The Kigali Model: Making a 21St Century Metropolis
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The Kigali Model: Making a 21st Century Metropolis by Samuel Shearer Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Charles Piot Supervisor ___________________________ Anne Allison ___________________________ Anne-Maria Makhulu ___________________________ Gary Wilder Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 i v ABSTRACT The Kigali Model: Making a 21st Century Metropolis by Samuel Shearer Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Charles Piot Supervisor ___________________________ Anne Allison ___________________________ Anne-Maria Makhulu ___________________________ Gary Wilder An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Samuel Shearer 2017 Abstract This dissertation examines the relationship between city planning and everyday life in Kigali, Rwanda. It focuses on markets, neighborhoods, and streets where Kigali residents encounter emerging technologies of architecture, finance, and expertise. These technologies are aimed at converting Kigali into a global metropolis with world-class tourist facilities, hi-tech service industries, and a “green” urban metabolism. Many city residents, however, experience these processes through mass evictions, market closures, and an ongoing utility crisis in the city. In response, they are going kukikoboyi (literally “to cowboy”), creating rogue markets, housing settlements, and ad-hoc utility networks. While Kigali’s international team of managers and consultants disavow these spaces and practices as informal, illegal, and antithetical to the city’s “world-class” future, they are nevertheless unable to erase them from the city’s surface. My research explores these divergent practices of city-making to show that a new Kigali is being built: a 21st century metropolis that, despite being a rogue version of its planned future, is a cosmopolitan urban center that no single interest, process, or population fully controls. Methodologically, this dissertation places the popular practices and expertise that hold a city together in conversation with global city modeling and design theory. Instead of focusing on a single neighborhood or population, The Kigali Model is an ethnography of an entire city that asks how differently situated social actors share the costs of producing, subverting, and negotiating their urban future. During twenty-seven months of fieldwork in Kigali, I interviewed foreign technocrats who were employed by iv multinational design and consultancy firms, paid by international finance organizations, and housed in Rwandan government ministries. I spent months following illegal street traders as they produced nomadic market spaces and (often correctly) anticipated that city authorities would be unable to enforce new zoning and tax laws. I participated in community infrastructure building projects and—when the pipes we laid failed to deliver services—became myself incorporated into the city’s hydraulic system by lugging twenty-liter jerry cans of water up forty-degree slopes. I also mapped the social and economic networks that produce and continually re-make Kigali’s largest “slum,” and debated views of urban modernity with second-hand clothing vendors, their hipster clients, and planners who wish to demolish the markets that both populations depend on. I use these ethnographic encounters to theorize Kigali beyond the categories of slum, crisis, and laboratory so often applied to African cities. I show how these seemingly disparate spaces, populations, and practices produce urban ecologies, cultures, and human and material infrastructures that persistently reinvent the city and the people who live there. v Dedication For Sachie vi Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. ix 1. Introduction........................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 The African City, the 21st Century Metropolis, and Speculative Urbanism. ........... 6 1.3 Methodology .............................................................................................................. 17 1.4 Organization and Structure of the Dissertation ......................................................... 23 2. Ruining the City: Demolition and Eviction in an Age of Speculative Urbanism ...... 30 2.1 Making Kiyovu cy’abakene and Kimicanga .......................................................... 43 2.2 World-Classism.............................................................................................................. 57 2.3 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 77 3. Worlding Markets .............................................................................................................. 81 3.1 Making Caguwa ............................................................................................................. 90 3.2 Putting the Body Together ....................................................................................... 98 3.3 Conversion: “We Buy Second Hand, We Sell Caguwa.” ........................................ 110 3.4 A Real Market?.............................................................................................................. 114 3.5 Worlding Nyabugogo .................................................................................................. 124 3.6 Nyabugogo’s Generic Future ...................................................................................... 137 4. The City is Burning! Street economies and the Production of Nomadic Space ...... 148 4.1 Planning the Street Economy ...................................................................................... 153 4.2 Nomadic Space ........................................................................................................ 161 4.3 Street Economics ........................................................................................................... 168 vii 4.4 Disciplinary Breakdown ......................................................................................... 181 4.5 Thresholds ..................................................................................................................... 190 5 Liquid Futures ..................................................................................................................... 193 5.1 Empty Kiosks and Infrastructural Time .................................................................... 198 5.2 Do Valves Have Politics? ............................................................................................. 203 5.3 Win-Win Water ............................................................................................................. 208 5.4 Corporeal Infrastructures and the Value of Free Time ........................................... 212 5.5 EWSA Tastes Awful! .................................................................................................... 216 5.6 Breakdown..................................................................................................................... 223 6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 225 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 233 Biography ..................................................................................................................................... 245 viii List of Figures Figure 1 Satelite photos of Kiyovu cy'abakene 2000 (above) and 2014 (below)Source: Google Earth ................................................................................................................................ 75 Figure 2 Kimicanga 2010 (above) and 2014 (below) source Google Earth .......................... 76 Figure 3 wholesale in Biryogo Market ..................................................................................... 83 Figure 4: Young Gace in "Like A Boy" ................................................................................... 101 Figure 5: Jay Polly and the Urban Boyz in their hit "Caguwa" ........................................... 104 Figure 6: The Kina All Stars Performing the Rural in Kanda Amazi ................................ 106 Figure 7: Abasitari Style in Danny Vumbi's "Ni Danger" ................................................... 108 Figure 8: The Oz Cluster Concept. Source: The Kigali City Master Plan .......................... 127 Figure 9 The Kigali Conceptual Master Plan. A visual representation of clustering. Note that the "existing downtown" and indeed the entire city is in the background and all of the proposed developments. ..................................................................................................