Awkward encounters of planning and repair: Healing the city under the weight of ‘new Kigali’

After the Rwandan Patriotic Front government proceeded to unleash its master plan for Kigali from 2007 onwards, it was only a matter of time before someone published the book on post-genocide urban Rwanda – and here it is. Drawing on decades-spanning research since the turn of the century, Hudani has produced a beautifully written account of the tensions, contradictions and discontents flowing beneath and around the Rwandan regime's attempt to reinvent its urban landscape in an age of internationally mobile urban imaginaries and all-encompassing sustainability rhetoric.

Hudani's book arrived a year or so before another landmark book on the Rwandan capital – Samuel Shearer's Kigali: A New City for the End of the World (2025), which focuses more exclusively on Kigali as a purported model and whose critique is trained more squarely on the government's aspirations to cast Kigali as the answer to climate change. Hudani instead deconstructs the wider ‘urban question’ in Rwanda, focusing primarily on the capital but also deep into its peripheries as well as the view from rural planned settlements, and the ways in which practices and discourses of repair, memory and forgetting, redesign, renewal and reformation have laboured forward under the weight of the government's obsession with planning and orderliness.

Hudani brings a unique longitudinal focus on the reconstruction of the country's judicial and political institutions after the 1994 genocide, rooting her book in two far removed fieldwork periods. First, she conducted research in the county from 2002 to 2004, which was still during the incredibly fragile first decade of RPF rule following the genocide. In this period she examined the earliest gacaca community court sessions, visited overflowing prisons and considered the workings of transitional justice in a context shuddering with trauma and judicial overload. Second, she returned in 2018 to find a new spatial and aesthetic order in which master-planned urbanism was now in full swing, but where the fundamental ‘material politics of repair’ was still shaping everyday lives under the veneer of the green, global, so-called ‘model’ city. Spanning almost two decades, and – perhaps no less importantly – with a substantial gap of 14 years between fieldwork periods, this gives Hudani an unusual combination of long-term familiarity and the ability to juxtapose, compare, and reframe within her own ethnographic experience.

It is this capacity to link recent developments, since Rwanda and especially Kigali rebranded itself heavily as an investor haven and pioneer of sustainable urbanism, to the underlying, long-term contusion of the social fabric that gives Hudani's analysis its distinctive value.

The book is infused with a focus on material politics and labours of repair, which proceeds through the construction of continuity and an ethics of care, and the ways in which this contrasts with the attempted erasures and reinventions of the trumpeted ‘new city’. Hudani weaves a picture of contemporary Kigali as a city in which place-based social memory is constantly under attack and threat by an imposed socio-spatial order that allows little time for ‘stoppage, pause and reversal’.

Through this story we get a striking sense of the different Kigalis that exist not just in the past versus the present, but in the very present when we consider the city from different scales. The Kigali that the Rwandan government wants us to see is ‘the city from above, from a God's eye view’; somehow an outsized city in a small country with a global profile and impact; while the city that people want to inhabit and save is one in which valued routines and social memories subsist in and through the materiality of the old city: a city which is still somehow small and local, which is lived everyday and which clings to the remnants of community.

This, in many ways then, is a story of ‘surviving urban renewal’, and as such its findings resonate far beyond Rwanda. Indeed, the idea of cities besieged by ‘crisis capital’ and led through elites gripped by a zeal for ‘neodevelopmentalist stage-leaping’ has strong echoes elsewhere in the region, not least in Addis Ababa in recent years (Terrefe, 2020). Hudani critiques the ‘urban solutions industries’ that have provided fuel for the kinds of planning mentality that underpins Kigali's renewal, in which forms of erasure are virtually built in to every so-called solution that emerges. This is also a timely argument, as the supposed panacea of ‘green urbanism’ comes increasingly under fire in critical urban scholarship (Fitzgerald, 2024).

And yet, despite the wider relevance of these themes, the intensity and distinctiveness of Rwanda's trauma must not be forgotten – and in many respects never can be, both because of the regular explicit reminders through memorialisation and commemoration and the fierce drive to transform, almost for its own sake. As well as being a story of old versus new, and ‘god's eye’ versus micro-material, this is also a story of Kigali fast and Kigali slow, the two being in constant tension with one another: the tropes of speeding up, leapfrogging, rapid progress and future-making – which have a distinctive political economy in terms of the elite's relentless pursuit of its own survival and legitimacy (Goodfellow, 2022) – rub up daily against the realities of protracted, labour-intensive healing. Repair is not only a practice but a ‘temporality of gradualism’, which through its very existence is seen to threaten the ruptural catastrophism the post-genocide, masterplanned rebirth.

Moreover, it is a story of death and life; not only in the obvious sense of genocide and the resultant trauma of the living, but in the very ways that the city has been rebuilt as a lifeless space. In the words of one interviewee, Marianne, speaking of one area of the city centre that was notoriously razed by the government to make way for a new Central Business District, ‘The buildings that have been built there, nobody considers them a sort of life, and we no longer talk about the disappeared life’. The built environment itself has, in such areas, thus become a sort of death – characterised by ‘necrotecture’, described by Atkinson (2019: 4) as ‘a kind of socially dead space in which human habitation and social attachment are almost absent even after sale’.

A further irony of this situation is that the ramping up of a drive for spatial transformation some 10–15 years after the genocide has, for many residents, threatened the careful and meticulous work of rebuilding they had been pursuing of over a decade. It is not as though Rwanda went from genocide direct to spatial transformation and reinvention. In the words of Claudette, ‘life came back with great difficulty’, and yet when it did, that very return of life soon found itself under threat from the very thing that purports to represent the city's rebirth: the master plan. In her earlier period of fieldwork, Hudani witnessed that gradual rebuilding of life; in the later period, she observed how it has struggled to persist under the growing weight of an imposed city vision that seeks to dissolve the material foundations that people have so meticulously maintained. These are the ‘minor acts’ which thread through the book, periodically appearing as forms of social reproduction, repair, and occasionally organised resistance.

As well as attentiveness to the materiality of the city and to the protracted processes of transitional justice, Hudani has another string to her bow, rooted in her unusual career trajectory involving a period at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine studying the H1N1 swine influenza during its global outbreak. This gave her an insight into health systems and disaster preparedness, and thus a keen eye for discourses on hygiene and the ways that the Rwandan government's obsession with isuku (‘cleanliness’) filters into forms of social and political control. Anyone who has spent time in a Rwandan neighbourhood will be familiar with the sound of brooms sweeping streets in the early morning, and with the relentless attention to cleaning and cleansing. Thus, Hudani unpacks the ‘hygiene-security nexus’ through which ideas of ‘weeding out’ are linked to securitisation and the removal of ‘matter out of place’.

Tragically, of course, this discourse of cleanliness and decontamination is not new in Rwanda, having shaped its history repeatedly and surged most cataclysmically through the 1994 genocide; and yet in the tropes of the green and clean city, it finds new expressions that support an aesthetic agenda to draw in international capital while also attempting to condition the character of community relations. This discourse of hygienic urban living proceeds alongside a carefully curated government programme of removing, moving, and preserving aspects of the built environment to sanitise and re-curate the city's many wounds. Thus we have the sense of a city that is, in the words of one of Hudani's poems, ‘moving forwards whilst looking backwards’, though one often has the sense that these pasts and futures look radically different depending on the eye of the beholder. Indeed, both ‘alternative versions of history and ‘alternative means of inhabiting the city’ are constantly fighting erasure.

Weaving all of these themes into an account of how the many layers of social and spatial reordering encounter one another in 21st century Kigali is an impressive achievement, and the book is constantly thought provoking, whether through juxtaposition, poetry or its range of conceptual suggestions. There are some ideas that feel a little underdeveloped or unfinished; ideas such as that of ‘double dispossession’/‘double valence’ and ‘accumulation by transformation’ feel as though they could be substantiated more through the empirics of the book and brought back more clearly into the conclusions. I wanted to know more about the relationship between a politics of repair and politics of disrepair, and between the politics and the ethics of repair – again all ideas floated tantalisingly in the introduction but not, perhaps, given the resolution they could have been. The book's overall heuristic in terms of the juxtaposition of ‘master plans’ with ‘minor acts’ works very well in general – but the division of the book into two sections, each named after these two terms respectively, seems to make less sense in terms of how the content of each half speaks to these themes.

These, however, are minor quibbles in relation to a thoughtful, meticulously researched and highly readable volume. Hudani is to be commended for taking on the challenge of capturing Rwanda's fraught, traumatic ‘urban question’ with such elegance. Anyone interested in how cities face the future in the context of ‘repetitive rupture’, or in how planning and repair often battle to coexist, must read it.