Kigali - (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century) by Samuel Joseph Shearer

Book Synopsis

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired U.S. and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The results were promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. To make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed, its residents converted into consumer markets for 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.

From the Back Cover

"Samuel Shearer brilliantly exposes the heart-wrenching hypocrisy of Western-implemented ideas of sustainable urbanism and green capitalism in the Global South. This lucidly argued and elegantly written book is an important addition to a growing scholarship on urban humanities from Africa and on degrowth."--Kenda Mutongi, author of Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi

"This book represents an impressive critique of the urban dreams and fantasies of the Kagame regime, and a re-envisioning of Kigali from below."--Garth Myers, Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South

"This is an innovative, insightful, and imaginative work that challenges stereotypes of Africa as backward or behind while emphasizing the vitality and resilience of African agency in remaking the popular city."--William Bissell, author of Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar

"Shearer reconceptualizes sustainable urbanism and the urban humanities with a productive turn to the worldmaking practices of ordinary people in Kigali and to imaginative media. The resulting interdisciplinary analysis is beautifully written, bold, and brilliant as it construes the politics of repair underpinning everyday life in the face of capitalist regimes of dispossession."--Cajetan Iheka, author of African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics

About the Author

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