament than any other country, as well as a number of government ministers.
Shearer, a fluent Kinyarwanda speaker, begins with a lively anecdote of rock throwing by a local crowd at police, labourers and guards, who were sent to prevent locals from rebuilding a recently demolished house, owned by a woman street vendor, who couldn't afford to pay a bribe to her local ‘cell’ or community executive. Bribes (akantu, ‘a little something’) are tokens to keep exchanges and favours flowing, but, in this case, not only was the ask too much, but the executive invoked the city's master plan, which marked her house and the area for eventual demolition. The crowd not only confronted the demolition, but called a popular radio talk show as the events were happening. To add insult, the crowd chanted loudly the ‘patriotic’ work song, tuzarwubaka, used during weekly compulsory community service (umuganda).
Street vending, the livelihood of the house owner, is a subsistence strategy of women who peddle produce and ‘used’ clothing. They sell smaller units of produce that they have bought, or gained on credit, from shopkeepers or wholesalers, and thus make marginal amounts on the difference in price. Garments travel the world in large, 45 kg bundles, and are locally unbundled and sold as individual items in auctions. They are then mended or inventively refashioned piece by piece, and rebranded as ‘international’ (mpuzamuhanga) rather than as ‘used’, ‘seconds’, or ‘cast offs’. They are called caguwa. Local fashion is invented in this way. Caguwa is more than ‘fakes’ (for which there is also a market), or ‘used’. Caguwa employs thousands of abaozi (tailors), organized into sewing cooperatives, using pump sewing machines, coal irons, and stacks of replacement patches and labels, ‘mending, working stains and switching brand name tags’ (Shearer, p. 98). The street traders have their own pooling cooperatives, so each week or month someone gets to use the entire pool to pay down debts, buy something, etc. Many are single mothers, share child care with each other, and often live without men. Other modes of making a small living include sanitation cooperatives and companies (often owned by the army) that pay less than US$1.50/day, or slightly more for waste collectors and sorters (US$2/day); in the 2020s some machines for sorting were introduced.
Returning to the vignette, Shearer says, ‘The narrative of Kigali as an ordered state with a docile population, broke down, showing that the production and occupation of space is fiercely contested’ (p. 98). The police calmed the situation, took the radio station off air, and websites off line. The police convinced everyone to sit down for a meeting, arrested four, jailed them for a few days, and then quietly let them go.
For the city, street vendors, akajagari spaces, informal settlements, and underemployed young men are problematic morally (disordered, unhygienic), financially (not providing a tax base), and technically (on unsustainable slopes and wetlands). For Shearer, the vignette illustrates that ‘at stake for urban residents in the twenty-first century metropolis is how to defend collective resources against the liquidating processes of speculative urbanism’ (p. 24). Shearer provides ‘before and after’ satellite photographs of two razed akajagari informal settlements (‘slums’) where in July 2008 thousands of homes were demolished and looted by the soldiers and workers. The National Pension Fund had distributed compensation notifications to landowners, but only for the buildings, not the land, which it said belonged to the state. When the demolition bulldozers and work gangs came, people banged pots to alert others to save what they could. The residents also hired their own surveyors to appeal the inadequate compensation. Many families were just loaded onto trucks and taken to a new housing village (Batsinda) owned by the pension fund.
Shearer's ethnographic ear is powerful: none of the districts or neighborhoods of Kigali are called by their official names, but by names of war zones, other famous informal settlements (or slums), or are descriptively dismissive: Kosovo, Bannyahe (‘where do we piss or shit?’), Karabaye (‘[bad] things happen there’), Sodoma (Sodom and Gomorrah, in Accra, in the Bible), Dobandi (from French des bandits, i.e. gangster-ville), N'Djamena (in Chad), Kabakene (‘for poor people’). Shearer is nostalgic for the now razed Kiyovu cy'abaken and Kimicanga, which he says by the 1970s had become thriving cosmopolitan centres. Even though he agrees the one-party development state of Habyarimana was oppressive for most of the rural population, the middle and upper classes could live well from the booming coffee and tea economy, with foreign cars, fancy clothes, and electronics, and a music scene of rumba, reggae, igisope, and rhythm and blues. In 1989 the coffee prices crashed. In 1990 the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded from Uganda. The airwaves were taken over by anti-RPF, anti-Tutsi, state-sponsored propaganda. It was, Shearer says, the ‘evacuation of the world’: Indian and Omani traders left for Tanzania, and many ‘walked away from the city to wait out the war’, some going to the Congo where Mubutu welcomed them as a potential force to use against the RPF (p. 95). Shearer celebrates the ‘street festival atmosphere’ of the illegal street traders and vendors, but he is under no illusions that their various tactics of occupying space and oppositional gestures are a real alternative politics. He describes the demolition in 2014 of the Nyabugogo market built in 1977, and of other such market buildings, in an attempt to move vendors into new shopping malls in spaces away from their supporting populations, and designed more for showing off commodities than helping small businesses thrive.
In a final ethnographic chapter, he describes the corruption of the effort to provide water uphill to informal settlements such as Muganza on Mt. Kigali. Pipes, promised by a public-private scheme (the German utility Lahmeyer, contracted by the World Bank to privatize the Rwanda utility Electrogaz), never arrived, although the residents dug the ditches for the pipes. (The state cancelled the Lahmeyer contract and re-nationalized the utility.) Water infrastructure problems also exist further downhill, where residents have to descend to the wetlands and marshes for water. The dilemmas of capital costs for populations that can provide no tax base is not unique to Rwanda. Shearer at one point, in frustration, says that urban development in Kigali seems ‘less about social improvement and more about [rendering] a rural society governable by a predominantly urban, authoritarian, ethnically minority elite’ (p. 16) and that this elite has enough political and financial resources (in their transnational network of managers and consultants) to steamroll any attempt to block their speculative urbanism (p. 23). Indeed, he asks: how could a world-class city be designed and built within the limits of municipal finances?
Hudani provides case studies of three types of strategies to relocate people from informal settlements to make way for new development: (1) eviction to a new housing complex (Bannyahe); (2) an urban finance frontier (Bugesera), attracting capitalist investment at the expense of working-class or informal settlement residents; and (3) model green village (Rweru, a form of ‘villagization’ and deurbanization). She shows the march of calculations (rents, agricultural prices, time and labour costs, space metrics needed for urban habitation, made smaller and smaller as apartment blocks replace self-built houses with plots for growing food and raising animals) and the metrics of competitions among countries, cities, and districts, seeking capital, credit, and investment.
(1) Eviction. Situated on a steep gradient that the master plans designate ‘high-risk zones’, residents of Bannyahe were forbidden to upgrade or rehabilitate their houses, which they had built over time from bits of wood, then improved with dried mud brick and then with terracotta brick, as they waited for the state to evict them and offer them resettlement options: to relocate to a newly built housing estate (Batsinda) or accept a monetary settlement according to, increasingly contested, bureaucratic evaluations of their houses and land. Neither was really acceptable. The new apartments were small and the unit cost was far above the offered compensation. They could not get acceptable loan terms from the Rwanda Housing Bank (imagined by the planners), because it would not accept as collateral land titles or houses about to be razed (new housing construction not keeping pace with evictions). And they were being offered three-storey vertical mass housing in exchange for first floor houses with gardens. Many people owned multiple houses that provided rent that would be lost in the proposed resettlement. Bannyahe was earmarked for a ‘$56 million development by a Rwandan-Finnish investment consortium’. A total of 728 property owners objected. Two hundred sued in court for a fair monetary settlement (not the new apartments). They lost. They began to tear down their own houses in defiance, a form of anger that also happened in the countryside when the state tried to organize rural populations into group settlement schemes (imidugudu), and imposed new building code regulations, such as requiring metal roofs instead of traditional thatch. The residents of Bannyahe protested the absence of urban services in Bannyahe as abandonment by the state, using the same term akajagari that the upper classes used against them. Akajagari is unruly, disordered from the latter's perspective, and abandoned to self-help from the other. As Hudani puts it, ‘the transgressive political order that underlies Kigali's clean façade’ is achieved by the use of the state apparatus of security to give an appearance of order. Her chapter is titled, ‘Political abandonment’, that is, the ‘abandonment of promises of urban inclusion and right to the city’. Rather than upgrading informal settlements with infrastructure (municipal water, electricity, and sanitation), as in Istanbul's gecekondu and in other cities in which squatting and informal building led to political pressure for services and incorporation into the city, here, Hudani says, the master plan re-zones the informal settlement for investment by transnational capital.
Hudani describes Bannyahe as grown to over 1,600 households, the main market street at the top, and steep inclines towards the bottom where wetlands supplied water when uphill taps ran dry, where there were smaller market streets, and where Pentecostal and Protestant churches and some cooperatives provided a social fabric of collective life. As refugees returned, pressure built to reclaim property, leading to disputes over land.
(2) The urban finance frontier of Bugesera District lies just beyond the Nyabarongo river and the swamps surrounding it, marking the boundary of Kigali, and near where many bodies of the 1994 massacre were dumped. It has now become a new zone of capitalist investment. In the 1960s the Belgians moved Tutsi pastoralists from the Northern Province and elsewhere to these tsetse-infested low-lying marshlands, and tried to get Hutu to work as paysannat, the French term for land settlement schemes. Two of the churches (in Nyamata and Ntarama), where 10,000 and 6,000 Tutsi, respectively, were killed, are now genocide memorials. Hudani says that the intensity of the genocide massacres in Bugesera in 1994 indexed the large number of Tutsi relocated from elsewhere.
Today Bugesera District is an urban frontier, a zone of new investment, anchored by a planned new thirteen-billion-dollar international airport in Kanombe (60 per cent financed by Qatar Airways, with a projected capacity of serving 14 million passengers by 2032), as well as a new agricultural and technical university (in a government partnership with Warren Buffett who bought and donated the land), industrial zones, a bulk water supply facility, and a Chinese-built highway. The airport and other new constructions are regulated by the Green Mark Rating System of the Singapore Building Control Authority (BCA). The land on the way to the airport is being bought up by investors, recognizing it will rise in value. A One Stop Center (OSC) here, and in six other model cities, where all permits and administrative transactions can be done, has been established to speed up this development. OSCs also help create competition between districts, cities, and countries to attract investment, using the World Bank's performance-based ranking index of cities (aggregated time saved in investment and business processes). Rwanda is vying to be ranked among the easiest places to do business.
The 2012 decentralization policy was intended to increase competition over performance among districts, and institute more stringent regulations. District governments were mandated to hire twenty-four-hour cleaning services and rubbish removal on three-year contracts. Hygiene patrols (isoku irondo) provided oversight and enforcement. Hudani says there are over 13,000 workers (often poorly paid women) hired by 135 sanitation companies, operated and subsidized by the national defence forces, as well as local monthly communal labour (umuganda) groups. There are competitions (isuku, ‘order creation’) among districts (disciplined by imihigo, ‘vows to deliver’) announced on television, with performance score cards – to monitor target setting and delivery. Communal labour, Hudani notes, called ‘volunteering’, and ‘even quantified by the International Labor Organization’, is touted by cities to attract investment. Hudani says the urban poor are increasingly moved around from place to place in waves of dislocation and dispossession. Those who cannot comply with new building standards and sanitation codes are evicted, paralleling the rural poor whose land is collectivized and freed up for commercial agriculture or for conservation, and are resettled in new housing schemes (imidugudu) and green villages.
(3) The third strategy of removal is the model green village. Rweru was established in 2017 as part of a Rural Integrated Development Program (IDP). Rweru at first housed 144 families, later another 140 families, in clusters of four units (sharing a latrine and biogas digester), built of red brick with metal roofs. Funded by the UNDP's program ‘Ecosystems/Landscape approach to climate proof the Rural Settlement Program of Rwanda’, 416 such villages were to be built by 2024. Rweru is the show village that investors and foreign dignitaries are taken to see. Hudani calls it a Potemkin village. Villagers complain: the biogas isn't working; rainwater harvesting is not effective; the land is too small to grow crops; those resettled from lake islands complain they cannot farm or fish enough for their food needs and cannot easily leave to earn money.
‘Villagization’ was originally a rural resettlement programme for returning refugees. It was later justified as being a more rational means of crop production, supported by external funders, and modelled on programmes elsewhere, especially Julius Nyerere's ujamaa collectivized or co-operatized villages in Tanzania in the 1970s, putting row houses in the centre and agricultural land around it. Uganda and Ethiopia had similar schemes, as did South Korea under Park Chung-hee's development state (1963-79). In 2006, Hudani reports, South Korea's Saemaul Undong (SMU) or New Village Movement was introduced to Rwanda and eight other African countries. The promise was to promote self-sufficiency, productivity, popular participation in infrastructure management, discipline (diligence, self-help, cooperation), and integration of people from different places (at scale). In 2001 Human Rights Watch reported that between 1997 and 1999, a million people (225,000 households) were moved to imidugudu (collective villages) to bring the scattered population into more concentrated forms, and to break apart the social organizations of rural society (which Hudani says contributed to the genocide, but which she also suggests could support resistance to state planning). Especially after 1998, Hudani states that ‘many Rwandans experienced forced resettlement, and were coerced to destroy their own homes and relocate to sparsely inhabited imidugudu settlement areas’, where building materials rapidly became in short supply. The habitation/resettlement policy addressed the complexity of rival claims to houses and land in gacaca court disputes by moving people (willingly or not) into imidugudu villages. She is not clear, but it seems the green model village programme is an effort to re-imagine the earlier imidugudu, adding climate and ecological considerations (and metrics) to earlier collectivization.
Given these three examples, it is also not clear how the goals of urbanization are aligned. Hudani says Rwanda seeks a 35 per cent urbanization rate by 2024, up from 18-20 per cent. The scale of the problems is daunting: she claims that in 2007 60 per cent of the Rwandan population lived in extreme poverty, and 35 per cent were under-nourished.
The importance of Bock, Shearer, and Hudani's fieldwork reveals, as actionable and simultaneous, a multiple-fold helix of needs and processes in everyday urban negotiations, mobilizing citizen, as well as political will, beyond any simple technological, political, or economic fix.2 Singapore's Surbana was indeed important to Kigali, and Singapore remains an important referent: in planning, in provision of urban services, in education, in attracting foreign investment, and in deft use of branding. Cultural concepts of akajagari and caguwa open paths into not only experience-grounded epistemologies, but also dialectical aporia, to balance opposing imperatives or double-binds. Akajagari operates both as a disciplinary moral negative (unruly, unhygienic) and as a liberatory moral positive (porous, flexible), while caguwa similarly operates to transform clothing from ‘used’ or ‘second-hand’ or ‘factory seconds’ into inventive and distinctive styles. Films, such as Kivu Ruhorazoza's Grey Matter (2011) and Fathers’ Day (2022) provide insight into local narratives and psychological pressures, as do vignettes such as Shearer's account of resistance to demolition, and of local choke points (and thus money-extraction opportunities) in getting water to uphill informal settlements. Comparative examples of Singapore, Dharavi (Mumbai), and Manchester (England) can sharpen the realism of competing incentives and resistances at play.
The architect Roland Dierterle, defending the expense and flamboyance of the Kigali Convention Center in a poor country, says landmark projects demonstrate Rwanda's potential and show diaspora Rwandans they can be optimistic about returning home (Wild 2016). He also defends the Convention Center as a model for sustainable energy development, a counter-concept to glass buildings. Bock similarly shows how public-private partnerships that bring investment can be incentivized and regulated to prevent finance capital from running wild.
Comparative perspectives are invaluable, not only the post-World War II reconstruction of housing in social democratic or socialist Europe and Singapore, but also the decay of those social contracts, most notably described for Manchester in England (Meek 2024; Rose 2024). Equally cautionary are contemporary fights over large-scale slums – Dharavi (Mumbai), Kibera (Nairobi), Orangi (Karachi), and Khayelitsha (Cape Town) – through private-public partnerships, or incremental improvements from shanties to working-class communities as in gecekondu in Istanbul, and favelas in Rio. The Dharavi case is particularly contested in the struggle over India's crony capitalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and businessman Gautam Adani, who was given the right to redevelop Dharavi, versus the civic groups that try to protect the rights to the city and the ecology of small businesses that provide an urban economic engine. Adani invokes the Singapore model, but not its social compact.
The three ethnographies of Bock, Shearer, and Hudani provide three very different perspectives, opening up the ‘model city’, ‘global city’, and ‘post-global city’ rubrics to more demanding realism about the circulation of finance and consultancies, as well as struggles to accommodate everyone's rights to the city, a matter not only of social justice, but of cultural liveability and long-term social and ecological sustainability.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the principal journal of the oldest anthropological organization in the world. It has attracted and inspired some of the world"s greatest thinkers. International in scope, it presents accessible papers aimed at a broad anthropological readership. It is also acclaimed for its extensive book review section, and it publishes a bibliography of books received.