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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.
| ISBN: | 9780520423183 |
| Publication date: | 28th October 2025 |
| Author: | |
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 238 pages |
| Series: | Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century |
| Genres: |
Urban communities Social and cultural anthropology Development and environmental geography Urban and municipal planning and policy |